Recruitment FAQs: The ins and outs for Candidates

Whether you’re just curious about recruitment or looking to expand your knowledge of the recruitment industry, we understand that you may not know all the answers. So, we have put together a series of answers to our most frequently asked questions to help make the recruitment process easier for anyone who’s looking to work within recruitment or working with a recruitment agency. So, let’s start with some of the essentials:

What does a Recruitment Consultant do?

A Recruitment Consultant helps businesses recruit talent and simplify the hiring process for both employers and candidates. This includes sourcing the best candidates for companies, presenting roles and highlighting the best career opportunities, shortlisting top candidates, and arranging interviews.

What is the difference between the recruitment process and the selection process?

Recruitment and selection are two different stages of the employment process.

The recruitment part of the process involves sourcing candidates and suggesting certain job roles based on candidates' skills, qualifications, and other qualities.

The selection part of the employment process revolves around screening and reviewing candidates so that the employer or recruitment consultant can select the best person for the job.

Overall, the recruitment and selection process involves the entire employment process from start to finish.

What is a 360 Recruitment Consultant?

A 360 Recruitment Consultant manages the whole recruitment process cycle from start to finish. This includes job description writing and other preparations, sourcing suitable candidates, sending CVs of possible candidates, conducting phone interviews, selecting the most appropriate applicants, and then also providing feedback, hiring, and onboarding candidates for each job.

What qualifications do you need to be a recruitment consultant?

There are no formal qualifications required to secure a Recruitment Consultant role, however, most companies will expect you to be educated to at least GCSE and A-Level or equivalent and have excellent literacy and numeracy skills.

Rather than specific or formal qualifications, recruitment companies, including here at LHi, will be looking for people who are ambitious and driven and can demonstrate that they have the work ethic to obtain the skills to be successful in recruitment.   

What are some of the top skills that successful recruitment consultants have?

1. Resilience:

One of the top skills for recruitment is resilience. When you are trying to match your clients’ requirements to the individual needs of your candidates, you won’t always get it right the first time and you’ll need to show resilience to keep searching for that right match.  This is where you will need to be resilient and keep on searching!

2. Communication:

Recruiters spend large portions of the day on the phone speaking to candidates and clients, building relationships to influence outcomes, offering overviews of a market and explaining skillsets.

3. Teamwork

In recruitment, having a supportive team environment is a necessity. They act as mentors and the people that will help a recruiter grow and develop.

4. Adaptability

As a recruiter, a large chunk of time is talking and building relationships with possible candidates. Being able to quickly switch from one mindset to another is a must for every recruiter as every situation and candidate is different.

5. Time management

It’s all about using time wisely. In recruitment, there are plenty of tasks to juggle throughout the day. This could be from going for meetings, sending CVs out, or doing interview preparation and of course, the general research on the market, and these tasks must be done simultaneously. At first, you may think this is impossible, but practice makes perfect! Over time, a recruiter learns how to plan days, weeks, and even months better.

What recruiting metrics do recruiters tend to track in a workplace?

There are many metrics that recruiters tend to track, and this can vary from agency to agency. Overall, some of the most tracked metrics in the industry are:

• Quality of hire is the percentage of candidates submitted by recruiters who are accepted for employment, plus the percentage of those that do not leave, divided by two.
• Cost per hire is the average amount of money you spent on making a hire.
• Time to fill is the amount of time you need to fill a position.
• Source of hire shows what percentage of your overall hires entered your pipeline from each recruiting channel or source.
• Offer acceptance rate shows what percentage of candidates accepted your job offer. This metric indicates how attractive and competitive your job offers are.

As a graduate, what are some of the advantages of using a recruitment agency?

• A problem shared is a problem halved, some would say, so if you’re struggling to find a job, speaking to a Recruitment Consultant can help to encourage and motivate you; we know the job hunt can seem like a long road!
• As well as recruiters providing a support network, they can also help a lot with CV writing and career advice, and therefore help you through the whole experience and give valuable insight which you can take with you for your future career.
• If you are unsuccessful in an interview, recruiters will provide feedback. This will help you understand why you were unsuccessful and what you can do to improve in future interviews.

As a graduate, why would a recruitment job appeal to you?

• There is plenty of progression opportunities. At LHi Group, we have a transparent and fast career progression: our team has a 100% promotion success rate in the first year as a consultant.
• Recruiters can be well remunerated through various incentives, commissions, loyalty bonuses, and much more.
• As a recruiter, you have the chance to learn a variety of transferable skills, from communication to organisation. Being a recruitment consultant also means no two days are the same as it is a very varied role that allows you to develop multiple skill sets.

Get in touch.

We hope we've answered your questions to help you understand more about recruitment. If you think you would be a good fit for the recruitment industry and want to be part of our LHi family, reach out to our People Team:

UK & Europe People Team at recruitment@wearelhi.com
US People Team at recruitmentUSA@wearelhi.com 

We love sharing bits about our industry with you, look out for our next blog in the recruitment series.