Ever wondered how to be more proactive and take more initiative as recruiters?
Proactivity & “taking initiative” go hand in hand and are extremely healthy business practice.
Have you ever thought what might happen to your revenue if you were a little less reactive and took the initiative to be a lot more pro-active in your recruitment? How much more successful might you be?
Being proactive in your recruitment means thinking ahead on issues such as candidate sourcing and new business generation – building meaningful connections with our clients and candidates ahead of time, such as building candidate pipelines of qualified talent even before new positions are released.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be more strategic, more proactive? For one, life would be so much less stressful!
When we are pro-active, we are taking control of our business rather than waiting for opportunities to pop up (reacting). It stands to reason that what we have control over, we can influence; imagine being able to create opportunities that we can help influence the outcome?
Taking initiative means doing something without being told to do it. A good example of this in recruitment could be - taking it upon ourselves to create various talent pools for the roles we are likely to recruit for, rather than starting afresh every time we get a new role.
Why is this important to us as recruiters? Doing this grows our network of high-quality candidates, meaning we can be quicker in our delivery whenever a new role comes in.
Being proactive and taking initiative gives us many, many benefits. It allows us to be more strategic, therefore more effective, and efficient when it comes to anticipating what our clients will need in the near future.
Proactive recruitment can also prevent bad hiring as we have been more strategic and begun the work in advance. And imagine how less stressed we would be, because we are more in control of the situation. This creates more value in what we are doing, making us more successful all round.
So, what can we do to take more initiative and be more proactive as recruiters?
Here’s a couple of things we start doing right now:
1. Why wait for the next urgent requirement to hit your desk? (Then running around in a reactive state – always behind the curve). Taking the initiative means planning for future requirements, so you are ahead of the game.
2. Stop. Think. Plan... What candidates are we likely to need in the near future for our clients? Now let’s go and make that happen! Build those talent pools. Networking with potential candidates even before a position is available. If you know that a contract is going to end soon start finding and engaging with potential candidates before the position is open. Contact them before someone else does.
3. Even when you are busy plan some time in your day (pro-active) to engage with your clients or candidates discussing their future plans (this will help grow your future business pipeline and negate the need for cold calling!) Successful recruitment requires building long term relationships.
4. Take the initiative of rewriting job adverts so it appeals to your network, do this by making sure the essential information is easy to read, fresh, exciting, and engaging!
We are all stuck in the “busy being busy” reactive state, but if we can just stop and breath for a moment there are so many ways to take some initiative and be a little more proactive in our day, we’ll feel more in control and ahead of the game – and who wouldn’t want to feel a little more on top of their game?