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A Day in the Life of a Recruitment Consultant (Part 1!)

I wanted to give you an insight into the standard day of a recruitment consultant, well one at BettingJobs in any case. It may not be fully what you expected!

Having arrived in the office at 8.30am, first task is to check the BBC Sport page, sorry I mean first task is to check all emails that have arrived overnight! Joking aside, emails are checked on Iphone as soon as my eyes are open, convinced smart phone addiction will be a recognised medical condition in a couple of years…

Having checked the sport pages I set about planning the day ahead. The actual day to day tasks of a recruitment consultant don’t vary hugely; the only difference is how you prioritise them. Each day I ask myself what do I need to do and when do I need to do it…

It goes without saying that you prioritise matters that have a time restraint and need actioned immediately.

At the moment I am working with a US based client and having received interview confirmations overnight, I decide my first task will be to contact the candidates and pass on the relevant information. Tick box.

The next priority is to follow up with a client who conducted a few interviews yesterday through candidates supplied by BettingJobs. I am the lead client contact on this account, which basically means I need to do all the client contact work for my lazy colleagues! I can understand why clients request this, it must make their life easier but it sure adds to the work of the poor consultant who needs to do all the work on everyone’s behalf! Thankfully the client is quite pleased with the interviews and progresses with 2 of the 3 candidates. I inform my colleagues who contact the candidates and begin the process of arranging second interviews….

Next I move on to where recruitment consultants actually prove their worth, identifying suitable profiles for our client requirements. Personally I work on the technology team, our client requirements tend to be very niche and it is a labour intensive task to work through our network to try and find someone who may be at least open to discussing new job opportunities. I don’t think our clients really appreciate how much effort goes in to finding a software developer with specific experience of developing a poker product!   Trust me, it can take days, weeks even, if it is a particular skill set. For me, this is the dull part of the job, but as I said, I understand this is why clients will use an agency and I guess ultimately how they internally justify paying the invoices! There can’t be anything more important to any organisation than the staff you choose to hire, we take pride in the part we play in that process. Thankfully we have a great knowledge of the industry and use those insights to try and narrow the search to where we could find suitable candidates, always being aware of the fact we can’t headhunt from our existing clients!

So how do we find candidates? Well there is no silver bullet; the honest answer is hard work and persistence. However that alone isn’t enough, we need to have the knowledge of how to identify suitable profiles, how to entice them to have an initial discussion and then finally to ensure that there is a match between their expectations and those of the client. That is just the beginning of the process and when it involves relocation, it can, understandably, take some time for candidates to decide to move forward. The ability to do this only comes through experience and knowledge of both recruitment and the igaming industry generally, thankfully there is enough old heads in the BettingJobs office who have been around iGaming for a long time now.

Having spent a few hours resourcing, I only have 30 minutes before lunch so I spend that time working with a junior colleague who has just joined the team. There is a definite skill to training and it’s as much of a learning curve for me as it is for the new consultant! To be fair, the training is more “on the job” as this is the quickest and most effective way to learn. Recruitment is more of a mindset that anything else and that is what I try to constantly convey. You definitely need a passion for finding that perfect match and a unique ability to manage the process to a successful conclusion, a 6^th sense is a prerequisite!

That brings me up to lunch at 1pm and the end of part 1!