Recruitment priorities: partnership and proactivity

October 3rd, 2023 | Industry News

Most recruiters try to build strong relationships with their clients, but there’s a stage beyond getting on well – true partnership. Partnership begins with recruitment website design – your online presence as a recruiter is not just your digital business card but also that of your clients. Creating a website for recruitment that allows them to demonstrate their needs, nature and culture is an excellent way of partnering your clients, because it creates great transparency without you having to constantly communicate who your clients are and what they are looking for. SAAS recruitment agencies have an additional benefit in partnership, because they can work with clients worldwide, allowing good communications to take place across national barriers and time zones.

Partnership is also about providing good data. Recruitment database software isn’t just an essential tool to help recruiters find the right clients, the best recruitment CRM can be used to help clients recruit in future – for example by finding significant insights like the growth, or shrinkage, of local recruitment pools, or how passive talent can be contacted during periods of fallow recruitment to prepare the ground for the next expansion.

Proactive recruitment – when, why and how

Proactivity is becoming second nature to top recruiters. The old route of posting a vacancy and sitting back to see what happens is long dead for any kind of talent recruitment, and increasingly even for pinch point jobs like long distance drivers!

Proactivity requires a whole new skill set. To begin with, if you’re the instigator of the recruitment process, you’ve made a commitment to treat your potential talent very differently – they are no longer candidates, they are invitees and as such, they have a set of expectations about how they will be treated. Recruiting software can help you move fast – which is vital if you made the first move, because if your invitee wasn’t looking to change jobs, they are going to expect rapid, responsive and considerate communication from you; after all, you’re the one who wants them, not vice versa.

In addition, it’s important to understand your responsibility to share information in proactive recruitment. We’re assuming that you’re using online recruitment software to be in timely contact with your client, but what’s your proactive response to your invitee? Primarily, it’s vital to respond to them expeditiously when they contact you, but equally, if you decide at any point, that you, as a recruiter, are not going to continue with the recruitment process, it’s your responsibility to communicate that to the invitee not only quickly but sensitively. It’s a bit like asking somebody out on a date and then not showing up – if you can’t continue the relationship, you’ve got to let them down nicely.