Become a Recruitment Consultant | Why not you?
Article
par
Olivia Canedo
le
Are you a recruitment intern, an employee in a Human Resources department, or looking for a professional retraining and are you planning to become a recruiter in a firm? But you don't know if this job is right for you, and you are wondering. What exactly are the missions of a headhunter? Is recruitment consultant the same profession? Do I have the qualities required to succeed in this path? What are the employment prospects and the training courses expected? Let's take stock.
You are made to become a recruitment consultant, if...
1. Are you looking for a job with rich and varied missions?
Do you tend to seek variety, avoiding repetitive activities in your daily life? The job of recruitment consultant makes it possible to combine a very rich recruitment activity with a commercial mission, which is just as rich.
As a recruiter, you support your customers throughout the recruitment process. You start your mission with the stage of framing the need and write an advertisement and an attractive job description after identifying the needs.
You then enter the heart of the headhunting profession through sourcing and the search for potential candidates. You are responsible for looking for potential candidates using suitable sourcing methods or for selecting their applications. Then, you organize a first exchange with your candidates during a quick telephone interview. You thus assess the relevance of starting a recruitment process with the candidate. You then conduct face-to-face interviews with candidates who, in principle, match your needs, and select the best profiles. To help you with your analysis and select the best candidates, you can rely on evaluation tests. Personality test, situation test, competence test, reasoning test etc., the list is long to assess the skills and motivations of your candidates.
Finally, you negotiate and advise your clients and candidates in order to promote common ground. Your mission comes to an end after a successful trial period.
This rich and exciting recruitment mission is coupled with a commercial dimension if you work in a firm, as a consultant.
As a recruitment specialist, you work to retain and develop your customer portfolio. You set up effective prospecting through multiple and diversified approaches and negotiate your commercial contracts. You rely on an HR Marketing strategy to promote Inbound Recruiting within your ecosystem. An innovative, strategic and exciting facet of the job.
2. You like human relationships.
As you can see, if you need to stay in your bubble until noon before agreeing to be spoken to you, forget about recruiting!
Your daily life? Contact in all its forms! Publications on social networks, telephone exchanges, team meetings, video meetings, video appointments for a progress report with your client, face-to-face interviews with candidates, presence at trade fairs in your sector of activity, ambassador of the employer brand etc.
Your interpersonal skills are a major asset, even an essential condition for you to thrive as a recruitment consultant. You can of course try to retrain in this path without having known a job in contact with the public, but it seems risky without having real relational skills. At first experience, if you are a junior, your natural shyness will disappear during your multiple exchanges, sources of satisfaction and development.
So if you like human contact, you check the first box. And if you have a curious and empathetic nature, check the second one!
3. You have a natural sense of curiosity and empathy.
No, curiosity is not a bad thing, it is even one of the main qualities of any good recruiter! If you think that your mission is to match a candidate with a position, you still have to have the curiosity to want to know both.
Getting to know a candidate means taking a tour of the character. Take an interest in their background, experiences, skills, personality and aspirations. Your empathy will help you ask him the right questions to find out if he is the ideal candidate. Ideal in relation to the position to be filled, of course. To find out, you will therefore have to collect all the information, such as team configuration, management style, work environment, development prospects, corporate culture. And you can match the two (or not).
Finally, in your mission as a consultant, your natural curiosity will push you to explore an entire ecosystem. You will set out to conquer prospects and professionals in your sector, while monitoring your field of activity to keep the competition at bay and always stay one step ahead.
4. You have a marketing or commercial flair.
Work on your commercial fiber and increase your persuasiveness thanks to today's marketing techniques! In the 2023 recruiter's toolbox, storytelling and copywriting.
Storytelling is the art of telling a story that creates emotions, to engage the reader into action. This technique makes it possible, for example, to write attractive ads. The art of presenting a position in its best light can, in an ultra-competitive field, make all the difference.
Copywriting, or persuasive writing, is a sales technique that comes from marketing. It consists in publishing powerful content capable of convincing an identified target. The idea is to sell through the power of words.
Once you have your approach and marketing techniques in your pocket, all you have to do is perfect your arguments. In headhunting, it is thanks to the direct approach that you build up your candidate pool. A good negotiation is prepared in advance, and the job study phase can be used as a basis for developing your negotiation strategy.
If you do not have these skills, which are strongly linked to consulting, know that many training courses exist to boost your communication and develop your negotiation techniques.
