What does the word recruitment mean to you?  You probably hear those constant ads from Indeed on the radio, promising to make it all so easy. If you are an in-house recruiter who is part of a big team at a blue-chip it means your daily job, much of which is taken up by trying to keep on top of all the latest developments in recruitment technology and fielding calls from the recruitment tech salespeople.

However, if you are like the vast majority of people in business who only have a need to hire new people, recruitment is something that is a pain in the unmentionables. It’s something that you have not had much, if any, training in – other than the accumulated wisdom passed on by your boss/predecessor, and that usually involves “call that agency, what are they called again, I think the number is with the HR person, what’s her name again? … and get some CVs here pronto.”

It needn’t be like this.  As someone who has spent most of his adult career working in recruitment consultancy, I am often amazed by how little many clients actually know.  Perhaps that’s understandable: it’s not their day job.  For those (the majority again) for whom recruitment is a distress purchase, made when someone inconveniently resigns out of the blue, the aforementioned recruitment agency, or an advert on a job-board, is the extent of their experience. It’s safe, but expensive and it sort-of takes the responsibility away, which is always nice, until it goes wrong…

In this series of blog articles I am going to try to address this audience, the unseen thousands of you out there who don’t want a recruitment consultant simply to take a brief and then bung you a wad of CVs, hope one floats your boat and then sends a bill for 15% of the starting salary.

Instead, wouldn’t it be good if the word “Consultant” was to the fore, and you receive advice and guidance on how to deal with almost any recruitment challenge you can imagine.  Rather than taking the money and running (until the next distress purchase), instead they show you how to use the best, most effective job-boards, how to use LinkedIn, how to craft a piece of advertising copy, why your brand is important even if you are an SME of six people, and how it’s vital to realise that today’s candidates don’t expect to sell themselves to you but expect you to sell your firm to them.  That would be good, so…let’s start with the basics – what are we trying to do when we recruit someone?

As a general rule (and there are always exceptions) most companies want to replace someone who has left with someone better.  That’s when it’s a distress purchase after a resignation. When it’s a new position you have no yardstick, other than the job and person specification, but you really do want the best possible person you can get, in almost every circumstance.  To sum it up, you want to introduce new, often specialist, skills into your organisation and you also, usually, want someone who will fit into your team.

That team bit is important. A friend was speaking to a famous football manager who explained that when he was looking to bring in a player he always sought someone with more talent than the incumbent, but the new person had to “fit into the dressing room, because if they don’t then the team falls apart very quickly.” Even if you have no interest in football, this is a statement of the obvious for every business, but it’s staggering how many times companies hire on talent and forget that the new boy or girl has to get on with the rest of the staff.

Secondly, we usually want to recruit someone quickly, especially if it’s to replace a leaver. However, that should not mean rushing things.  If you just call up a recruitment consultant they will (or at least they ought) to take a full brief.  Not only will they want to know what the job involves, they ought to want to see around your premises to get a feel for what this person will be coming into and if there are any issues that you might not see because you are too close to them.  Often firms struggle to recruit because they don’t offer the working conditions that candidates increasingly seek nowadays.  Millennials, although much pilloried for being self-centred snowflakes (sometimes correctly!), are nonetheless a significant part of many target audiences and you are increasingly going to have adjust to meet their demands as they come to dominate the labour market.

Make sure that you take the opportunity to review the job and person specification when someone leaves.  You’ll obviously be doing this if it’s a new position, but when it’s a replacement it’s scary how many line managers just blow the dust off the old job spec, ignoring the fact that it was written in 2002. As a result they are likely to simply recruit the same type of person as the one who has left.  Instead, unless it’s a really low-level role not requiring a lot of change, take the opportunity to ask yourself where your business will be in the next five years, how this new recruit will help you achieve your goals and consequently how the job/person spec needs to change.  Here, an external adviser, whether a recruitment marketing expert or a recruitment consultant who actually cares about long-term relationships (many don’t), can be a real help.

Set realistic timescales, don’t just do what you did last time automatically, and consider all the options. What are they?  Well, that’s what this series of blogs is about, so make sure you see my next article, to be published in a few weeks’ time.

Mark Lynch, Director, Resource Partners Ltd.