Whatever the economic conditions, effective recruitment of the best talent is defined by the delivery of added value to the hiring organisation. In these times, the future of many businesses is dependent on having the right people in place, with the right skills and experience. As recession hits, talented people become increasingly ‘risk averse’, often preferring to stay put rather than risk moving to a new employer, in turn causing organisations already challenged by tightening budgetary constraints to face a shrinking talent pool. This is the cue for recruiters to practise what so many preach but often fail to deliver: adherence to best practice.

Best practice should not be led or defined by changes in the market. During buoyant economic conditions, recruiters often concentrate on satisfying the basic needs of clients, entering into transactional relationships and adopting a volume-led approach to revenue generation. Inevitably, any success will disguise the need to develop value-added strategic partnerships — which will be vital if recruiters are to remain buoyant in a tough economy.

As the market tightens, transactional relationships become difficult to sustain. Clients who were once generous with resourcing requirements begin to demand enhanced value from their depressed hiring activities. They increasingly rely on a handful of recruitment partners and opt to
work with those who invested time early in the relationship to truly understand the business drivers that underpin their staffing needs. The return on investment for the recruiter is realised as they become recognised as an indispensable component of the client’s value chain.

While recruiters pay a lot of lip service to the importance of developing strategic partnerships, there is often a fundamental lack of understanding of what this means in practice and how to achieve it. The effort required to achieve a true strategic alliance with a client is significant, and more often than not, even the best recruiters can be found lacking.

Here are some key principles that will help achieve a successful strategic alliance:

• Engage a client’s entire organisation — develop leads in all elements of the value creation chain and understand the business drivers that underpin hiring decisions
• Develop an understanding of your customer’s market; monitor the market dynamics that can have an impact on their business and adapt your staffing proposition accordingly
• Establish a way to sell to the client that is consistent with their own values and approach to doing business, always acting with integrity to earn their trust
• Enhance your competitive advantage by ensuring that recruitment consultants know how to create value for their clients in the way they place staff, as well as just the ability to sell — for example, quickly understanding the culture of the client’s company and the type of person who will best ‘fit’ with their teams
• Work with your client to develop and refine a service offering which consistently exceeds expectations. This proves that service not onlymatters — it is paramount
• Equip sales leaders with the ability to engage with clients at a senior level, offering flexible solutions that support, challenge and advance the customer’s central business strategies
• Understand and demonstrate to customers how your proposition can positively affect them by knowing how they measure success and creating a compelling case for your solution that fits with their metrics.

The goal of a strategic partnership is to become a trusted partner, becoming more closely involved with the client organisation’s own decisionmaking process, which in turn will lead to creating opportunities for the recruiter. As market conditions deteriorate, organisations will
experience further difficulty managing their talent pipeline effectively unless recruiters are able to offer a tangible, strategic service offering, closely aligned to clients’ needs.

If we are to ride out the storm of the recession, the onus is on us as recruiters to work with our clients as real business partners, becoming an indispensable part of their talent management process.

There has never been a more important time to add value and promote best practice throughout the recruitment cycle. By adopting such principles, recruiters stand a much better chance of engaging with hiring organisations, leading to the creation of sustainable strategic partnerships that will be valued as much when the market recovers as they are now.

Simon Page
is director of permanent recruitment
at business and IT solutions firm,
Parity