Keeping the edge in Recruitment.
In the competitive and cutthroat recruitment world of today, reputation is essential to survival. Everyday there seems to be another rival around the corner just waiting to take your place, sometimes somebody you have trained and mentored. This means it is vital for your recruitment businesses to stand out from the crowd when it comes to dealing with clients. Once you start to get a reputation for poor client service or for handling client relationships badly, it’s a slippery slope down and it becomes more and more difficult to repair the damage as word spreads like wildfire.
When it comes to handling your clients the pressure to deliver good service is stronger than ever as money is the lifeblood of all SME businesses. By valuing your clients’ reputation just as much as your own, you will realise how important it is that you deliver consistently effective services.
Image Is Everything
No matter whether you’re a small independent business or a huge corporate company, your image and reputation is possibly more important than your product. If customers don’t like what they see when they look at your business then they won’t buy what you’re selling. Having a spotless reputation for customer service will spread just as fast as bad news, so its’ important to maintain those high standards for your own sake. We’ve all seen how quickly a bad social media review can spread – don’t put your own brand in this awkward position. Only promise what you can deliver and don't live in other peoples shadows.
Good on Every Level
In order to uphold a strong and positive relationship, you need to be connecting with your clients on multiple levels. Understanding there technical requirements fully and not just matching to words. Your product may be fantastic and your website in peak condition, but if something doesn’t look right on the delivery side of the process then the customer won’t complete a transaction.
In the digital world, you simply cannot underestimate the importance of having an unblemished track record when it comes to reputation. If you’re not confident that you have the in-house expertise and resources to take care of things, it’s vital that your business knows where to look for external support. Your whole reputation could hinge on your ability to outsource effectively.
Let’s face it – there are a lot of recruiters out there. So, amongst all this noise, how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? Recruitment is a strategic activity, and yet a recruiter is rarely treated as a strategic partner by their clients.
Specialise
How many times have you seen an agencies that claims they are “experts” in Engineering, Sales, Medical, Legal and Telecoms recruitment? Newsflash, folks – a generalist is not an expert. To use a comparison, when you visit a Doctor, your GP is a generalist: they have a broad overview of a range of different areas. A GP is fine if you have a minor complaint, but for anything more complicated, you go to a specialist consultant because they have spent years studying one particular part of the body to become an expert in it. Lets have technical people recruiting technical people, it seems to make sense not somebody who failed GCSE Science and Maths trying to entice engineering excellence.
Exclusivity
In a sales job, business development is king: you can’t rely on your existing clients for all your work, and, for a healthy pipeline, you do need to bring new clients into the fold on a regular basis. However, where many recruiters go wrong is to focus simply on winning the business, rather than thinking about what type of client they want. The best clients I have would do work with me on an exclusive, or near-exclusive, basis. This gives me the time to get to know them and their business, and work far more consultatively with them. Be exclusive – you don’t want to be the norm!
Creative Sourcing
Most contingency recruiters operate in a pretty standard way: get a requirement in, post jobs on the job boards, search your database for matches, and hammer LinkedIn and job boards for candidates. But, recruitment is (and always has been) a job about making connections. Sure, you should be doing those things, but you should also, take candidates to lunch to get to know them better, sponsor or set up a local conference in your area of speciality, help set up a user-group, with regular meetings, for candidates with particular skills.
Don’t just be a recruiter at the end of the phone! Find a way to get face-to-face with people. It may be a cliché, but people do business with people: find ways to make face-to-face time happen and it will pay dividends. Ultimately a recruiter will be judged on how well they can deliver on providing great staff. The better your network is, the easier that will be.
Follow my group "Helping to bring Manufacturing / Engineering back to the United Kingdom " for an altogether more consultative approach.