Recruiting recruiters in a challenging labour market
2020 proved a highly challenging year for talent companies and we were no exception. Having grown accustomed to strong year-on-year growth, we found ourselves needing to furlough some staff and, ultimately, even to make roles redundant.
But in 2021 we've found that the market has rebounded strongly. Existing clients have been hiring bullishly; new clients have come on board.
This created the risk of an entirely different problem, namely a bottleneck in the recruitment process. Our business model hinges on intensive, and indeed imaginative, searching for candidates.
We think of this as the Carlsberg approach: we discover candidates that other recruiters will not reach. In particular, we have a strong record of uncovering passive candidates – a phrase that has acquired a new nuance in today’s highly unusual market.
Traditionally one thinks of passive candidates as people who are in employment and settled: they might be open to approaches but had not thought of themselves as looking to change jobs. In today’s market, where many people seem to have withdrawn from the market – they’re not in employment, but neither are they registered as unemployed – we need to include under the heading of passive candidates people who may not be looking for a job at all.
So we need intensive search capacity. But intensive search is laborious. In the context of a rebounding market, the only way we could develop sufficient capacity was by increasing our number of researchers.
We decided the attributes required and then focused our recruitment process on that. We emphasised that it was the ability to provide the required attributes that mattered, not whether the candidate had previous experience of recruitment.
This has been our standard procedure for some time, but it is particularly relevant in a market where there is evidence that, following the COVID hiatus, many people are reconsidering their careers and are attracted by the idea of switching paths.
Whenever we advertise our own roles, there’s a little bit of me that feels trepidation. The first time I ever spoke to a recruitment professional – a friend of a friend whom I found myself sitting next to at a wedding reception -- I asked him how his work was going and he replied, ‘It’s tough at the moment: we’re really stretched because we can’t get the staff’. When I suggested that wasn’t a great advertisement for a recruitment company, he failed to see the funny side. So now that I work in recruitment, I always think, ‘I do not want to be that guy!’
And, of course, today’s market is ultra-competitive, with an abnormally high number of vacancies.
But, blow me down, when it came to it we found we had not one candidate who met the specification, but two.
What to do? Well, dear reader, we hired them both. With the result that our search department is more geared up for growth than it has ever been.
I’m delighted to say that both recruits are already in post, so let me finish by briefly introducing them.
Joshua Turner is a graduate of Leeds Beckett University, where he studied Creative Media Technology. The world of recruitment is often described as ‘fast-paced’: we note that Joshua once worked at the Silverstone Grand Prix, so we reckon he can cope!
Olga Lupu has extensive experience in human resource management. In particular, she has held responsibility for candidate identification, so the business of search tools, databases, and networking is very familiar to her. Olga also has experience of training and mentoring.
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But in 2021 we've found that the market has rebounded strongly. Existing clients have been hiring bullishly; new clients have come on board.
This created the risk of an entirely different problem, namely a bottleneck in the recruitment process. Our business model hinges on intensive, and indeed imaginative, searching for candidates.
We think of this as the Carlsberg approach: we discover candidates that other recruiters will not reach. In particular, we have a strong record of uncovering passive candidates – a phrase that has acquired a new nuance in today’s highly unusual market.
Traditionally one thinks of passive candidates as people who are in employment and settled: they might be open to approaches but had not thought of themselves as looking to change jobs. In today’s market, where many people seem to have withdrawn from the market – they’re not in employment, but neither are they registered as unemployed – we need to include under the heading of passive candidates people who may not be looking for a job at all.
So we need intensive search capacity. But intensive search is laborious. In the context of a rebounding market, the only way we could develop sufficient capacity was by increasing our number of researchers.
We decided the attributes required and then focused our recruitment process on that. We emphasised that it was the ability to provide the required attributes that mattered, not whether the candidate had previous experience of recruitment.
This has been our standard procedure for some time, but it is particularly relevant in a market where there is evidence that, following the COVID hiatus, many people are reconsidering their careers and are attracted by the idea of switching paths.
Whenever we advertise our own roles, there’s a little bit of me that feels trepidation. The first time I ever spoke to a recruitment professional – a friend of a friend whom I found myself sitting next to at a wedding reception -- I asked him how his work was going and he replied, ‘It’s tough at the moment: we’re really stretched because we can’t get the staff’. When I suggested that wasn’t a great advertisement for a recruitment company, he failed to see the funny side. So now that I work in recruitment, I always think, ‘I do not want to be that guy!’
And, of course, today’s market is ultra-competitive, with an abnormally high number of vacancies.
But, blow me down, when it came to it we found we had not one candidate who met the specification, but two.
What to do? Well, dear reader, we hired them both. With the result that our search department is more geared up for growth than it has ever been.
I’m delighted to say that both recruits are already in post, so let me finish by briefly introducing them.
Joshua Turner is a graduate of Leeds Beckett University, where he studied Creative Media Technology. The world of recruitment is often described as ‘fast-paced’: we note that Joshua once worked at the Silverstone Grand Prix, so we reckon he can cope!Olga Lupu has extensive experience in human resource management. In particular, she has held responsibility for candidate identification, so the business of search tools, databases, and networking is very familiar to her. Olga also has experience of training and mentoring.