Coaching the Recruitment Industry

Fate is a strange thing. Despite my concentration on helping managers achieve results by learning to coach, the world of recruitment has started to invade my business life.

Firstly, I've entered into partnership with a fellow consultant and we're hard at work producing some distance learning on helping candidates cope with assessment centres and competency based interviews.

Secondly, my next door neighbour and several other people I know are in the job market and have climbed aboard the carousel of CVs, Recruitment Agencies and Interviews.

Thirdly, I have a vacancy to fill within my own business and find myself in conversation with agencies and government backed training organisations. And finally I was challenged to write this article by an 'insider' in the recruitment industry who was interested in how I see the coaching approach making a difference with some of the problems the industry faces.

I began – as I guess we all do these days – with good old Google and was soon overwhelmed by forum after forum of disgruntled candidates venting their spleens and blaming all and sundry (except themselves, of course) for their failure to secure the job they wanted. But I followed that by getting some feedback from recruiters themselves about the nature of people development in the industry and how they might connect with some of the candidate's frustrations.

So, I'll set out here the problems candidates cite and how coaching could help followed by the problems recruiters themselves face and how coaching could help with these too. My aim is not to give anybody a good kicking but to offer an objective and simple diagnosis and prescription from somebody taking very much an outsider's view.

Problems candidates experience

Using their own language and terminology I hasten to add.

How coaching can help

There are a few possible explanations for the problems stated above:

• The candidate are being unfair or there perceptions are inaccurate
• The recruitment industry is staff by cretins of mind-numbing ineptitude
• The recruitment industry is working under too much pressure

The first explanation is worth thinking about; the second is plainly nonsense and the third something that coaching may be able to ease.

Let's say that our work performance lies at the point at which our challenges and resources meet. It follows that:

Too little challenge, too many resources = boredom

Too much challenge, not enough resources = stress

Coaching can't do much about the level of challenge as this is all to do with market forces, economic conditions, demographics and so on. Having said that a coaching conversation that enables the recruiter to come to terms with what they can and can't control could be very helpful.

But really coaching is about increasing the resources we have to meet the challenges we face. Some of these resources may be external to do with securing budget, staffing, equipment or time, and coaching – with its emphasis on taking action - may be a great way of developing an effective plan to get the resources we need.

Other resources will be internal, and this is where coaching can have its greatest impact. It can be so useful for any of us to explore our access to humour, experience, focus, choice, trust and a whole host of other qualities that given an opportunity to develop, are likely to have a profound effect the quality of the recruiters working life and ultimately on the service candidates experience.

Problems recruiters experience

How coaching can help

The first two problems can be attributed to a work environment that places the individual as more important than the team or the business. This is probably not deliberate and may well be unconscious but can be seen in the reward systems and career development policies. Whilst not offering a quick fix, coaching is a process that invites people to consider what psychologists call ego boundaries. In simple terms this is about who is 'them' and who is 'us'? If I hold on to a bit of industry knowledge because it means I get to place a candidate instead of my colleague across the office, who really wins in the long term? If I'm a team leader and I don't induct my new staff member properly because 'that's just the nature of the job', how much have I contributed to overall business development?

Competition is not a bad thing per se, but who is the real competition and what game are we playing? It is naive to think that competition is the universal motivator we've been led to believe.

The second two problems can be explained by poor goal or target setting. Most coaching models attach huge importance to goal setting and the team and individual level and rightly so. When we work towards a clear, meaningful goal we are likely to muster our resources with more focus. We will make better choices about how we spend our time and can more easily eliminate tasks and activity that are not in keeping with our goals.

Lack of good goal setting is also a common explanation for poor performance. In a previous life I was involved in conducting disciplinary interviews and all too often the root problem was the organisation and the individual having opposing ideas about priorities, standards and measures of success. A quick, focused coaching conversation can save huge amounts of time, money and stress further down the line.

Coaching is not a panacea and will not by itself solve all the problems of the recruitment or any other industry. What coaching does offer any manager of people though is an ability to get results through others and to get them focused against a background of competition and stress. They'll gain, the candidates will gain and client companies will gain too. What's stopping you?