This post is for recruiters who feel like their work doesn’t really matter.
For the last 6 months we have been hacking (sorry to use a crappy hipster business term) at our business to evolve into an employee-centric business. We’re a business that’s coming out of start up zone and into “maturity”, whatever that means. We’re still small and our culture is the most important thing. Employee engagement and customer experience combined occupy about 92% of my thought time now. It’s fair to say I am slightly obsessed by it
I used to believe we were building a recruitment company. We are not. We’re now constructing, quite deliberately, a Customer Experience company that happens to deliver recruitment services. We’ve a long, long journey up the mountain.
There are basically 4 pillars we now work at daily.
1. Team Collaboration
Morning stand ups centres us around this, it acts as a shared learning centre. It prevents the typical recruiter delusions, and keeps us all razor focussed on the customer (candidates and clients). The idea sharing and self accountability in our team has risen sharply in the last 2 months based on this organic collaboration.
2. Recruitment As A Craft – Consulting Skill & Partnerships
From business discovery to job qualification through to candidate presentation techniques, interview preparations and de-briefs, we have gone up 3 gears in our attention to detail. Over time we are starting to see that our work is more accurate, involves less fallouts and reduced hassle for our customers. Our journey up the mountain is long but each week we get a little better.
3. Values at the Centre
Over the last 6 months, a definable set of values has emerged from the bottom up. Without arranging it or realising it, the team has started to speak in common language. It stems from a spirit of giving, people ethics, work ethics, and quality. Respect for the candidate experience drives our processes. We are after improved employer branding for our clients, not just placements.
4. Long term, Strategic Thinking
We view our business development cycles as being far longer (and more sophisticated) than ever before, with relationships front and centre. We view what we do through a strategy lens and we ask “how and why” instead of just “what”. We spend energy on quality activity, not just “activity”. Sounds logical enough.
I would argue these 4 pillars completely integrate and are actually inseparable because you need all 4 for each of the 4 to work well. Strategy and decision making stands in Values. Collaboration and Craftsmanship walk hand in hand, and both are required to deliver on Strategy.
I have never experienced recruitment to be so rewarding, nor have I seen people so completely engrossed in the finer details of what constitutes an exceptional recruitment experience. We believe that if we hold strong to what we value, we attract the clients who align with that, and this leads to exceptional value for our candidates. The opposite is also true, and that’s why we’re so comfortable to walk away from companies or teams that don’t care about the candidate journey.
We believe that if we bring great people together, then technology that changes lives will get built. This is why our work is so important, and it’s why we do what we do, every day.
Cheers,
Todd