Being a recruitment consultant can be a very rewarding job. You will be dealing with people most of the day, and successful recruitment consultants need to learn and continue to develop a range of skills. You will need to develop marketing skills, advertising skills, sales skills, phone skills, client presentation skills, research skills, interview skills and data management skills.
While it is great developing these skills and talking with people all day, the role of a Recruiter isn’t for everyone. It is worth considering some of the challenges of a career in recruitment.
Who is suitable for a role as a Recruitment Consultant?
People can come from a range of backgrounds in recruitment and there are all types of Recruitment Consultants recruiting for a range of industries, so the individual skills required can vary mainly on the industry they are recruiting in. At Archer Recruitment, we specialise in IT Recruitment. IT is a competitive industry for tech talent but also a highly rewarding sector. We look for people that are going to be able to thrive in our comprehensive recruitment training programme so the ability to learn a broad range of skills is important to us.
People may need to have these personality traits, like confidence and being personable and approachable. Most importantly, being goal-orientated or target-orientated is really important. You will have training at our company, but being a recruitment consultant involves enjoying working to a process and achieving outcomes. When people are able to understand their own personal and professional goals, it makes their career as a Recruitment Consultant more successful and fun.
Those who are very successful in their recruitment career tend to be able to think about the medium to long term. For example, people are always surprised about the complexity of recruitment and the skills they need to develop. Also, recruitment is a relationship business and people need to develop relationships over a long period. People need to nurture their professional relationships and make sure they are acting in the best interests of candidates and clients.
What should I do before an interview for a Recruitment Consultant position?
Recruitment is rewarding and there are lots of opportunities to innovate and change the way things are done. It is an industry where the rewards are linked to your efforts and performance, however, some questions worth considering are:
- Do I understand the challenges in recruitment?
- Am I comfortable with those challenges?
- What are my short and medium-term goals?
- Do I consider myself to be financially motivated?
While you don’t need to be 100% clear about all the answers, it is just worth taking a moment to consider the above questions. Everyone is different and will have different motivations, for example, some very successful recruitment consultants aren’t exclusively financially motivated, but many are because this role allows people to earn more money for their efforts. Often when people have financial goals, for example like buying a house, they have a goal to work towards and a reason to put in the extra effort for candidates and clients.
Questions for an interview for a recruitment position?
- Be able to talk through your CV in about 5 – 7 minutes.
- Why are you interested in working as a Recruitment Consultant?
- Anything you’re proud of in your life either professionally or personally?
At Archer, we are most interested in you as a person, so we try to get people to be open and not scripted with their answers. We want people to do the best interview they can, but it is about understanding each other. If you would like to consider more interview questions check out this article.
Other things to consider when Interviewing as a Recruitment Consultant?
Presentation: It is worth noting that despite the changes due to the Covid pandemic, the position of a recruitment consultant is about relationships and meeting candidates and clients. The role involves dressing professionally because the job is about building credibility and conducting interviews, so you need to be dressed for an interview every day.
Questions to ask the Recruitment Agency / Recruitment Consultancy during an interview?
- What training and support is available to me? Not all recruitment companies will have access to training and support. It is worth understanding for a prospective Recruitment Consultant what are the training structures available and the support to help you progress.
- What are the career prospects? It is worth understanding what your career prospects are, for example, can I become a manager, a Principal Recruitment Consultant, a trainer or even a partner in the future?
- What kind of tools will I have access to? Will I have access to advertising and a CRM system and how well established is it? Will I have access to Premium LinkedIn accounts or any other tools to help me generate candidates or vacancies?