Harnessing the power of resilience

Written by: Kristen De Sousa, Director, Six Degrees Executive, APSCo Director

Navigating a recruitment agency through a boom to markets stabilising can be tricky. By focusing on the resilience of your consultants you may uncover opportunities that a changing market can bring and enable a more sustainable model for success over the 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.

Like most orgnisations, we see technology and enablement as key to providing the bandwidth for recruiters to deliver value-add for customers as a focal point by providing a more seamless customer and employee experience.

Building stronger relationships

During economic downturns, one of the first things that can get put on the back burner are the softer value-adds like good customer service. However, there is no silver bullet that sees the return of or growth in revenue in the long run.

This is where resilience and grit truly make an impact. Building long-term relationships that foster loyalty and trust in both clients and candidates have a pay-off that is often hard to monitor and measure, and in times of economic pressures its almost a reflex to priortise activity that is seen to directly drive the bottom line.

Take for example, the value in our reinvigorated temp workforce. We wanted to wrap our arms around this community for the next 20 years and provide a branded service experience with a high-touch model and looked to redesign our end-to-end candidate experience to align with this.

Activities such as this, or any that contribute to building stronger relationships, monitored and improved on using mechanisms such as Net Promoter Score, give consultants and the business an opportunity to refine the experience and lay foundations for repeat job opportunities into the future.

Resilience is a skill that is critical to the sustainability of both organisations as well as consultants who want a career in the recruitment industry.

It is something that can be strengthened overtime so supporting your consultants to do this through L&D while also having them out in market refining these skills is critical to future proofing your place in the recruitment industry over the next phase.