If I were given £1/$1 for every time I am told between now and Christmas that “not much recruitment is going to happen in December” or “I don’t expect to be doing much until January” I would expect to have enough money to pay for all my family’s presents.

Both prospective candidates and possible recruiters are going to say this to me and I know that nothing I can type here is going to make a difference…

But let’s have a go anyway!!

December is a cracking month to be recruiting (or be recruited) and there is a very simple reason for that. January is rubbish!

• During January you are busy planning for the year ahead and find that everyone else is too. It is not that easy to coordinate diaries of interviewers and interviewees. By contrast in December diaries always tend to be a little less busy and interviewees can more easily disappear relatively unnoticed from current jobs to do some Christmas shopping/make an interview.

• Everyone recruits in January which means that as a candidate you are up against “the world and its wife” and as an employer you are slap bang in the middle of the War for Talent (and forever waiting for your competitors to progress with their interviews so your candidates can “compare and contrast”). In December you can get the Pick of the Bunch and progress the recruitment process at your pace.

AND most of all

• On the morning of 1^st January everyone wakes and looks themselves in the mirror and decides that this is the year to find something new and certainly the time to get paid more. As a prospective employer though can you be absolutely certain that the candidate sat in front of you though is actually interested in the job that you are talking to you about or are they fishing for a counter offer? By contrast though in December you can be pretty certain that the candidate you ask in for interview at 4.00 on the last Wednesday before Christmas is damn interested in the job! And how impressive and passionate do you sound as a candidate if you ask for that sort of interview and opportunity?

So I ask you (all my fellow recruiters) to spread the word and the next time someone says something about "things slowing down in December" persuade them that this is the wrong thing to do or expect.