Your Recruitment Strategy Must Change

Call at all stops to Candidate Central – why your recruitment strategy has to change.

This is a guest post written for us by Tara Lescott, MD of Recruiter Republic as part of our new Recruiting Weekly series, where recruiters who work at the coal face on a week-in week-out basis share their expertise.

We’re a recruitment agency. We’re a recruitment to recruitment agency. One that has redefined not only how rec2rec should work but also how you can be candidate centric and still offer your clients a brilliant service.

After spending 14 years in corporate agency recruitment I set up Recruiter Republic for several reasons:

1. I felt the rec2rec offering in the market was pretty poor
2. I was excited about the opportunity to do something different
3. I’m a recruitment geek and would get to meet all sorts of businesses and people
4. My time as a Digital Director had taught me excellent marketing strategies

I thought I had a recipe for success and would be a millionaire within a year. Ok so maybe that last part was a little tongue in cheek, but on the whole I did genuinely think I had an opportunity to change what rec2rec meant to people and in the process create a business of real value. What I learnt, and rapidly, was that this business is 100% candidate focused. I also found out that Recruiters as candidates are quite possibly the most demanding and critical candidates you will ever work with and that their fear of bad or poor service will lead them to prevent you from doing your job properly. It created a real conundrum for me in our early days.  Despite this, and some early “learns”,  we have built a process that works and is totally centred around optimising the candidate experience. So I am here to tell you that if we can run a candidate centric business, you can too.

I genuinely believe that recruitment today is about the candidate. Nearly all specialist markets are candidate short and job strong. Candidates don’t NEED to you use an agency, or so they think. And when they do there are plenty to chose from. They are wary too. Having spent several years through and after the recession being neglected they can be a little cynical about your value. During the recession it was because they weren’t needed – jobs were. After the recession and during the resulting jobs boom they were needed only when a relevant job needed filling – Recruiters were far too busy to nurture candidates. The result was and is a pretty poor user experience and Recruiters have to wake up to the fact that our candidates are consumers and our service is a product. We have to build a brand identity that attracts quality candidates and is aspirational. Look at major retailers – even the best in class brands have to continually work to keep their consumer base engaged and in love with their brand. As Recruiters we have to do the same.

So let’s bring this back to recruitment. Have you wondered why Inhouse Recruiters are filling more jobs per month than agencies? It’s because they have become better at nurturing talent and managing talent pipelines. You don’t think it’s because candidates prefer applying directly do you? You don’t think they have more hours in the day do you? They simply have better careers sites to engage with, they court and headhunt candidates more and for specific and real vacancies and as a result candidates are “attracted” to a brand. By the time they interview with a firm they are 50% of the way there. Inhouse Recruiters also don’t have to waste their time on lots of maybe jobs –  they just work on 100% fillable jobs – but that’s a whole other blog about retained or exclusive vs traditional contingency.

So let’s think about how your candidate audience sees you. How enticing is your shop window? Do you even have one?

What does your brand stand for? What candidates should you target? What channels do you communicate with them on? What does your website actually DO for the candidate? How real are your job adverts? What content do you produce that is genuinely valuable to them? What candidate events do you run? You’re starting to see what I mean aren’t you?

So as an agency in a candidate short market what do you do? Well I can only tell you what we do and maybe that will help. We are open with our clients that our focus is all about the candidate. We believe the best job we can do for our clients is serve them great candidates and to do this we have to spend all our time with candidates. That means we spend a lot of time with our clients at the start of the relationship to really get to know them, their culture, their teams, their story and their future vision but we do have high expectations in terms of how we work together and we won’t budge on this for anyone. We have to believe that the firms we represent are good. That they are good employers and strong businesses. We also have to believe that the interview process for a candidate will be a positive one. If it’s not we will insist it is changed to accommodate the candidate. Then and only then will we put talent in front of our clients. Our clients know that we won’t be calling daily or weekly with updates, in fact we rarely work to specific job descriptions either. Instead we constantly introduce candidates with matching skills and values – we leave the rest up to the client and candidate and 9 times out of 10 this results in a role that has been totally tailored to the candidates skills and needs.

So this all sounds like the client so far right? Nope – it’s actually all about the candidate and that starts here with educating the client on how to get the best candidates. Once this is done (and only then) all our energy is spent on the candidate. Our candidate service is something I am genuinely really proud of. It has taken several years to define it and get it to the point where I know it is best in class but it has been worth the cost and pain.  Our candidate service is about constant nurturing of our candidate community. We want all recruitment professionals, of all levels, to have a safe haven. A place to go that supports them throughout their career whether that’s about how to optimise their career or business we want to be part of that. We know if we invest in this and have asserted our credibility and expert knowledge, candidates will come to us automatically. So we have invested, heavily, into creating a candidate community, producing video content, salary calculators, free downloads and more. This won’t stop and it’s not a one off.

Our candidates get great service from us even if we don’t represent them. We will always offer free advice, we often give candidates CV advice and tell them which companies to apply to directly if we can’t help them ourselves. But if we do commit to representing a candidate they get the most proactive recruitment service available.

Every single candidate has an initial consultation (usually at least 2 hours long) and with a Consultant that has equal or greater experience than them. (If we take on Trainees they gain experienced for a year in a research and marketing based role until they have acquired enough knowledge to be a true expert). This consultation  is used to really get to know the candidate and help them to define what they want in their next role. We do a thorough CV assessment and psychometric profile and give them our professional opinion on whether their criteria is achievable and if so what their interview strategy should be.

We then map out all the companies that match their values and skills and give our candidates total visibility on who we represent them to.

Now the candidate has had time to define what they want, has insight into what they can achieve, have a better idea on how to represent themselves at interview and know who the best firms are they feel prepared and ready for interview.

Then and only then do we start work and this include a CV rewrite, a full psychometric profile available for clients and discreet initial introductions.

We qualify every opportunity and brief the candidate for up to 30 mins for each and every interview they receive – I don’t think any candidate has better prep than ours and as a result of a greater understanding of the candidate, better match and better prep our interview to placement ratios are incredibly high.

Being candidate centric works – if we agree to represent a candidate we place them 9 times out of 10 – and the 1 out of 10 we miss is usually because the candidate gets countered and stays where they are. Yes it costs more. Yes it takes more time. Yes it doesn’t always result in a placement. But it is the one thing that differentiates us from any competition and as long as we qualify the quality of candidate we represent we will always produce great work. Today our candidates are our most powerful marketing tool, acting as brand ambassadors for us.

Our candidates know that we are behind them every step of the way and with their best interests at heart (as shown by our real and named candidate testimonials on our website).

We’ve done it … but we’re not done. Being focused on candidates means that we can’t take our eyes off the ball for a moment. Anything that affects our candidates affects us and we have to be ready to respond. We have to have a constant flow of fresh content and constantly communicate why we are valuable to our candidates. Our work will never be done but that’s ok with us – that means our business is alive.