What's in a mission statement?

At blueskies we’ve been looking at our mission statement recently, thinking and overthinking how we summarise our aim in a couple of sentences. Every recruiter wants to be the recruiter of choice in their specialist market, but what does that even mean? How do we get across to our candidates and clients what we strive to achieve each and every waking moment? And most importantly how do we make sure that our awesome team believe it and live and breathe it every working day? (and typically a fair bit of the non-working day too!)

You can read tons of articles online, each telling you what needs to be included. But what really is key?

This got me thinking about my clients and candidates. Over recent years we’ve moved away from salary being the motivator to change jobs, it’s so rare that we hear that now. It’s about things like progression, training, soft benefits and flexibility. But what about the draw to a new agency? One of the key things here is culture, every candidate asks the question and we need to know our clients inside out to be able to hand-on-heart tell them what each agency is really like and whether we think there’s a synergy there. A big part of that is about the agency’s values and how these are lived by within teams day to day, their ethos and their vision. What is their mission? What makes them amazing? That’s what candidates want to know.

So, what should a great mission statement include?

For me it’s driven by our values and our customers, it’s about what we do and how we do it, but it’s more than that, it’s why. You may have guessed that ours is a rework in progress right now but when it’s done it will summarise what makes us awesome and how we keep our customers at the heart of everything we do. 

What about you? I'm really interested to hear opinions on what you think makes a great mission statement, and if you can spare a few minutes to have a think, what would you want your recruiter’s to be?