Why Recruiters Must Develop Flexibility

Most recruiters are working in sectors facing skills shortages, so the recession-era days of assuming your candidates will accept any good role you offer them are well and truly over!  

Recruitment is a constantly-changing business, adapting not only to economic fluctuations, but also to swiftly evolving technology and employment regulation. The way recruiters worked 10 or 20 years ago is scarcely recognisable to the recruitment processes of today, and these sweeping changes can only be expected to continue right through your recruitment career. 

All of this change means that recruiters have to be more flexible than ever. Here are some ways you develop your flexibility to adapt to the changing recruitment landscape and succeed in all markets. 

1. Master social media. (Even the platforms you may think are inane.) 

You may privately think that Snapchat is bizarre, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any social media platform that’s relevant to your audience to increase your recruitment reach. A ‘stick in the mud’ recruiter who refuses to properly utilise technologies will find themselves left behind.  

Find someone who loves social media platforms and get them to show you why they love them, and how they can be used at their maximum effectiveness for recruitment purposes. You may well find you start loving them too- and you definitely will when you see your talent pipeline growing! 

2. Develop your emotional intelligence.

Recruitment is a career about people: their businesses, their career dreams, their frustrations. That’s why people with high emotional intelligence excel in recruitment, as they’re good at not only reading other people’s emotions and building strong and empathetic relationships, but they’re also good at managing their own emotions in pressure situations.  

There are many ways to grow your emotional intelligence, from learning to reframe problems as challenges, to writing your feelings down, and learning to observe strong emotions in your body when they arise. 

3. Always have a plan B ready.

Flexibility is much easier when you’ve already given some thought to what might happen if your first (and second) course of action falls through. When that ‘sure thing’ candidate rejects the offer, or that big ticket client moves to another recruiter, you won’t need to panic, as you’ll have another candidate or client in the pipeline. Some people look very flexible and adaptable, but often it’s just that they’ve given prior thought to alternatives and have done strong groundwork.  

4. Be strategic about how you work.

So much time is wasted on what we call ‘low pay off activities’- and time is not something recruiters have the luxury of wasting! It can be a great exercise to log absolutely everything you do at work for a week and start noticing where time slips away and where your biggest pay offs are.  

Also, this exercise tends to show you how important it is to structure your time to allow you to be more flexible. For example, you may be hugely underestimating how long your emails take to wrangle, and wasting lots of time on unimportant tasks. Once you recognise the inefficiencies, you can fix them- creating a more realistic schedule where you to have time to react positively when you need to change tack. 

Keep building your knowledge. 

The more you know, the more flexible you’ll become. Keep learning about your sector, stay abreast of recruitment and economic trends, and check out successful sales books and webinars to learn new strategies to improve your pitch and grow your leads. All of this information will make you more skilled at your job, more highly attuned to the market, and more adaptable when circumstances change. All of these things will translate to higher billing numbers throughout your career.  

The clever recruiter, is the flexible recruiter. Are you a clever recruiter?  

Until next time,  

Cheryl