Many recruiters improved their skill-set over Covid, and in the subsequent hiring boom. Plenty of newbies have entered our profession in the past year and have made tremendous progress.

It’s exciting to see.

However, over the past six months, I have spent a lot of time in recruitment companies in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK. I see a consistent group of mistakes – that even good recruiters make.

Are you guilty of these? Can you hone and improve?

1: Making too many assumptions.

Making assumptions has always been the cause of most recruiting pain. But now, it’s more critical than ever. With candidates especially, but clients too; constantly checking in, calibrating, questioning, offering alternatives, posing scenarios, peeling the onion, and asking, ‘what has changed since we last spoke‘, is crucial to reduce nasty surprises.

2: Allowing remote work to drive shallow recruiting.

The reality is that as Recruitment has become more remote, savvy recruiters have become more engaged. The majority have not done this. A one-hour interview in a meeting room in 2019 has deteriorated into a 15-minute zoom or even a 10-minute phone call in 2022. Jobs once taken with clients face-to-face are now accepted (and acted on!)  via a job description attached to an email. This is catastrophic and costs all stakeholders in terms of disappointing outcomes. We have to go deeper, get closer, and become more engaged.

3: Developing a one-sided skill set.

Why this has occurred is easy to understand, but it’s no less of a mistake. Many recruiters are achieving outstanding results by focusing on candidates in a candidate-tight market. Logical, obviously, but at what cost? The wheel will turn, the market will shift, and the big mistake is allowing your business development muscle to weaken, and your client relationships to grow flimsy and superficial –  which will give you no traction and no equity when the market turns

4: Failing to act as a trustworthy advisor to clients.

Plenty of recruiters are missing the fact that you fill more jobs by making those jobs more fillable. That means consulting to your clients on aspects of their order that need to be finessed or changed for them to make a hire in the current market. In my opinion, recruiters have got better at that, but there is a long way to go.

5: Not securing genuine client commitment on every order.

I’m blue in the face talking about this. Great recruiters have earned recruiter equity and don’t work on multi-listed contingent job orders where the client has no skin in the game. Moving towards retainers and exclusivity is essential now to change the dynamic for better outcomes for all parties.

6: Not genuinely understanding the candidate MTA

So many recruiters think they are good interviewers because they can accurately assess a candidate’s skills, work history, and qualifications. That’s the easy part of interviewing. The hard part is understanding the candidates’ true motivators for making a job change. To decipher precisely what it is that will encourage them to accept. That will be a heady cocktail of salary, employer brand, flexibility, workstyle, responsibilities, opportunity, and much more. The point is you need to know what they are. And have them ranked in order of importance. To the candidate

7: Sloppy or zero outreach skills

Recruiters do need to initiate contact with prospective candidates. The skills shortage is severe, unlikely to abate, and job boards are increasingly ineffective. But most resort to crude spamming via LinkedIn InMail. You need to understand what candidates want from a recruiter, and not approach them to ‘sell a job’ at all. You pitch your credibility first, and then you offer a career discussion.

8: Not signing up for the Savage Recruitment Academy.

Sort of a joke. But not really. Every one of these issues is covered on the Academy in detail. Over 50 hours of high-quality recruitment training. And new material every quarter. See the details below. Get your company signed up ASAP.