So the X factor is now done and dusted for another year and my Saturday evenings are not going to be the same for a while! However it got me round to thinking how this could apply to recruitment. What is the x factor for recruiters? What takes a recruiter from good to great?
Personally I think its about energy, enthusiasm, taking a personal pride in their work and how they manage their stakeholder relationships. I’d rather have this than raw skills any day as you can always develop those.
I’ve spoken to a lot of fellow recruiters and people’s views although wide ranging can be summarized as follows:
• A genuine interest in people, lateral thinking and the ability not to take things too seriously!
• Active Listening skills – a skill that sounds so simple – the ability to really listen to what your stakeholders/clients need. All too often recruiters feel that they need to be the advisor – of course this is important, but in order to do this successfully you need to have really listened and understood exactly where your client/stakeholder is at. Understand, question and push back when necessary to ensure realistic objectives
• Customer Focus – To be able to partner, to really get into the DNA of the business and stakeholder, to build a strong robust relationship so that you can influence when required and gain that trust.
• Commercial Acumen – the ability to understand how any particular role and the individual ‘doing that job’ affect and add value to the way in which a business is run. The ability to then build on this and run smart, effective and measurable recruitment campaigns is key.
• Candidate mgt. – the candidate care piece is so important as the repercussions of poor candidate mgt. are huge. A sensitive and empathetic approach is crucial – the ability to put yourself in a candidates shoes and treat them the same way you would like to be treated. To understand candidate care, to never leave a candidate wondering what is happening, to never break promises made to candidates in terms of contact/timescales and always deliver full constructive feedback
• Swanlike! Cool, calm and collected at all times, offering solutions rather than creating problems. Never appearing frazzled despite the fact your Line Manager has changed their requirements for the umpteenth time, your prize candidate has dropped out and the snow is ruining your assessment centre
• Honesty and Integrity – The ability to build that rapport and relationship with a client it is essential that you are upfront, diplomatic and honest even if you are struggling to fill a role – just be honest and manage expectations
• A Passion for direct sourcing – Last but by no means least is a passion for networking, social media recruiting and to see every vacancy as an opportunity to unleash the powers of creative direct sourcing.
So what do you think?
