Hishem Azzouz and a guest argue that contract recruiters should focus on three fundamentals: concentrate on high-impact activities instead of spreading thin, use phone calls to build real relationships with clients and candidates, and cut social media distractions. Daily commitment to these basics builds stronger pipelines in a noisy market.
You were very dead set on like every single day I wanted to focus on doing the basics extremely well, and that's what I really focused on. How can people master the basics? And in your perspective, what are the basics for a successful contract recruiter that you keep top of mind?
Yeah, so like you said, right, it's with everybody trying to be different to everyone else out in the market, there's so much noise out there and it is so easy to get lost in the noise. And if you're trying to focus on 20 different things that can improve you as a recruiter or as a person, you're not really going to put, you know, 100% effort into all of those 20 things. For me, I went back to, right, what was I doing in lockdown? How did I build my desk to where it was? So the basics for me are always just picking up the phone and building a relationship over the phone, right? In a mad digital world at the moment where It's so much easier to send a text, an email, or a LinkedIn message. I've got rid of, like, socials because I just can't deal with the noise. And clients and candidates won't really look at LinkedIn because they're getting hounded by recruiters on there.
Okay.
So picking up the phone and just building relationships is like a basic skill set that I think that you need. Organization. I was not organized at all for about 2 years. Really? It's kind of chaotic. But I quite like being chaotic a little bit, right? For me, I always had like a main focus, but I would never really plan a day properly. I really started to do that in the last year, which is where I think again I made the stepping stone to get to my weekly GP. So I will plan my day not to the tee, but I will set 6 important tasks that I need to achieve the next day in order for me to achieve my goal. By the end of the week. So organisation, being on the phone, and just following through. Just deliver on what you promise to clients and candidates. Nobody likes being let down. If you let the client down or the candidate down, ultimately you're going to let yourself down, and that's where you're going to find yourself in a funk. If you've tried absolutely everything that you can to deliver on something that you've said that you're going to deliver to, then you can finish work knowing that you've given everything. Those three areas are so basic, and people glaze over them so much. ¡Gracias!
