Have you noticed how the focus for recruitment has moved away from the candidates in the last few years?

We seem to need to spend more time looking at out SEO, our adword analytics, our backlinks and mobile compatibility and a thousand other online considerations.

At the same time, the economy in recent years has made the recruitment world focus closely on it’s clients.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Clients a critical for all businesses and that is all very good.

But what about the candidates?  For our part, my agency is taking the time to go back to basics and spend more time focusing on candidates, customer service and quality.

When we first opened our recruitment consultancy in 2004, www.completelycare.co.uk , our aim was to do things differently.  We wanted to me more honest, more approachable and more down to search for our candidates and our clients.  This has always remained an important part of the way we work.

Recently, we have seen that the changes in the job market and the increased demand in the employment sector has made this more critical than ever.  In our sector, the social care, healthcare, childcare and education industries, staff are is especially short supply.  There is high demand for all of our roles and competition for staff is stronger than ever.

So it seems like a good time to go back to the basics and look at the recruitment process again.  The plan is to review the whole recruitment process, look at the way we interact with candidates and try to ensure we continue to refine and improve our candidate processes.  Its been a healthy experience and we have made a number of improvements.  It’s also made us re-consider the way we do things to ensure we are applying our own customer service values to our working practices.

So, I suppose the point I making is that improvement and development in recruitment is constant and it is critical that we keep developing our systems to work smarter and to find new ways of reaching out to people.  But it is also just as important to keep looking at our old practices too.  In fact, to my mind, the basics are far more important.

The moral of all this is as follows.  You have to keep looking at the way you do things to ensure you keep doing them the way you originally wanted to do them.  Hmm.