One of the most important skills for a sales recruitment consultant, and one of the very first things every recruitment consultant learns, is good time management. Time is money in every business, but none exemplifies it quite as well as sales recruitment.

Think about it: every second spent on a potential hire that’s not a good fit, or lost to any of the day’s many distractions, is time that could have been better allocated to a more promising candidate. And time a recruitment consultant spends with that qualified candidate is time invested in a placement that will pay off, for both the employer and the sales recruitment firm.

The importance of good time management and responsible scheduling may not break down so clearly in other industries, but it is not unique to sales recruitment. Whether you are an up-and-coming recruitment consultant, a college student, part-time sales clerk, self-employed entrepreneur, stay-at-home mom or big wig executive, you can always benefit from structuring your day to be more efficient and productive. Take a few tips from a successful sales recruitment consultant and make them fit to your end goals:


Make a plan every day. Write it down.
Sounds silly, and like a kind of “duh” tip, but I’ve seen more than one recruitment consultant miss something because they gave themselves too much credit and assumed they could “keep it all up here.” Nope. The exercise of writing down what you need to accomplish will help you remember in itself, and seeing it there will give you a map of what to do next.


Find an end goal. Work towards that by working backwards.
Figure out what your ultimate goal for the day or week is, and then work your way backwards and determine what you need to do to get there. A sales recruitment consultant may see placing a hire as the final goal, so the steps before are to make contacts, call candidates, set up meetings, etc. Apply this somewhat backwards thinking in order to effectively work your way forward.


Stick to your list. Set up a mini-reward system if you need to.
Use the list to stay on task. Break it into manageable chunks with mini-goals and corresponding mini-rewards. Tell yourself you need to return all your phone calls before lunch; this gives you something to work towards beside the ultimate end goal, with the added enticement of a break for lunch at the end. There’s also the motivating sense of accomplishment every time you get to cross something off.

These simple tips can really help structure your day and increase your productivity, no matter what your final goal is. What other time management strategies work for you? As a sales recruitment consultant firm, we’re always looking for ways to improve performance and we’d love to hear your input.