What makes Great Recruitment Professionals Stand Out?

I meet a lot of recruitment professionals at all levels in my job. It’s a real pleasure (in the main).

I often get asked what are the common trait’s of great recruitment leaders (in house). My answer couldn’t be any simpler. Great leaders take control. Take ownership.

What Does Taking Control and Ownership Mean?

Leaders take ownership of their team and drive forward the processes that they and their team are employed to do.

I don’t mean doing everything themselves. I mean guiding and creating an environment that allows their team to also take control.

Leaders are not afraid of failure. They create an environment where mistakes can happen safely and lessons learned are shared as successes not failures.

Great recruitment pro’s take control of things in the here and now. They don’t put this shit off. Don’t accept that they are too busy to innovate. They do it. Recognising that regardless of how busy they think they are, doing this now means improving their working lives. In turn their teams will have less leg work in the future.

Recruitment leaders don’t accept that it’s the norm to bashed over the head with business change and requirements that were kept hush hush. They demand excellence from their teams and their peers. This means they are respected because they control and own their processes. Sometimes pushing back on the business and being the expert they are employed to be.

We don’t accept that reactive recruitment is the norm because the business isn’t ready to change. We owned the process to change. We on the ownership and drove it forward.

They don’t accept that if they can’t control 100% of what’s going to happen then they should revert back to doing nothing. Take steps forward no matter how small. They control the ‘controllable’s’. Which in turn means that if anything does happen out of left-field they are in a damn site better position to deal with it.

They don’t make excuses of why they couldn’t do something, or that the timing isn’t quite right. They made the timing right by taking control. They got off their asses and did something about it.

Maybe they got bored of it always being this way or maybe they just know there’s a better way. Either way they owned their role and took control.

It’s fantastic to see in house recruitment creating a ground swell of professionals that are disrupting the way our industry performs and is perceived. The only way you can be a part of that is taking control.

Yes there are other qualities of great leaders. Such as resilience, drive, perseverance, empathy etc. But my favourite is the ability to take control.

So don’t be afraid of failure. Move forward, one step at a time. Take control.