Failure is the crucial learning tool that everyone needs in order to progress and succeed. If you’re afraid of failure you’ll never progress. You’ve got to fail sometimes to succeed overall.
We love the following quote from US basketball superstar Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
“The job market in 1990 was a very different place to what it is today. Every town and city had numerous newspapers with reputable career sections where pages of job adverts appeared. If one caught your eye, common practice was to write a nice covering letter accompanied with a CV posted off to the advertiser. Most of the time you got no response, occasionally a polite company would send you a letter thanking you for your reply. There was the odd Recruitment Agency servicing the local area, but they tended to specialise in temporary workers and office staff………………………………………………………”
The advent of the internet has revolutionized the job market in the last 15-20 years, however another major evolution that has changed the job market has been the growth of the influence of the Recruiter (Recruitment Agency & Headhunter). Although Recruitment service suppliers have been around for many years, it is in the last 20 years that their influence and dominance in the job market has reached significant levels.
Having spent over 25 years working in Search Recruitment; the single biggest issue I’ve found is explaining to clients what is it that we actually do? How do we “add value” to their business?
And why does Search Recruitment beat advertising & work so much better than other “reactive” forms of recruiting? Why does Search Recruitment gets results in the war for the top talent in your market?
Each recruitment process is unique, but there are some normal things that occur in the majority of cases. From a headhunter’s perspective, being aware of what’s happening can help you deal with the recruitment process and ensure you have the best chance of success. The top 10 things you should be aware of are:
As the first serious frost of the Autumn/Winter 2023 season covers much of the UK; I was out with some friends over the weekend and an interesting conversation developed.
One friend was exalting the virtues of his lovely German saloon with leather interior, cruise control, faultless driving experience,etc. Another friend was championing how cheap his “Far East” manufactured car cost was “to buy and run”, the low cost for spare parts, servicing, etc.
Although the conversation was about cars – the two friends were coming from opposite ends of the scale in terms of car needs and wants. Kind of similar to comparing apples & pears.
This set me thinking about our clients; “Transactional” and “Value-add”.
As a leader and manager of any successful business a key component of success is finding and hiring the right people, at the right time; with the minimum amount of time and effort expended.
We encounter countless fundamental errors that companies big & small make on a daily basis that are massively hampering their ability to attract and recruit the “hidden elite”. This is the top talent in any market sector. Make sure you don’t fall foul of our top 5 hiring howlers:
Job interviews are a necessary part of any recruitment process, however with the right planning and approach even the most nervous of interviewees can avoid difficult interview questions and give a good performance (see our earlier article http://www.wynneconsulting.co.uk/interview_preparation/ on how to prepare effectively for any interview).
Conversely – we regularly encounter situations where seemingly excellent job candidates have failed at an interview as a result of answers to one or two difficult interview questions.
Dealing with difficult interview questions that have a “negative” answer:
A scenario we experience regularly goes something like this. A client wants to recruit a key individual, so they assume the best strategy is to put the job out to 20 different recruiters. “Surely, if we put the job out to lots of recruiters, we’ll get a good coverage of all of the job seekers at that moment in time and we’ll then be able to recruit the best people available.”
The problem with this strategy is like you, a recruiter has to put hard work and effort into any inquiry to turn it into a result.
Any efficient, well run business knows that the key to success is to pick and choose the business they target, rather than working on every client enquiry.
Despite the deep uncertainties in the world at the present time, across our core markets in the UK & EU there are a huge proportion of companies recruiting high quality people. That’s a fact.
We are seeing strong demand from the majority of the niche markets that we service which can bring the question if you are looking for a new challenge; do you accept the first job you are offered?
For many years, employers have held the power and have tended to be very selective in their hires; and insistent on interviewing multiple candidates for a particular role. Decision-making has typically been quite long and arduous – as hiring managers see a wide selection of candidates as a good reason to “take their time” and make decisions slowly.
Fast-forward to 2023 and we are seeing what we call “candidate short” markets in the majority of our sectors. This means that in many instances there are more jobs than candidates, and this causes employers to have a different approach.
One of our top clients came into the office this week to talk about a major project we are undertaking to set up a new business unit for their organisation. Chatting away, he told us the story of his best friend who insists on doing all of his recruitment himself to save money.
He talked about how proud his friend is of placing job adverts in lots of different media, then taking all of the CV’s from “applicants” that he receives, all the phone-calls he gets from interested people who just “want to have a chat” about the job, etc. He then spends the next few evenings & weekends going through the CV’s, calling up the 15 or so interesting candidates and chatting to them about their background, experience, etc.
