How to Become an Effective Recruitment Consultant
Written by Leslie Manglo
Recruitment consultants, or what we call headhunters, usually have their own styles of getting the right pool of talents for their respective clients. While volume recruiters are heavily involved in reaching out to dynamic and fast-paced talents and evaluating them based on various measures that would meet their clients’ expectations, headhunters, on the other hand, have progressed in multiple areas of recruitment. Among these are dealing with clients’ contact persons, hiring managers, and other corporate-related issues.
Headhunters usually start by understanding market trends in their clients’ industries, knowing which type of leaders are needed for their clients’ corporate development, and conducting research on how to provide potential solutions for their clients’ business concerns. They do all of these not only to become partners with their clients, but also in order to provide an overview of the hiring organization’s industry to their candidates.
Through the years, headhunters have developed the skill of custom-fitting talents based on their clients’ requirements. To do so, headhunters usually source for prospective candidates via various career portals with the use of technology (e.g. LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, and more). As soon as applications are received, recruiters screen the applicants’ profiles and check whether they have the credentials required for a specific role. After which, interviews are conducted in order to get necessary information about their working experiences and their alignment with the current role they’re applying for.
Since headhunters are looking for organization leaders, they ensure that the talents they tap have the expertise of leading a team and the ability to eventually produce potential leaders. Headhunters apply this skill to further increase their chances of fulfilling a specific requirement, considering that the profiles they have chosen had already been tailor-fitted based on their clients’ preferences. This skill also showcases the ability of the headhunter to be able to pool talents for future requirements. The aforementioned skills are still being used by various recruiters; however, to be able to adapt to the evolving phases of recruitment, one must be flexible and learn to use other methods in corporate recruitment.
In order to become a successful headhunter, you must understand the industry you’re catering to. Being well-informed about various sectors in the corporate world establishes your credibility to both clients and candidates. And with this credibility, they know that you are capable of presenting their brands to others. Additionally, being well-informed also allows you to provide alternatives in case sudden changes in the market occur.
Another must-have in becoming a successful headhunter is the ability to foster long-lasting rapport with clients and candidates. Building relationships with candidates and clients can be considered as the most important skill a recruiter must have. Naturally, when candidates and/or clients have had a great experience with a recruiter, it leaves a lasting impression of one’s performance.
Executive recruitment professionals have their own sets of best practices to showcase. They might go about the recruitment process differently, but the most important thing is that they are able to fulfill requirements and provide opportunities. At the end of the day, headhunters act as consultants to their candidates and clients and serve as a bridge between the two.
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About the author:
Leslie is currently a junior recruitment consultant at the Executive Search and Selection division of John Clements Consultants, Inc.
