Posted: Mon 01 Jun 2009
Adrian Treacy, Director – Arrows Group
In the current climate the most important thing I would say is focusing on doing the basics to the highest of your ability. Sometimes when market conditions change people change the way they work and markets they focus on instead of focusing on the doing the basic recruitment skills well which gave them the success in the first place.
Also you must have a positive outlook, don’t blame the market, the down turn the recession for your results. If you are positive, work hard and keep focused you will achieve success. In the last down turn after 9/11 these were the things we focused on in order to achieve higher billings and larger market share than we had before.
Richard Herring, European Staffing Services Director - Volt Europe
Historically we have seen boom and bust economic cycles and recruitment follows those cycles very closely. The current climate of uncertainty may mean that recruiters have to commit more time to their business development activity than before. Reviewing incentives and commission schemes to ensure they promote this activity and ensuring your teams have the skills required through training, coaching and mentoring will be important.
For those businesses that have focused recruiters on tight vertical markets, be prepared to encourage them to broaden their market focus if their skills area shows signs of slowing down. Take this action as early in the cycle as possible as they will need to learn quickly!
And ensure you are managing your costbase and cash flow tightly, it may be necessary to review sign-off limits for items of expenditure and cash is king!
Finally, be confident and positive with your colleagues, they will follow your lead."
Richard Crawley, Managing Director - STR Group
1) Be Positive – sell a positive story every day to your staff, to your clients and to your candidates, celebrate success at every opportunity and ensure your business and teams are enclosed in a positive bubble. Success should be measured differently now so look to adapt your expectations and rewards to ensure that your new definition of success is being celebrated to the max.
2) Build Loyalty – get out and see as many clients as you can, keep your clients loyal and when they recruit look to gain exclusivity. Inject more TLC towards clients by changing the day-to-day standard client call structure.
3) Maintain Margins – It can become increasingly hard to keep margins up when the market tightens; don’t let other companies reduce your margins. Your service is as good as ever so let the price reflect this.
4) Go the Extra Mile – Going the extra mile gains you a competitive advantage at the best of times, now this is vital to incorporate into your business; this can be as simple as candidate networking evenings or holding candidate evenings where you gather the team together for an evening of pizza and phone bashing to speak to all those elusive candidates you have not been able to get through to in the day.
5) Review – Review your business as much as required, review it every week if you need to; but always think outside of the standard recruitment box. Moving into new markets, changing consultant focuses and ensuring you are profitable are the main review areas but the ‘to review’ list in a tough market is always pretty long and certainly comprehensive so keep reviewing to ensure you take advantage of all the opportunities that a tough market brings.
6) Train – Skill up all your staff. Many of your staff may have not worked in a tough market or at best they have not for a number of years so get them working the market the best way to maximize on best practice.