It’s coming up to Easter, I have some space on my desk so I decide to contact some businesses whom I feel I could support through recruitment and employment coaching.

For those of you visualising me sat with a phone and a copy of the yellow pages, opening a random page and calling… STOP, YOU COULDN’T BE MORE WRONG. (Despite this being the starting block for many a successful recruiter, who set up in the 80’s/90’s, no disrespect)

• I spend time researching businesses; to reinforce my understanding of their offering and their individual identities

• I look at who is hiring and particularly focus on those who have had open vacancies for a long time (I consider the reason for this; hiring method, company reputation or perhaps a skill shortage)

I completely appreciate that you may not require my assistance at the time of my call but please listen to my offer, listen to my research or if you’re genuinely snowed under allow me to send you an email detailing this.

Some of you will insist that you will NEVER need external support and the conversation will end there, admittedly, sometimes rather abruptly and not out of my choice.

Now, let’s consider the day comes when you require support filling a highly skilled senior role, or a huge order and short deadline comes through and you need some temporary staff to get you through this. Alternatively, you may require support with redundancies, market salary information or team profiling and development. Whom are you going to contact?

Those that took the time to speak to me will go straight to their inbox *pause … try to remember my name….* after searching ‘recruitment’ in that handy little search bar, like magic my email will appear. Ta-dah. This email will reinforce how I understood their business, could provide strong testimonials from others in their industry and could support both their temporary and permanent staffing needs. Furthermore, detail how RSE Group offers alternative employment services to standard recruitment.

For those that were too busy to speak, receive an email or were certain they would never require external support, will now spend unwanted time looking for an agency with good rates, good testimonials, and a background in their industry. Recruiting/ replacing/ hiring and firing are some of the most stressful things to do in business, wasting time looking for external support is an inconvenience.

Therefore, I ask these people to please stop thinking short term, have a contingency plan, let me send you an email and save you time in the future.

I am not speaking for all recruiters, I know some may still operate the Yellow Pages, no research required method, these are the ones giving our industry a bad name! If they phone, hang up, you can figure this out pretty quickly when they are offering you teachers for your garden nursery!   Please call Harriet to find out more about what we can do here at the RSE Group to help you!

By Harriet Finch