A recruitment consultant is, at base level, someone who a potential employer consults to go through the process of recruitment a new employee or member of staff. A recruitment consultant will assist the employer, source, select and employ the right member of staff and in doing so, receives a fee.
Over 99% of all recruitment consultant businesses get paid on a percentage basis by their clients, whether this is based on the first year’s salary of a new employee or the monies paid to a contractor over their period of time with the employer.
Typical Day of Work for a Recruiter
A typical day of work for a recruitment consultant would be as follows:
- Check their email and deal with anything outstanding from the previous day.
- Check out instructions from management on new leads that they need to contact on that particular day.
- Have a look at any outstanding vacancies and check on progress.
- Traditional recruitment consultants will then telephone round any outstanding employers they have CVs in with and check whether they want to proceed to interview.
- Check out interviews that are taking place that day and chase up any for feedback if this has not yet been provided.
- Check out new candidates coming into the system and identify vacancies already on the system that might be suitable for them.
- Have a big long chat with your colleagues about how hard it is to get anyone in to work and how fickle some candidates are.
- Start telephoning round to see if you can source any candidates for the outstanding vacancies on the system.
- Deal with any billing that needs to be forwarded across to the accounts department.
- Look at business development, although the vast majority of recruitment consultants do not really get involved with this and leave it to the management team to sort out.
- Check out interviews going on the following day and make sure that candidates are aware of them, sending them a reminder and chasing up where necessary.
- Keep your phone on in the evening so that if any candidates get lost on the way to their evening interviews you can assist them.
Quite a lot of recruitment consultancy is all about how much you bill, and a lot of recruitment consultants can be very self-centred people, focusing entirely on the money they generate through the work they do. If they were not like this however, would they make good recruitment consultants? That is a good issue to debate, but here at Ten Percent Legal we like to think that we are not salesmen at all and instead facilitators, helping our clients and candidates match up together without us needing to force either party into a relationship that inevitably will not work out if this was the case. Naturally we still like being paid!
How do I know if a career as a recruitment consultant is for me?
You don’t. The vast majority of people who end up doing recruitment work fall into it by accident, having taken it as a stop gap for something else and finding out that they actually enjoy it, or the money is good. Unfortunately the money is only good if you are a salesman able to push deals through, but if you are like this then chances are recruitment is going to be high pressure and may well be something you don’t want to do longer term in any event. Have a read of our guide at wisebusinessadvice.com to see how to be happy in your job. We suspect the vast majority of people who work as recruitment consultants are definitely not happy, and the turnover in a lot of the more cut-throat companies is extremely high. Very few recruitment consultants last for any length of time with one particular business.
