How do we stay true to our values?

In our last article, we discussed the impacts Covid-19 has had on many businesses and industries and how many different values have arisen to the surface.

From taking the time to understand these values, we wanted to explore what values recruitment really bares and why they are so important, now so more than ever.

Here at Cruinn, we hold firm beliefs in honesty, commitment and transparency and try to have them influence every piece of work we do. It can be easy to promote any random value on your website or business card, but how do you follow through and allow these values to really define you?

Honesty is a key

Within recruitment, we use honesty as a key to a lock that opens up trust, business growth and long-term connections.

By understanding honesty, which is a facet of moral character that connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity and truthfulness, you can fully see the impact it can have on your business and the businesses you work with. Although honesty is arguably a key value in every business, it bears extreme weight in the recruitment industry. It is critical that there is honesty in every step of the process, and incredibly important you take pride in it from being able to identify true character to making realistic goals for yourself and your team.

 This can include anything from owning a mistake as it is important to be held accountable for your actions to making sure your workload is realistic for you to avoid disappointment for your clients and yourself.

We try to avoid these by setting quarterly objectives and reviewing at pre-set junctures and also having great mentors who can guide us towards success, but no one is perfect and mistakes can be made. However, a really honest business will open up about their mistake and set goals on how to improve it.

Discovering the true meaning of commitment

In our opinion, commitment in recruitment shouldn’t just be about delivering first-class work day in day out, although that should be the base of what you do, it must branch out into many other aspects of your approach.

Commitment to building trust and relationships is a huge part of our industry. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is the fact that commitment to each other and standing as allies in times of struggle has come to the forefront. We now realise the impact of solidarity and viewing clients and partners as an extension of your own business; as vital, and extremely pivotal for the future

This type of trust really does take commitment and cannot be achieved easily. That is why from the first brief you give us to the last, we will see it as a personal challenge and take everything we do and supply as an extension of our pride.  

Within recruitment, it is sometimes easy to get lost in a sea of personal gain and your real commitment can be overseen by those who see commitment as purely financial as opposed to relationship building.

It was recently stated in a business podcast featuring an interview with a Senior Executive that "I had been warned that Headhunters were akin to Estate Agents". This caused great frustration to us and made us question why this was being said as there is no connection between our industries. Like within all industries, there are those that are exceptional and those that are terrible and everything in between, this includes Estate Agents and Headhunters. It made us wonder why we strive so hard to push our values when it can sometimes seem like they are lost.

Although taken aback at first it fuelled our passion to drive our value of commitment more. We acknowledge that if we stick to what we believe and always do the right thing then statements like this can be dispelled, even if it is only for our own network.

We ensure that no one we work with is ever treated like a commodity and to this extent we know that they never feel like this.  At Cruinn, we try and show our commitment through being true to our values, our employees and the wider community. We have recently committed to donating 3% of all invoices to a charity of our clients choice as we understand the importance of giving back and if we can we will.

The effects of being transparent

You should try and treat your recruitment business in the way that if someone were to put up a window as to let people look into your business, it would it reflect every single one of your values truthfully.

It all comes down to listening and understanding what a client needs and being able to look yourself in the mirror. We want our clients to be able to understand our processes from start to finish and to be able to see who we are as people, rather than just business associates.

To us, transparency brings down an invisible wall between business and client as it allows for more opportunities and for growth.  This can be achieved by encouraging candour and the unwarranted sharing of detail at every step of your process, which will allow you to pave the way for a more blanket understanding of your companies ideals. This will, in turn, encourage transparency from your clients, and thus allows for a truly organic and real business relationship to grow.

Within our business, our transparency comes from being real. If you choose to work with us, you will understand we treat every brief with personality and dedication and would never take on something that we didn’t think we could complete.

There are many, many values that we also do consider to be part of recruitment and for Cruinn, but to us these bare a true resemblance to what we do and how we carry out our business. We have had time to grow and develop these during the effects of Covid-19 and feel we are in a better position to truly appreciate why these values are important to us.

Our final value is good coffee! So if you would like to chat about how we could work together let us start there!