There’s more to being a recruiter than many realise, sure if you’re good at selling it helps and will probably see you do really well in the first 5 minutes of your career, but unfortunately a lot of people who are good at sales tend to live in the now not the future, and this is a vital difference as to what makes a successful recruiter especially within FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods).
Here’s a few of our top traits, you should develop if you want to become a successful FMCG recruiter.
- Relationship Focused
- Driven
- Actually Interested In Your Niche
- Long-term Focus Not Short Term
- Know Your Market
- Strong Negotiator
Relationship Focused
This is arguably the single most important trait in becoming a successful recruiter, the ability to build long-lasting relationships.
Trust, reputation, integrity and credibility are the four pillars of what makes anybody successful in any professional situation, and these give someone the ability to build strong relationships, not just with your clients, but also your peers and candidates. If you are consistently able to demonstrate these qualities, you will build relationships that can span your entire career and will undoubtedly give you a long and successful career that is also very lucrative.
Developing good relationships will ultimately lead to you being able to self-generate exclusive professional relationships which in turn will make your life a whole lot easier as you will do less cold-calling for new business, generate more referrals within your niche, and gain long-term repeat business.
Driven
A strong trait no matter what industry you work in, however in recruitment being driven and resilient is a huge bonus that will set you apart from the rest. Too many recruiters are still stuck in a short-term sales mindset of just focusing on monthly targets, when they hit a rough patch (and everybody does) this is when this trait sets the best from the rest.
Actually Interested In Your Niche
It really helps to be interested in your sector, being a recruiter is not the easiest job in the world for sure, but if you are interested in what you do, it most definitely can be very rewarding and not just in the monetary sense.
Luckily for us we work in one of the most innovative, interesting and exciting industries there is, FMCG. So for us it’s pretty easy to come into work excited about what opportunities might arise.
Long-term Focus Not Short Term
We speak about this all the time, so it feels a little repetitive, but planning ahead and not just working month-by-month is always going to make you a world class recruiter.
A great way to start doing this, is to create a sales pipeline, and focus on filling it with future business, work with clients to determine their long term goals and how you can help them reach those goals through a talent acquisition strategy, this way you help clients reach their goals, give them confidence that you have their long-term interests at heart, and in return you secure a long-term client that will bring you more than just the one placement.
Adopts Modern Approaches
Staying on trend, using technology, social media and personal branding are all things a successful recruiter will utilise to stay on top.
With the speed in which the world is moving, especially digitally, not making the most of new, modern approaches will be a certain death for a recruiter as others begin to gain a competitive advantage over you.
Personal branding via social media will be one of the biggest advantages for recruiters in 2022, as a recruiter, storytelling to clients and candidates why you are the best person for the job is probably one of your strongest traits, after all that is what sales is all about, storytelling. Now imagine you could tell that story to all of your audience at the same time, that is the power of personal branding via social media.
Strong Negotiator
Negotiation is a huge part of what it takes to be a successful recruiter, not just in terms of negotiating with candidates on job specifications like salary and benefits, but also with clients on what they should offer candidates and also how much you want as part of the deal.
The art of negotiation is prevalent in a huge amount of professional and personal life situations, so if you feel that you are a weak negotiator, now would be the time to brush up on those skills.
