360° Recruitment Explained: The Process and the Benefits of 360° Recruitment

A recruitment consultant’s job is complex, even more so when they’re a 360° recruitment consultant. It involves many different tasks to make up the 360° recruitment process, also known as the recruitment lifecycle or the end-to-end recruitment process. Let’s look at what it means for you, as an employer or an employee, and for the recruitment consultants.

The 360° Recruitment Process Explained

Before explaining what 360° recruitment is, it helps to first try and visualise the process as a journey. The end-to-end recruitment process covers all the following steps:

Identifying Opportunities

Recruiters use their knowledge and expertise to identify new opportunities within their sector of the marketplace. Being first to seize the opportunity is key to staying ahead of their competition.

Sales

There are so many recruitment agencies operating in the UK that it takes a savvy salesman to win new deals. Of course, if the client understands their sector of the market and the potential value a recruitment agency can offer. Having someone on the team who can deliver that message effectively can prove invaluable.

Relationship Building and Information Gathering

Whenever a recruiter wins a new client, they must take time to understand all the intricacies of the business. It is not enough for a recruiter to merely understand the details of the role they are working on. To present a client with the most suitable candidates, recruiters must understand their client’s goals and understand their company culture.

Marketing

A major reason small businesses employ recruitment consultants is that they struggle to compete against larger corporations. This is because big companies have massive marketing budgets, which enables them to create strong employer branding. Employing a reputable recruitment agency enables small businesses to piggyback off the recruitment company’s reputation. This makes it easier to reach the talented professionals their business needs to grow without a massive marketing budget and avoid the employer branding mistakes that drive candidates away.

Sourcing Candidates

These days, it is not enough to advertise a roll, sit back, and wait for CVs. Nor is it enough for a consultant to rely on the marketing activity the recruitment company do for their business. Recruitment consultants must also do a certain amount of marketing to promote themselves. To find the best candidates, recruiters need to be highly active on social media channels, especially on LinkedIn.

Screening and Shortlisting

Once a potential candidate is identified, a recruitment consultant must establish rapport with them. It is essential that candidates feel comfortable enough to discuss personal details about their dreams and aspirations for the future. This detailed knowledge is what enables recruiters to match candidates with jobs that provide longevity. 

Interview Co-ordination

It is not simply enough to book an interview appointment for a candidate and forget about them. Once interviews are in place, recruiters must assist their candidates with interview preparation. This includes making sure they know where they are going, what time, who they are meeting and helping them overcome any obstacles they might encounter.

Administration

Candidates trust recruitment consultants with a vast quantity of highly confidential information. It takes a highly organised administrator to manage these details in a way that is easy for recruiters to access while complying with GDPR law.

Candidate Management to Onboarding

Even once a candidate receives a job offer, it can take three months to start their new role. During this time, it is normal for them to feel a sense of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, until candidates are fully settled in their new job, it is imperative that recruiters maintain relationships with them. This continues throughout the onboarding process until they feel settled as a new employee.

Account Management Review

A recruiter’s job rarely ends once a candidate is placed in a role. Providing the recruiter does a good job, it is likely the client will give them more vacancies to work on. Even if there are no more vacancies at that moment in time, more may become available in future. Therefore recruiters will often maintain relationships with clients long after the initial brief is satisfied.

360° Recruitment Explained

Recruiters never work on just one role at a time. They may have to fill many vacancies with different clients at the same time. That’s how the simple end to end process becomes more like a continuous loop.

To describe what a day in the life of a recruiter looks like, we often liken it to plate spinning. Recruiters who are good at their jobs keep all their plates spinning and never let any of them drop. However, as you can see from the above, the full 360° recruitment lifecycle is a lot of plates to spin! That’s why it is becoming more common for recruiters to focus on 180° of the recruitment lifecycle.

180° Recruitment, but Which Side?

Recruitment professionals who only work on a 180° segment can go one of two ways. Some recruiters prefer to work on the candidate management side, which is commonly referred to as Recruitment Resourcing. Alternatively, they can focus on the client-side in more of a Business Development or Account Management capacity. There are also recruitment specialists who only work in a small segment of the process, such as Administration or Marketing.

Delivering a Full 360° Service

There are situations where a recruitment agency may not need to cover the full 360° recruitment lifecycle. For example, there are sectors of the recruitment market which don’t require as much account management. Agencies also choose to situate their offices in high street locations so they don’t need to do as much marketing.

Within our team, we employ recruitment professionals whose strengths lie in different segments of the recruitment process. This means that between us we are able to deliver a full 360° recruitment service to our clients.

We hope that after reading this article you have a better understanding of what 360° recruitment is and how that benefits our clients and candidates. If you found it useful, please feel free to share it on social media where others can benefit from it too.