Harnessing the power of resilience Navigating a recruitment agency through a boom to markets stabilising can be tricky. By focusing on the resilience of your consultants you may uncover Kristan De Sousa opportunities that a changing market can bring and Director, Six Degrees Executive enable a more sustainable model for success over the APSCo Director long term. Throughout my 16 year recruitment journey I’ve had to navigate through many changes both at a macro and micro level. The only way to endure this over a sustained period has been with resilience and a problem-solving mentality. Resilience is listed by the World Economic Forum in the Top 3 skills that are most in demand for 2023, and Top 5 Skills on the rise. It can be a key strategy that helps employees tackle stress and is associated with greater job satisfaction, organisational commitment and increased productivity. Especially during challenging times, the ability to bounce back from changes in the industry is more critical than ever. For our business it’s been important to understand not only how to support employees to be resilient, but how you can view it as a springboard for opportunities. Skills-based learning and experience Consultants need guidance on how to build and refine their skills to set them up for success in a changing market.
Constant candidate and client rejections can be difficult and add to that the attrition of recruitment talent over time which for us brought new consultants into the business, some that may never have needed to make a BD call because of the boom during COVID. To mitigate this, we leveraged our Learning & Development framework to provide consistent and targeted training through on demand learning to address identified skill gaps and promote cross-skilling. These peer-led sessions not only provided excellent transfer of knowledge, but allowed consultants to share stories, building a sense of camaraderie and providing tangible examples of how others navigated or bounced back from difficult situations. Having a skills-focus should also translate to your internal hiring processes. Demonstrable soft skills and life experience are just as important as a track record, delivering a more wholistic 360 recruitment mind-set to identify potential recruitment consultants and their potential to navigate the changing market demands to come.
Activity & Outcome Focused Resilience isn't just about bouncing back; it's also about staying ahead, never giving up, and driving consistent activity of the things you can control. We reviewed the metrics we tracked to ensure they were outcome focused and then provided visibility to live dashboards that consultants could anchor decisions to and provide tangible results for active monitoring of their, and the broader teams, activity. From Business Development, Candidate and Client meetings, Revenue and Net Promoter Score Results; we wanted consultants and leaders to have access to metrics at every point of the customer journey at their fingertips and to develop the commercial acumen to use these to drive business outcomes. In parallel, we refreshed our organisational values to align with these metrics and our strategic imperatives to create unified behaviours that supported achieving individual and business wide outcomes. RECRUITMENT & CO | 20
