Having been in the recruitment industry for a number of years, we try to buck the trend of making a fast buck at whatever the cost. In offering our expected recruitment services, we are more interested in understanding what the company is looking for and what the candidate wants in their career and matching those two entities for everyone’s gain. We have noticed over the years that candidates tell us that we interview differently to a lot of other recruitment agencies, and they tell us that they feel we understand who they are and what they want rather than trying to fit them into a job we have on our books, so we can make a fast placement. Indeed, we are proud of our 97.7% hit rate of sending a CV to getting that candidate an interview.
Now that times are tougher and we are seeing a lot more redundancies, the advent of outplacement services is on the rise…again. What do you look for in outplacement services? For a client they want to ensure that the staff they are losing are looked after during this distressing transition and for the staff that are remaining, they can see that even though you may have lost your job, the company will do its best to help during a stressful time which is good for morale. For candidates, they are in shock, they may need assistance in coming to terms with what has happened, assistance in finding a new job and someone to talk to at the time. We believe in the yin and yang of recruitment.
During the good times, we make money from placing candidates in their jobs. In this current climate, we believe in offering our outplacement service for free. We believe in giving something back when we are in a partnership with a client. In the past, we worked with a client in financial services that we did a lot of recruitment for at all levels, but significant numbers of customer service, back office and support staff were most of the people we placed. When the company went through restructuring, many of the back office and support staff were being made redundant. These were people that we had placed with the company, so we knew them, these were people that had been interviewed by us, to understand the job that they wanted and now they were losing it. When we heard of what was happening, we arranged to go on to the client’s site and meet everyone who had been consulted for the redundancy process, regardless of whether we had placed them with the client or not. We were able to help these people with confidence issues, interview insights, help with writing or updating a CV and their LinkedIn profiles and we were there just to listen and be a sounding board. People’s reactions vary from acceptance, to sadness, fear and anger, we wanted to be able to support everyone with whatever they needed at a very emotional time.
The yin and yang of recruitment is all about making money from the recruitment service we offer during the good times when clients are looking for staff to grow their businesses but it’s also about supporting them and their staff in the bad times when redundancies are looming, and staff will lose their jobs. We need to ensure that when we advocate for partnerships with our clients and candidates that we are true partners by being there in the good times and the bad. Regardless of the levels of people you are making redundant or whether you have worked with us or not, we are here to help should you require assistance for your staff during these uncertain times.
