Working in recruitment, it can be hard sometimes to hear candidates go for roles without first consulting us. At times, it can be even harder when the candidate gets turned down for the role when you are confident that had they gone for the role through a recruiter they probably would have gotten the role.

For recruiters, our role extends far beyond connecting the dots between candidates and clients. More often than not, we are about building relationships. Relationships that don’t just look like notes in a CRM, or appointments in a calendar.

The best recruiters I know will grab a beer or coffee with candidates that weren’t successful, and even go so far as to invite them to meetups and other events just to help them get their name out there a bit more. Not only that, but we manage the relationship on both ends to ensure smooth transitions between clients and candidates to build genuine connection.

Client and Candidate relationship management goes far beyond a piece of software, like most sales roles. The value of a good recruiter lies in their ability to build these relationships up with rapport and share this rapport between clients and candidates.

The value of a good recruiter lies in their ability to relate to people as people, not as businesses or viewing people as numbers on a board. It’s about much more than that. Our role isn’t to simply be sharks swimming in blue waters, but to be the documentary film maker observing the school of fish.

We want to observe how people work, not just in the sense of how they go about conducting their work, but how their mind works. The best recruiters can bring people out of their shells and into their talents, and help people find their way through the job market.

For some recruiters, the clients matter a lot to us, but the candidates matter more. For us it’s not about the roles we’re dealt, but the people we talk to. There is a common misconception that recruitment is all about putting numbers on a board. To be honest, if it was, we're in the wrong industry.

Most of the time when we meet a candidate the first time we don’t even have a job in mind. The majority of agencies tend to “share the love”, where anybody can meet anybody, and they can share contacts around if there is a role out there for them.

It’s much easier to offer a candidate a role if we know them at least on some level. Once we know someone, we can easily talk to them about a role, so it wouldn’t make sense for us just to cast people to the side if we don’t have a role for them. That’s not what our job is.

We are there to form relationships, and to deal with relationship matters. Anything else is a bonus.