Any cons of doing a speculative interview for either the client or the person looking for the job?
I guess the cons side of things is that, from a recruiter’s perspective, we’re putting two parties together and there may not be something that comes out the other end of it, and then we’ve got to potentially deal with a disappointed candidate who hasn’t got an opportunity at the end of it.
And I don’t really see there are too many cons. It’s an opportunity for the client and candidates, it’s a two-way process to understand whether it’s going to be the right fit for them in terms of skill set, job, and culturally.
So if we’re not going to hire for twelve months, probably don’t bother.
Yeah.
If we think they’re going to need to hire in the next two to six, okay, I think that’s worth doing.
Yeah, absolutely. Because if we work backwards from people’s notice periods, it only gives you a twelve-week window to actually put that hiring process in place.
And generally, a recruitment process is going to take you four to six weeks unless it’s a senior hire, and it could take up to twelve if not longer—in most cases longer, I would say.
But yeah, I think in essence they are a good thing as long as it’s managed properly.
So we’ve talked about speculative meetings with clients and candidates. What advantage does that put candidates in if they’re open-minded about these sort of things?
They will gain market information no matter what happens. Market information is always useful. They get to meet someone, develop the start of a relationship.
Which is good.
Equally, if the project or whatever it is—the investment—suddenly kicks in and there is a vacancy, then they’re ahead of the curve. They’ve already done one interview stage.
Now whether it’s framed as a coffee meeting or not, it’s a conversation which effectively translates into an interview when you’re talking about employment.
And how often do you think that they actually transition from coffee meeting to formal interview to placement?
I can’t give you a proper stat on that.
I’d like you to.
What I can say is a lot of the time with senior hires, roles get created around people.
Yeah.
So I think that it’s a really good way to approach a job hunt, if you can find companies that have a similar outlook on life, similar values, usually a similar sector. There have to be synergies to make it worthwhile making that approach.
Or they might be about to do something that you are good at and you can feed into that scheme. They’re taking on a mixed-use scheme, you’ve done mixed-use, you’ve looked at their structures, so they don’t have a delivery person. You are a delivery person.
This is what we do as recruiters when we’re creating roles—it’s not just random. We will see if we can identify a need that perhaps the client didn’t know about yet, and then set up a speculative meeting based on that potential need.
So yeah, I think there are quite a few advantages to it, really.
To even get a speculative meeting, though—albeit a coffee meeting or informal meeting, whatever it is—a candidate’s got to have a good CV. They’ve got to have something on the CV that a client is going to want to see.
So how should candidates position information on the CV? What do people and recruiters want to look at and see, and what do clients want to see?
CVs need to be documents where you can access the information very quickly.
I know this is close to your heart, Steve.
That’s why I’m asking you this question.
I see a lot of CVs.
This is true.
I do often give out coaching on CVs. And this isn’t just to satisfy my own preferences, this is to increase people’s chances of having their CV properly read. And indeed achieving an interview.
Yeah.
So it’s for a good cause, ultimately.
I’ll talk you through what I think the mindset is when people open emails. We are absolutely showered with information every single day, so no matter what it is coming at us, we want to know if it’s something we want to read properly, and we want to know that fast. CVs are no different.
So to have a profile is, I think, pretty critical.
And what does that need to look like? One, two paragraphs?
Definitely not two. Always one.
Okay.
I’d say about five sentences.
And for me, my mindset is: what disciplines does this person work in? What level of seniority are they at? What kind of schemes have they worked on? Roughly speaking, what is it they do?
And then, job titles are job titles, right? They can mean different things in different places.
Yeah.
I think in real estate you probably need to read between the lines sometimes on job descriptions because they do differ.
From a CV perspective, I think after you’ve set the scene—you’re a director that’s dealt with schemes in London up to £350 million.
Yeah.
And you operate on an end-to-end basis cradle-to-grave.
If I’ve read that and I’m looking for a development director, great, I’ll read on.
I’d then like to know a little bit more. Have they done appraisals?
So if you’ve got a skill set section, just some bullet points—no more than ten. Otherwise it’s like a shopping list.
