Recruitment : Specialise and build a talent pool

Build and own a community — the concept and how it can impact your success

To be an effective recruiter, it helps if you can operate at a pace that is quicker than your competition. Pace on its own is not enough though, you also need to have the edge when it comes to your ability to access, engage, and present rare talent. So how can this be achieved?

There are two important factors:

Become a specialist

It’s my belief that you should strive to become a specialist recruiter rather than a generalist. By operating as a specialist and working in the same market every week of every year, you can leverage the information that you gather from your client and candidate conversations to build up a strong market awareness and knowledge. Which companies compete with which, what is their structure, where are they based and who pays what, etc. Holding this depth of market knowledge is vital if you want to be recognised as a trusted and credible recruiter by your clients and candidates, a person that is qualified and able to provide solid advice to people working in your space. Someone who coaches and consults rather than sells.

Build a community — be consultative, not transactional

The other important factor is to think of all the people that work in the market you specialise in as a community. It’s a talent pool and your objective should be to build trusted relationships with as many people in this pool as quickly as possible. To do this requires you to adopt a caring mindset and display empathy on every candidate call that you make and with every person that you speak to regardless of that persons suitability at that moment in time. Treat everyone with the respect that they deserve and take the time to explore and understand the future ambitions of everyone you speak to so that they can become a part of your community . Someone you can engage quickly with next time around because you are pre-armed with knowledge of their experience and future ambitions and trust has been generated. Remember that everyone in your community is as important as the next and so whilst a person’s experience and needs may not be right for what you are doing today, what about tomorrow?

Imagine how effective you would be if you understood the personal needs of the people in your community and, most importantly, what would make them consider a move. Holding this information would effectively allow you to categorise people into smaller sub-communities — those people motivated to join a start-up rather than continue in corporate life, people motivated to manage a global or EMEA team rather than a regional team, people looking to work for a manufacturer rather than an integrator, etc. The next time a client comes to you with a specific need, how much easier would it be to pick up the phone to a pre-qualified person who you have already spoken to and who has bought into you and your style of approach. Imagine how much faster you could deliver compared to the generalist that is fishing in a pool where they have no knowledge of what fish resides where, and even if they did, they are using the wrong bait to catch it.

To be able to gather this information quickly and maximise your success, you must be able to make every call count, as often you only get the one chance to approach and engage with someone that you haven’t spoken to before. You don’t have to be experienced to be successful at this, but you do have to have the right approach and an effective interview style that allows you to control the call and extract all of the relevant information to make informed decisions regarding selection. The first call to someone you haven’t spoken to before is where the candidate experience begins and getting this right goes a long way towards building your personal brand and generating trust. I would like to share more of my thoughts on this next week before then moving on to how to nail the candidate interview.

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