If you’ve been job-hunting at any point within the last couple of years, you will have noticed a surge in the number of vacancies for ‘Recruitment Consultants’, ‘Headhunters’ or ‘Talent Acquisition Consultants’ filling up job boards.
Recruitment, thanks to a select few cut-throat agencies, has gained a bit of a bad reputation as of late and simply seeing the word ‘Recruitment’ in a role title or description can put job hunters off.
Is this justified?
In short, no. Due to common misconceptions about the industry, many people are hesitant to apply for Recruitment roles, without really understanding what they entail. This means that they could be missing out on a lucrative and personally satisfying career that could be the perfect fit for them.
What is a Recruitment Consultant?
A recruitment agency is a business that works on behalf of other companies with job opportunities to be filled. These companies may not have the time or the resources to find candidates themselves, therefore they entrust a recruitment agency with their recruitment needs. The agency will then advertise the clients’ roles and look for the right people to fill them.
It is the job of the Recruitment Consultants within the agency to liaise with the clients and to find suitable candidates for their vacancies. They also need to keep all of their applicants updated and build a rapport with them.
What do they do?
Essentially, their role is very people-focused. Their success depends on their ability to build relationships with candidates and clients, having a contagious passion and enthusiasm for what they do, and their abilities to understand and read others.
A Recruitment Consultant’s day-to-day duties usually consist of:
- Meeting with clients to maintain working relations and to gain a good understanding of their recruitment specifications, the business and their culture
- Reviewing job applications
- Interviewing candidates (either via telephone or face-to-face)
- Finding the right candidate for the right role
- Negotiating job offers with both candidates and clients
- Exploring new avenues to find the best available candidates
- Maintaining contact with clients and candidates to make sure that they are always kept up-to-date
- Building and maintaining a portfolio of clients
Could I be a Recruitment Consultant?
Like with every role, there are key skills and characteristics you must possess to be a successful Recruitment Consultant. Due to the nature of the role, you must have a similar skill-set to those that work within Sales; this is because there are targets to hit in relation to the number of candidates that Consultants place within a set time period.
However, you must have a genuine passion for people; strong interpersonal and communication skills are a must because of the amount of interaction the job involves and the importance of building good relationships.
To be Recruitment Consultant you need to be:
- A strong and confident communicator
- Able to work autonomously
- Positive, with bags of enthusiasm and energy
- Genuinely interested in people; who they are, their motivations, their strengths and weaknesses
- Target-focused and money-motivated
- Flexible and happy to travel if necessary
- Professional, polished and organised
- Commercially-minded
Sounds great! What’s the catch?
Overall, if you find a good people-focused agency, working in recruitment is an exciting and rewarding career. True, the pace is fast, there can be pressure to contend with and you need to be ready to put in some hard work! However, your professional skill-set will be boosted ten-fold. Additionally, many companies offer impressive bonus schemes! Every day is different so it’s hard to get bored and you will really be making a difference to people’s lives.
So if you’re driven, hungry for success and want to work with people, recruitment might be the next step in your career ladder!
