Tick Tock
A recruiter’s day is spent reading through hundreds of e-mails, assessing a variety of candidates, and creating amicable relationships with numerous clients. The recruitment process is an endless cycle of tedious tasks which may carry over into the next day once office productivity decisions are overlooked.
"Talent acquisition is an onslaught of a thousand seemingly important things competing for your attention," (De Pape, 2017). True enough, especially in an executive search kind of setup, you can be talking to a client over the phone, while your fingers keep typing in the keywords you acquired from the conversation that you had with a potential candidate earlier.
Despite the hectic schedule recruiters are always dealt with, some people still manage to squeeze in watching hilarious videos online, and sneak in some snacking from time to time. While others are successful at getting all work done ahead of time, some fall behind and even miss deadlines. This, in turn, leads to staying late at work – a contributing factor to job burnout.
Job burnout phenomenon is the last thing you would want to associate yourself with. Thus, you avoid it like the plague by properly practicing Time Management. By spending the appropriate amount of time in the appropriate place, you will be able to get all work done in no time.
1. PLAN YOUR DAY
- "Time management doesn't need to be complex or high maintenance. Instead, practices should be simple and complement how your mind operates," (Maurer, 2017). Start your day by creating a To-do list. This is to avoid working on unnecessary tasks that may hamper daily productivity. Select search assignments correctly, and you will save half the time you would have spent had you chosen pointless activities to work on.
- Aside from the interviews done initially, a candidate who is recruited by an executive search professional has to undergo another set of interviews with the hiring manager of the company. Thus, as much as possible, you minimize the recruitment process from your end, so as to avoid making the candidate feel that they are “going through a lot”.
- Keep the interviews short, but meaningful at the same time. Set up candidate phone interviews more often, and improve the selection of face-to-face interviews with candidates in your office.
- While it is not prohibited to take personal calls at work, especially those that are urgent, excessive engagement pertaining to non-work related matters is. Focus is hard to come by, especially when your phone is always at your side – something you do not have much of a choice when your job requires you to interact with candidates through phone calls a lot.
- However, focusing on the task at hand would be a lot easier once you manage to eliminate unnecessary calls, conversations and activities during business hours. Furthermore, adding reminders in your calendar for every task that needs to be executed at a certain time and day will save you from exerting effort into rescheduling appointments to another time which could have been allocated for some other important tasks.
- Call the candidate at 10 AM. Set up a meeting with a client at 11 AM. Then take an hour-long break at 12 noon. You may sneak in some IG stories sometimes, and engage in non-work related conversations from time to time, as long as you get all work done on time.
- This is the point where you reflect and assess how well you have performed for the day. How many candidates have you tapped for this search requirement? How many candidates have confirmed their attendance at the interview? How many more people does this client need to close the search?
- On some days, you might feel like you have worked less than yesterday, and that is totally fine. Productivity is measured in terms of successful results, not activity. You have been busy attending to a lot of client calls and candidate endorsements, only to realize at the end of the day that you have accomplished almost nothing.
- Working harder is good, but working smarter is better.
- Managing your time will no longer be that tedious of a task once you get the hang of things at work. Only you have the power to turn a number of recruiting tasks into a manageable workload that will satisfy your clients, candidates, and even your superiors.
- Evaluate your time management strategy if you must, to achieve an even better result the next day. That way, you will attain the work-life balance that you always deserve.
Sources:
De Pape, C. (2017, May 8). Time Management for Recruiters: 4 Basic Steps (Plus Tips and Cheat Sheet). Retrieved from https://recruitingsocial.com/2017/05/time-management-for-recruiters/ on April 15, 2018
Maurer, R. (2016, July 25). Time Management Tips for Recruiters. Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/time-management-tips-for-recruiters.aspx on April 15 2018
Image courtesy of https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Simple-design-office-Coffee-beans-wall-clock-Art-style-afternoon-tea-wall-clock/
By Anne Casquejo, Research Associate