10 Tips to become a Gold Medal Recruitment Consultant

What makes a gold medal recruiter?

Elite performance has always fascinated me. How do some achieve greatness whilst others do no better than the average, even with all the same tools, the same environment and the same coaching.

Sat here watching day one of the Olympics in Rio got me thinking…so I thought I'd write my thoughts down and share them on a blog.

I entered the world of recruitment back in 1997 at that point there were 6 other staff members at Macildowie... I think I have written before that my first job back then was to input all the data from 'candidate cards' onto our DOS based system called Recruit.

This meant I got to know the names of the candidates pretty quickly who were considered to be "stars" a.k.a - highly placeable. One of the most common comments on the cards of theses candidates was GFABW... This meant "good for a beer with"

What I noticed as I spent three months inputting data was that the GFABW's pretty much all got placed into the best jobs... Meaning that if the candidate was able to build rapport with our consultant that they were, more than likely, going to be placed into a great job

Why? Because our consultant would be able to sell them better.

So, upon promotion to Consultant I already realised that it was actually my responsibility to interview thoroughly in order to find out what every candidate's USP was... To allow me to place more people than just those I liked the best from a personality perspective....

It also didn't take me long to recognise that every candidate I met wanted constructive criticism about how their CV and how their interview technique could be improved.

So I designed my own coaching session to help each and every one to improve in those areas.... Making all of my candidates more placeable....

So this is lesson number 1 in what makes a gold medal recruitment consultant... The ability to improve how your candidate performs at interview and the ability to explain their main selling points to the potential hiring manager.

In 1998, there was no social media, marketing and advertising were very expensive and Macs wasn’t a particularly well known brand. So I decided that in order to build my own reputation as a top consultant that I needed to represent candidates who hadn’t registered with other agencies. So I taught myself how to head hunt.

Something viewed by many as one of the dark arts of recruiting.

Doing this meant that I learned incredibly early on that most professionals do believe that the grass could be greener elsewhere and are therefore happy to discuss possible career options... It also meant that I knew how to source candidates that my competitors didn't know how to get hold of, giving me much stronger short lists and therefore dominating my clients' interview schedule giving me a much higher chance of success.

Lesson number 2 in what makes a gold medal recruiter is the ability to find great candidates who aren't actively looking for a new job. I now refer to this as the ability to find all the candidates IN the market rather than those who are actively looking to leave their current employer and therefore ON the market.

Naturally the best candidates are happily going about their day job and being looked after by their current employers so you have to entice them - and that takes timing and skill.

Gold medal recruiters, and this is lesson number 3, view their jobs as networkers.

If you network with great talent, and help great people with a long term approach they in turn will refer their friends to you, and they in turn will recommend you to their peer group....who in turn.... You get the drift.... 

...so gold medallists build brilliant networks due to the quality of their reputation – nowadays referred to as their Personal Brand.

Given that the majority of great candidates will one day have a team of their own. Gold medal recruiters are commercial in approach and understand that today's candidates are tomorrow's clients. So lesson 4 is treat everyone as you would if you were trying to win their business – as one day that will inevitably be the case and they will have a memory of how you treated them personally when they needed you the most.

Now this is probably the hardest thing to do, because we recruiters can get hundreds, occasionally thousands of applications to our jobs, especially now with how easy email makes it to apply.... So lesson 5 is that the best recruiters find a way of communicating in a personal way with all of these people without having to necessarily pick up the phone. Bad news is better than no news when a candidate has applied for a job, even if they don't agree with your feedback/reason.... So communicate bad news as well as good!

Gold medal recruiters are great relationship builders. They realise that to have a winning career in recruitment that they have to build win/win relationships... Winning new business has never been easy, so lesson 6 from the gold medal recruiters is make sure you retain your best customers... 

May, June, July Employees of the Month

Gold medal recruiters work on a high proportion of exclusive or retained business.... Why? Because it means that the work they carry out will yield a return on the time they invest. Bad recruiters work on dozens of jobs, where they are in competition with multiple agencies.... Of course we all have to start somewhere.... So in the early days this (more than likely) will be you. But your recruitment career won't have longevity if it continues for too long.... after all, who enjoys working on vacancies that they don’t get paid for. So lesson 7 is – learn early on how to win exclusivity.

Additionally, lesson 8 .... Gold medal recruiters realise that they are marketing, BD and service delivery experts.... 

Marketing, you need to promote brand YOU, you have to find a way of promoting your personal service offering, your great vacancies to the masses. Your job adverts need to be more compelling than the next person's, you need to understand the persona of your candidate and client base in order to market effectively to them. Marketing gives you the option to operate in a “one to many way”... The phone only allows for 1-2-1.

Lesson 9 - All of that said, I believe that the best recruiters live by KISS.... they 'keep it simple stupid'. Recruitment always has been, and always will be a contact sport. It's a sport where winning is EVERYTHING.... If you don't have the best candidate, you don't fill your client's vacancy, you don't get paid. So gold medal recruiters make sure that they speak to more candidates than anyone else to ensure that they know EVERYONE in their market place.

Finally, gold medal recruiters are either mentally very tough, or they get great at winning retainers and selling exclusivity (or both). They also realise that in order to achieve this, they have to put in the hard yards. Mo Farah trains harder than all of his competitors, gold medal recruiters simply speak to more candidates, more clients than their counterparts. So lesson number 10 = hard work and desire are essential to becoming a gold medallist in my world... the world of recruitment.