5. You work with organization and perseverance.
It would be wrong to believe that the job of headhunter involves no difficulties. But if you have a sense of organization and are persistent, you have all the cards in hand to succeed.
In your daily life, you will have to deal with the vagaries of the job, you who will work with everyone's agendas: rescheduling appointments, delays, modifications, cancellations. You can count on all the virtual assistants on the market to optimize your organization. Jobboards, collaborative tools, various software, smartphones will be very valuable to you.
And if, despite all your efforts, some missions do not come to an end, know how to be patient and persevere. You are not immune to a ghosting, the disappearance of your best candidate, vanished without leaving an address. Or a readjustment of the need by your customer at the very end of the process. But your taste for challenge will allow you to finalize the most difficult recruitment missions!
6. You are ready to learn and grow.
But then, How to become a recruitment consultant ? Most recruitment consultants come from commercial training (business school, IAE, etc.) or in Human Resources Management, from Bac + 3 to Bac + 5. Others have studied psychology, social sciences, management or are opting for training offers. But as we have seen, soft skills are essential. So, if you have a sociable and curious nature, if you have a taste for challenge and communication skills, you could make an excellent recruitment consultant, get started!
Especially since the prospects are numerous. To deal with a shortage of talent in many sectors, recruitment agencies are acclaimed by many companies for their expertise and efficiency. By specializing in IT and Tech for example, you will potentially work for start-ups or innovative companies that have a strong societal impact, you will be able to work on the recruitment of very specialized experts, for example positions in cyber security, supply chain, etc.
As a senior consultant, you will also be able to broaden the range of possibilities for your clients by recruiting talent internationally. Finally, you will be able to work in other jobs in this environment: the recruitment of C-Levels, Executive Search, The RPO, human resources consulting and even The training to the recruitment of HR and TA teams in companies! Whatever your final choice is, you won't be disappointed!
So if you dream of a job in constant evolution, which challenges you and which fits your curious and sociable personality, join us !
Discover also our offers to get an overview of the positions you would have to manage!
Here is the job description of a recruitment consultant:
The recruitment consultant must manage a client portfolio made up of companies for which he carries out recruitment procedures. Its main task is therefore to find and select the best profiles, whether collaborators or managers, to occupy previously defined positions. The recruitment consultant works closely with his clients to define the ideal function and profile for the position to be filled.
He is then responsible for organizing all the recruitment phases in order to be able to propose the candidates who seem most suitable to him. In particular, he must write job advertisements and broadcast them in the media of his choice, with the agreement of the client. He can also prospect himself on social networks and CV libraries to directly contact professionals corresponding to the criteria.
After an in-depth study of the applications, the recruitment consultant makes an initial selection and sets up individual interviews to assess the suitability of each profile for the position. Following this pre-selection, he is responsible for proposing one or more candidate (s) to the company. He sometimes participates in the recruitment interview between the candidate and the client. He can also support the candidate in taking up a position to ensure their successful integration into the company.
In addition to recruitment missions, the recruitment consultant also carries out commercial missions with the prospecting of new customers and the loyalty of companies with which he already collaborates.
The missions of a recruitment consultant are quite varied. On a daily basis, its main activities are as follows:
- Identify the needs of the customer;
- Determine the ideal profile of the candidate according to the job description, missions, required skills, etc.;
- Search for candidates by publishing an offer or directly via professional social networks and other digital tools. This is the sourcing phase;
- Study applications and respond to candidates (positive or negative responses);
- Pre-select candidates; the profile is generally judged during an initial telephone interview;
- Select the best profiles and offer them to the client with reports on their selection;
- Support them in order to take up a position...
The advantages:
- The human factor plays a big role in this profession. The recruitment consultant must not only have good interpersonal skills, he must really enjoy human contact. It is at the service of both its customers and candidates.
- There is no routine for the recruitment consultant since he meets different people every day and works for different companies.
- The average salary for a recruitment consultant varies according to experience, but it is generally attractive.
The disadvantages:
- Depending on the company and the type of position, recruitment pressure can sometimes be high.
- Disappointments are possible when the selected candidate finally does not live up to the requirements for the position.
- The decisions of the recruitment consultant are sometimes difficult to make on a human level.
A recruitment consultant usually works in recruitment firms, human resources consulting firms, or temporary employment agencies. It is also entirely possible to exercise this function as a self-employed person or as a freelancer. Working conditions will of course vary from one work environment to another.
With regard to career development, after a few years, a recruitment consultant can evolve into the professions of HR development manager or consultant, recruitment manager, or even human resources director.