June 2012.pdf - RCSA

focus: RECRUITMENT AT THE SPEED OF TOMORROW
Order-taker or trusted adviser
Reframing the consultant’s role
Recruiting at the
speed of tomorrow
means more than
technology – it also
means changing your
thinking! Conference
presenter Bridget
Beattie looks at
reframing the
consultant’s role.
No matter what the state of the market,
every recruiter comes up against talent
shortages at some point. Perhaps it’s a
daily occurrence, or perhaps you are one of the
lucky ones with a deep talent pool and plenty of
great candidates.
But regardless of the industry or skill set, sometimes
you simply can’t find the right candidate. If it were
easy, after all, clients could do their own recruitment!
While every recruiter will struggle with hardto-place
roles, it’s the way they respond that
differentiates the outstanding recruiters from
the middle-of-the-road ones.
One response is to look further, deeper and
wider for candidates. That is always an important
part of your job. Clients expect you to be creative
in the way you source talent, whether it’s through
traditional networking, social media or
sophisticated online searches.
However, even the most thorough search
sometimes fails to produce results. And this is
when you have another option: change the brief!
But isn’t that at odds with being a “consultant”
Doesn’t it suggest that you can’t meet the needs
of your client
Not at all: true consulting is about working with
the client to genuinely understand their needs; to
get to the bottom of what they need to get the
work done. By asking the right questions, you can
drill down into the core competencies of a role
– the “deal breakers” – as well as identify what can
be taught, what is a “nice-to-have” and what the
client can live without.
The end result is that your B or C candidate
can become an A, with the right training and
development from their employer. In a world
where specialist skills are in demand but hard
to find – what we call the “talent mismatch” –
finding a seventy per cent fit for a job is still a
good outcome.
If this is something your business already
does – then you can stop reading in a moment.
But firstly let me share some statistics from our
database of candidates who undertake our career
transition programs.
Fewer than one in five of these candidates find
a job through a recruiter, and one in three finds
their job through networking. These are quality
candidates – after participating in our programs,
they are job-ready and have a clear understanding
of their strengths. Yet recruiters are placing only
one-fifth of them.
This tells us two things:
1. recruiters are missing out on good candidates
by not pushing back on the client brief and
2. candidates are better at selling themselves
into clients than their recruiter.
Despite the realities of the candidate market, it
appears that many recruitment professionals still
struggle to sell their less-than-100% candidates
to clients – candidates who aren’t lacking in their
attitude or ability; but who simply aren’t an exact
match to the job specifications provided by the
client.
It’s a big pool of talent to rule out. If a client
is insistent on only hiring someone from their
particular industry, for example, they would
miss out on around half of our candidates – the
proportion who change industries during their
career transition process. In fact, roughly the
same proportion change functions too.
These program participants are successful
in making the leap, because they are adept at
highlighting their transferable skills to employers.
Are you doing the same thing for your candidates
Setting up for success
The challenge here is that getting a result for
a client may depend on pushing back on their
requests. It’s not something we like to do in
professional services – after all, everyone likes
making their clients happy.
So how do you manage client expectations and
move from being an order-taker to a consultant
First of all, reframe your role. You’re not simply
here to sell – you’re here to solve problems. That
means asking lots of questions, being intellectually
curious, understanding root causes and looking
for patterns.
This is also the point at which you have an
opportunity to influence the design of the role,
based on what is achievable in the market. Agree
with the client upfront what would be appropriate
as teachable fit: the core skills tend to be
interpersonal – such as communication and
problem solving – while the teachable parts
are more likely to be hard skills.
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RCSA JOURNAL