Recruiters can get a bad reputation for their self interest in relationship building. I guess the sceptic could argue that any sales relationship can and is inherently selfish.

But I would say in my experience that often the best relationships are built with the people you don’t place or recruit for. More recently we have seen an increase in client and candidate referrals that have come from simple yet effective communication. In a competitive market these are gold.

Last week my colleague Toby arranged a coffee with a candidate he previously had in process for one of his roles.  He didn’t end up placing the candidate, but he left a lasting impression on a job well done, simply for his ability to keep him updated. He has taken a senior role and wanted to sit down with us to talk about him building his team over the next 12 months and the part we can play. The business he has joined is not somewhere we would have easily secured a business meeting with but because of his experience of being listened to and kept up to date, even when we didn’t place him, we are his first choice for hiring.  

One of the first candidates I met when I moved to Sydney in 2016 was a HR professional who at the time had been made redundant, I didn’t have a role for her then, but I was honest about that and kept in touch over the years. Because of this I have regularly been referred both new clients and candidates from this meeting, by simply keeping in touch. While these examples are nothing new or groundbreaking, you’d be surprised at how often the common complaint from both candidates and clients is that they never heard back from the recruiter.

It seems that this is also prevalent in recent years as the industry has seen a big influx of new recruiters, no doubt following the post pandemic boom in the market.

Perhaps as they had not experienced a softer market, they naively didn’t understand the importance of communication in building long-term relationships that extend beyond the immediacy of placing a role or candidate. When exploring a partnership with a new prospective client a key exploration around their pain points with recruiters often is a lack of communication and a lack of consistency in the person they are dealing with. A quick dive into company attrition rates for recruitment agencies in Sydney over the last 12 months is perhaps indicative of people joining the industry in a busy market and not embedding best practice around communication from the start. Lacking genuine relationships when the market is less favourable most likely plays a part in this.

As Kevin Chandler put it in a recent shortlist article;

"The industry has got into this mould where we'll just take people on and see how they go and if they don't go well, we'll move them on," he says.

But this approach has led to turnover rates around 40%, and disillusionment among young people entering the industry.

Any industry in which a recent graduate with the right abilities can earn in excess of $200k in their first few years should be highly attractive to new entrants, says Chandler.

Instead, the recruitment industry has a reputation for churning through staff when they don't meet targets. Clients also gain a poor impression of the industry when they get bad or incompetent service from inexperienced consultants lacking the necessary attributes to be good at the job”.