Put that down. Then we know you’ve dealt with legals, we know you’ve done appraisals, we know that actually you’ve dealt with procurement.
If it’s not spelt out, clients will jump to a negative conclusion: if it’s not there, you haven’t done it.
Okay.
And then outside of that, you’re going down to the standard sections, right? You’re going down to employment.
Strangely, lots of people are doing project-led CVs where they just list the projects and the dates.
A client needs to know how long you’ve been somewhere.
Yeah.
And what progression you’ve seen. It’s really hard to get that out of a project list.
We want the projects, just put them in the employment section.
Would you suggest that people also put the stages at which they’ve taken on that project and then they’ve exited that project as well?
It’s a really good point, absolutely. Just putting a project there is a statement of a project description; it doesn’t say what your specific contribution was.
What your role was.
Okay.
And then when people are applying for jobs, would you suggest that they have a master CV and tailor their CV to pick out the pertinent points for a job description, or do they just have one generic CV?
I think your point is valid.
Yeah, there should be a master document. If you have to change it…
You’re probably not right for the job, to be honest with you.
However, you might reorder things. If you’ve done, say, 30% resi—or actually, a third resi, a third office, a third retail—and this company does retail, you might put your retail projects first, show us an example.
But honestly, if you have to change your CV that much, you’re probably not going to be selected.
So Bert, talk to me about timelines of recruitment processes, how they differ, and whether or not recruitment consultancies can influence those timelines positively.
Right. Okay, so I’ll answer the last comment first.
Yes. Recruiters can be a positive influence on running a really tight schedule for recruitment processes.
It needs to be set out from the outset with your client, and all processes will differ.
And it is generally down to a couple of things: it’ll be candidate availability in the marketplace, it will be client availability and commitment to getting interviews booked in, and also how many stages of the interview process are set in stone.
If that changes, then obviously the timelines change.
So for a more junior hire, it generally is a two-stage process, so that can be anything up to maybe four weeks, maybe a little bit longer, depending upon, again, availability for interview.
That’s the key thing here: availability for interview.
Mid-management, I would say four to six weeks.
And then senior hires, I’d like to say twelve weeks.
However, if there are maybe three to five stages—because you might want to add in, after the formal stages, more meet-and-greet-type stages—I would say it takes considerably longer.
Having done three senior hires at the back end of last year, they all differed. They really did, in terms of timelines.
And then you’ve also got to factor in people’s notice periods.
So junior candidates can be one to three months.
And up to senior surveyor, senior development manager, is generally three months.
Anything at director level tends to be three to six months.
So you’ve got to factor that in.
When we speak to our clients, when we first start looking at the recruitment process, we need to work backwards from the start date. When they want somebody to start on site.
Then we’ve got to work backwards as to when we need to start the process, factoring in the worst-case scenario of a notice period.
So in difficult markets, I think it’s quite tempting for clients to advertise themselves, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with doing that.
It would be a lower cost on face value than using a recruiter.
Talk us through what that might mean.
I think the most important thing is that you’ve got to look at time and how valuable a client’s time is.
If they’re stretched and they’ve got a lean team, their time is really valuable, and they need to be productive in the hours that they’ve got during the daytime.
And perhaps looking at CVs and qualifying people is not the best use of their time if they’ve got deadlines that they’ve got to hit.
I’ve worked with a client recently—it’s a long-standing client of mine, know them really well—and they’d got a couple of roles that they wanted to fill, so they wanted to do one themselves and use me for the other one.
So we did the recruitment piece for that, and at the end of it, we hired the role through me.
They hired somebody through themselves, and the feedback at the end of it was that they would never do that again because they got so many responses, it took such a long time to go back through all the CVs, to review them, to qualify them, but also then to get back to people.
The ones that they wanted to reject out of the process.
It took such a long time to do that, that then they got a backlog of work that they actually had to get on with as well, because recruitment obviously isn’t their day job.
So it is interesting that a client that I’ve worked with for years and years needed to try and save some money—and it’s the right thing to do if you’re looking at cost savings and you’ve got tight budgets, et cetera—but they now value their internal team’s time more and they want them to do their day job, and they would rather use me going forward for pieces of recruitment.
