Building Habits That Set You Up for Long-Term Recruitment Success

Success in recruitment isn’t luck, it’s the result of the habits you build early.

The daily actions you take now will shape your future billings.

Intro: Why habits matter more than motivation.

The word habit has a negative connotation.

But we all have habits, good and bad. Whether it’s our morning routine, how we eat our lunch, or even leaving dirty crockery on the kitchen side and not putting them in the dishwasher (you know who you are?). Habits make up a large part of our day.

Yet when it comes to recruiting, we seem to only create bad habits.

Building good habits is something that I talk to all of my students about. This is because recruiting is all about doing the right activities consistently over time. The definition of a habit is: a usual way of behaving, something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way.

So you can see how the 2 align.

Creating good habits will make your life as a recruiter much easier, and we could all do with that.

Recruitment habits don’t have to just be a daily thing.

In this blog I am going to break down some of the different habits that recruiters learn in the Recruitment Academy.

Daily habits

I did say that habits don’t have to be daily, but some do. Its actually really important to create these daily habits as they are the ones that can de-rail your whole month.

Some of the most simple habits are the most impactful. These daily habits are the ones that if done will compound and become a huge part of your day to day life, and a huge reason for your success.

·        Day planning

·        Task management

·        Logging call notes

·        Admin time

Becoming habitual about these things will ensure that you get everything done.

We all know that as a recruiter, there aren’t enough hours in the day, but most of that is because we aren’t using the hours we do have effectively. We waste time jumping from task to task and never really prioritising. We put of the things we don’t want to do, and then we end up having a mad dash at the end of the day to get things done.

Making sure you are creating habits around booking in admin time to do any CV formatting, clearing your inbox and creating content allows you avoid the mad scramble at the end of the day to get things done.

As for logging calls, you need to create a habit of sorting you call notes before starting the next call. I have worked with recruiters who save writing up call notes until the end of the day, only to not remember fully what happened in the call.

Weekly habits 

Earlier I mentioned that not all habits are daily, so let’s talk about some of the weekly ones.

·        Pipeline reviews

·        Client check-ins

·        Candidate updates

The weekly habits aren’t so focused on creating more business, rather than solidifying and building the business that you already have.

There are many plates to spin in recruitment, and you have (hopefully) lots of candidates at different points of the process to look after. You also need to keep the clients of these processes updated on the multiple processes that they have with you.

It can be easy to loose track of them all. This will end up in dropouts, disgruntled candidates and lapsed clients. It is important to schedule a time to review all of them. Make sure everything is up to date and that you are in moving the process along.

Having a specific day or time to contact all of your current and lapsed clients will help make sure that you are strengthening your relationship with them. It gives you the opportunity to update the client, and get any updates that you need.

Doing the same with all of the candidates that you have in process will help you to keep them warm and reduce your drop outs. Even if the candidate is unsuccessful, you will have shown them that you are the recruiter to go to and they will trust you and use you again.

These are activities that will strengthen your network, and your network is your net worth.

Learning habits 

These habits are crucial to you becoming a top biller.

Most recruiters don’t make time for their own development, yet they are struggling to get the results that they strive for.

Creating habits that help you reflect and develop are vital if you want to become a top biller.

·        Listening to calls

·        Reading about the market

·        Reading

·        Training courses

Listening to calls is the best way to improve your recruiting ability, after all, we are only as good as our phone calls. The amount of recruiters who tell me that they don’t need to worry about their calls, because they know they are good is crazy. Every single one of them quickly realised that they needed drastic improvement. We started to add call listening into their  schedule and it has fast tracked their success.

Understanding the market is an important part of the job. Most recruiters sign up to newsletters and magazines, but they rarely do anything with them. Creating a habit around this will help you understand when and where to focus your activity.

Training courses are a great way to learn new skills and hone the ones you already have. They help you to stay ahead of the game and succeed in every market.

These are just a few of the habits that you can develop.

So rather than think of habits as a negative, use them to help you level up.

Habits are your future, build them deliberately.