What exactly is a recruitment consultant?

Jobseeeker

I think it has high sales targets and a lot get sacked if you don't meet them.

My BIL did it for a couple of years but when he started he wasn't given work he had to create it by getting clients on board and finding jobseekers. Finding the clients is obviously the hard part.

persa

I work in a profession which uses agencies/headhunters heavily.

A lot of work goes into building relationships with clients and candidates. Some clients will use one agency exclusively, obviously they'll go with the agency they like the most.

Recruiters can't just send any old person along for interview - if it's clear it's a poor match, it damages their relationship with the client and with the candiate.

Sometimes candidates stay put for longer than expected - but they can still be a source of commission if they like the agencies enough to part with names of colleagues looking to move on. Again, there has to be sufficient trust/goodwill for it to work.

The business is more like a dating agency than a job centre. It's not about ticking boxes and/or trying to pigeon hole people, it's about relationships and networking.

InsideInsurance

DailyLife wrote: »

As a recruitment consultant do you just search job sites for peoples CV', ring them and try to sell them an interview? Interviewing them and CV screening ect and basically just deciding if they're fit for the job or not?

How hard can that be... I know about 20 people just about the graduate university who would jump at the chance of a job in the City, I hardly think I'd had to sell them the job.

You are first of all missing half the job out, which is finding the job vacancies in the first place and not just the candidates. You'll find many companies have a PSL and so will only deal with certain agencies and so you need to try and get on the PSL or find ways around it.

Its then not just a case of selling a vacancy to any old candidate but finding 2-3 exceptionally good candidates. Your job as an agent is to filter, I as a hiring manager could put a job on Monster but I am going to get 2000+ candidates applying and I simply don't have time to review them all. I instead work with 5 agencies and ask each to provide 2 candidates and so I then only have 10 candidates to review.

Agencies that continuously send poor match candidates will quickly find themselves not being told about vacancies and not being on the PSL.

The challenge as an agent is having a broad enough knowledge to be able to spot good candidates. You could specialise in insurance and so get my recent vacancy looking for a hybrid BA/DA with commercial insurance experience, ETL, data modelling and Oracle knowledge but not a hardcore coder as they need to be business facing.

You'd need to understand these requirements and be able to work out if you get a CV that has DB2 instead of Oracle if this is likely to be a better match to someone who has Oracle but no experience with ETL. Obviously you may decide this role is too technical for you and so should sit with the IT team rather than Insurance but then do they have the knowledge to be able to test the candidates commercial insurance experience.