So yeah.
Finger in the air, how many hires do you think you make, percentage-wise, headhunted versus advertised response?
Good question.
Is that in a buoyant market or now?
Now.
I would say it’s probably 50/50, if I’m brutally honest.
If I’ve got a really specific role that’s got quite a unique skill set or it’s a unique project, there might be fewer people available in the market that would be able to do that, so I might naturally feel as though headhunting would be the right way forward for that because I can be really specific about the projects that I look at, the client base that I would look at, and I can control the narrative on that in terms of who I speak to, who I reach out to.
And then on the advertising side, quite often clients are open to doing a little bit of PR, a bit of a PR exercise that they’re busy, they’re recruiting, they want to do some advertising, so I’d say it might be a 50/50 mix.
And there are some really good candidates in the market that are coming through from adverts and people that we’ve not spoken to—and we’ve got over a million people on our database.
To get a new person that we’ve never spoken to before, that’s a development manager working in London, is quite a unique thing.
So yeah, we’ve unearthed some really good candidates through advertising over the last, I would say, six to twelve months as well.
What kind of numbers do you think you get in terms of the candidate response that is an accurate fit—so the candidates that have applied are a good fit for the job versus those that have applied that are not a good fit for the job?
Less than ten per cent, I would say.
That’s striking and I’d agree.
What do you think candidates can do in terms of their job search process?
I think the key thing is to build a good relationship with a recruiter if it is that you want to use a third party to assist you with getting a new role.
But also you’ve got to be realistic about the roles that you go for.
You’ve got to realise that the market is competitive, and the closer match you are to a job description or an advert, the more likely you are to get a positive outcome from that and a response—so maybe a callback or a call from a recruitment agency or a client.
I think the problem that we’ve got at the moment is there are a lot of people looking for work and they’re sending CVs into every single job that is advertised, and I see the same names coming up, and I think you probably do as well.
I absolutely understand that people are looking for roles and the market has been in quite a tricky place for a while.
However, we still need to hit the criteria that the client’s asked for, so we are always going to reach out and speak to people that are a close match.
So I would say be perhaps more selective with the roles that you apply to.
And if there are things that you are interested in and your recruiter is advertising those, just drop a call in or just drop a quick email in to say, “I’m still here. Do you think that I’d be suitable for that role?”
If your recruiter comes back and says “No”, then you’ve just got to accept that there are other people that are more aligned to the role than you probably are, and then go again next time.
Yeah.
It’s hard for people and I think if you need a job, you need a job.
And it’s tempting, of course, in this technological age that we live in to just scattergun and say, “Right, well, something’s going to come back from that.”
But I’d question that, because it slows down the processes for other people and it doesn’t actually get you that job.
I get IT Managers applying for construction roles.
Yeah.
Why?
Well, either they’re automating the application process or they haven’t read the job description.
Yeah.
I think for the sake of everybody, including the candidate, you’re going to get a much better turnaround if you’ve read the job, if you’re a good fit, if you’ve got questions about it, ask the questions, get in touch, have a conversation.
You might pick up some useful market information in any case.
And then if it still feels like a good fit, go for it.
I think a more accurate response is probably what it’s called for.
Yeah.
I agree.
And look, we may differ to some other consultancies around, by which I mean we read all of the applications that come through to all of our adverts.
People have taken the time to apply and we will always read through the applications that come through, and it takes us quite a long time.
So for us, it would be really helpful if people apply to the roles that they’re most aligned to.
Do you think that clients need to be doing anything differently at all in this market when it comes to hiring?
I don’t, to be honest with you.
The clients would love to hire. It means that they’ve got business, it means that they can carve a profit, it means the appraisals are stacking up.
But the only thing I would say is that we’ve got to remember there are people at the end of these CVs—recruiters, employers, everybody needs to remember that.
So if you have engaged in a process, whether that’s direct or through a recruiter, just get back to people.
It’s a common courtesy.
It means that they’re looked after and your brand is held in a good light for when times improve again and you may want to hire that person.
Sure.
So it’s candidate experience that we’ve got to bear in mind.
Yeah.
That’s the only thing.
Okay.
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