Finding great candidates starts with defining what “great” looks like for the company.

This October WasteRecruit celebrated its 21st birthday. It’s a huge milestone for us. Incredible to think that we’ve been recruiting for the waste and resource sectors for 21 years – more actually, when you know that it’s always been my personal passion.

As often happens when milestones are reached it’s been a time for reflection. Are we making an impact? What’s the best way that we can continue to serve our clients and candidates? For us, the answer to that is continuing to find great people to work for great companies. ?And the art of achieving that, lies in identifying what great looks like and understanding how it differs between companies.

Sales aren’t always the same.

Two different waste management companies may both be looking for sales people, but if the company approach to sales differs, so will the skills needed to succeed.

Some operators in the industry take a more transactional approach. Their aim is to fill the routes with as many customers, and bins, as possible to secure materials for their facilities. To achieve this, they expect sales people to hit the streets and knock on as many doors as possible. It’s about efficiency, building rapport quickly, understanding the customers’ needs, and ensuring that is matched to the sales pitch to close the deals.

Other operators find that they can’t compete operating this way – and that’s mainly due to price – so they take a different approach. For them, it is about building relationships, taking the time to understand the customers situation and the challenges they face with the existing service provider. It’s a much more consultative approach, learning the details about their drivers, what waste and recycling they produce, as well as the volumes.

These two contrasting approaches require sales people to have different skills, abilities, and behaviours. A person that is great at playing the numbers game, knocking on doors and selling volume, may not have the right personality or skills when a more consultative approach to selling is required. What a great sales person looks like can be very different for different companies, and if the roles are listed with same job titles it may not be obvious.

This is why, when engaging candidates, we aim to get an informal understanding of their approach: how they like to work and the sorts of expectations they are used to. Once shortlisted, our assessments create a more objective and predictive picture of how they might work, and then we can ask structured questions at interview, to gain further insights into how they approach different challenges in the role that determine the required outcomes.

Just as every company has their own business development strategy, the skills needed to achieve success are defined by understanding what a great sales person looks like for that specific company.

Compliance and H&S are specific. Are the skills the same?

One might think that in roles where there’s regulation involved that there are clear boundaries on what needs to be done. That these are roles primarily focussed on filling out forms and submitting them and that the skills required for this are mostly administrative. But there can also be complexities with changing regulations and multiple stakeholders, which introduces a different skill set.

Often the ideal solution might be unrealistic from a budgetary perspective, but a solution is still required. This brings an element of commercial awareness and creative thinking to the roles to develop a solution that is both compliant and within budget. Great people understand this and embrace the creative challenge it provides.

In this regard, the ability to build effective relationships, both internally and externally is equally important. Internally, it’s important to gain buy-in to solutions and address concerns or resistance. Externally, it’s important to build effective regulator relationships, communicating proactively around solutions and the rationale for them, influencing effectively where necessary.

Of course, with behavioural change and improving H&S and Compliance standards, the ability to build effective collaborative working relationships is often the key to success. Finding that balance between understanding other perspectives, working with people, and ensuring changes are embedded. It’s a tricky skill and one that often differentiates great people from the rest.

What this example highlights is that a H&S or Compliance Manager role is far more detailed than ticking a box on a form. Great candidates are those who are structured and organised, but still flexible and adaptable. They’re good at identifying needs and developing new solutions that are commercially viable. Most importantly, they are skilled at engaging with and working others in a collaborative way. Hardly standard administrative skills.

What does it take to deliver great?

As you can tell from these examples, a job title is seldom the best indicator of what great looks like. Each role and company is nuanced, and requires a specific skill set, and this is what we work to uncover. What are the skills needed for success and what characteristics demonstrate that candidates have them?

Delivering great candidates requires that we work closely with clients. This includes our full business psychology services as a key part of the process. Our in-depth client and role analysis seeks to understand what the outcomes need to be. Then combined with our skills-based assessments, we build a picture of what great is going to look like for a particular role in their business right now.

It’s this scientific approach that helps us to make an impact in lives of candidates and in the companies they land roles in. Here’s to the next 21 years of skills-based recruitment!