Hiring Recruitment Consultants Requires Creativity

by Veronica Blatt

Today’s guest blogger is Julie Parsons of Premium Consulting in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Julie is a member of the NPA board of directors. Premium Consulting is a boutique independent recruiting firm that provides professional and practical recruitment consulting advice specializing in retained recruitment, partial services, psychometric assessment and appraisals, outplacement and career counseling.

Gone are the days when a recruitment consultant was happy with a job, good base salary and commission.

These days, hiring a good recruitment consultant is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Salaries in the Aus/NZ region are through the roof and uncapped commissions are being offered to attract top billers. Reputation is important; it can take years to build and days to disappear. What attracts good recruiters to your firm?

Some recruitment consultants want the security of working for a global brand name. It may be difficult to attract great talent to a boutique recruitment agency. Belonging to a global recruitment network, such as NPA, can help an independent recruiting firm compete for talent by offering both global reach for recruitment as well as a global brand. It also can open doors for a recruiter to learn new skills and to start billing in other regions and markets they may have been unfamiliar with.

State-of-the-art technology and tools are also seen as attractive. Our workforce is younger and very tech-savvy; when hiring recruitment consultants, you may need to supply the latest computer/laptop or iPad, along with an iPhone or other smart phone to enable them to operate on the go. Old cumbersome systems and slow databases are a no-no to the young recruiter. Secure job and candidate data and access to job sharing tools can be the difference between filling a job and billing or not.

Flexibility, shorter working weeks, longer holidays, remote workers, job share, these are all terms we are hearing and should look at offering our recruitment consultants, in order to compete and stand out.

Learning and development–what is in it for the recruiter? Where can they go, can they develop, will they be promoted, can they earn an equity role in a company? Do you invest in regular training? Can recruitment staff attend conferences and seminars where they learn the latest techniques and trends from their peer group and the industry’s best?

As our workforce ages, we must adapt and keep up with technology in order to successfully hire top-notch recruitment consultants.


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