BD? What’s That?!

It’s quite rare to get three months holiday, a proper holiday where you’re not only encouraged not to work from a legal perspective but a moral one too. I downed tools early December and enjoyed the 10-15 days of Sunshine we were allocated this year. I also went on Honeymoon which was nice and snuck in a wee trip back to the UK. In truth, between banks, lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers, office managers, and various hardware and software purchases, I’ve been busy. While I’ve been going through somewhat of a transformative stage, so has the market. A lot can change in three months! I’ve gone back to basics; my mornings are spent with my clients and arvos are for candidate generation. Those mornings spent with clients from the different shades of the recruitment rainbow have been enlightening albeit a little jarring. It seems that jobs are becoming a little harder to get these days. The market was red hot when I went into hibernation, but I have emerged from my cave to find I’ve jumped the gun and it’s still a bit frosty out there. But why?

Usually, this time of year things have fully taken off and to use the regional colloquialism, it’s hissing! Most hiring managers come back mid-Feb and are fully refreshed, ready to hit the ground running. As a proud Tamaki Makaurauian, I’ll start with a reason we Northerners can get on board with. The weather! At the risk of giving a bit of a ‘Kloppist’ answer, the rain has been really against us. It’s added to the impending dread and uncertainty that we really don’t have a clue what’s around the corner. From what I’ve been hearing perm fees in Jan & Feb have been down compared to previous years while temp fees have come back up to pre-Christmas levels a lot sooner. This hints at a lack of conviction from my client’s clients. Throw in a hard/soft recession on the horizon as well as a new financial year dawning, I’ve already heard the chilling phrase “hiring freeze”. It feels like the recruitment market is a bit more like what it was before Covid.

If you cast your mind back to April 2020 when the industry shed a truckload of recruiters. There were still heaps of work about, so when the dust settled there was a big push to get bums on seats. Suddenly, we had a plethora of account managers effectively doing switchboard recruitment, filling vacancies with available candidates and clients were more than happy with it. Now jobs are a little harder to come by, I mean they’re still out there but are they exclusive? Will they result in a placement? Will you even get them? One client remarked that they can really see the difference between someone who has joined the industry in the last 18 months to two years. You can’t blame them, every time they picked up the phone, they’ve got a job on, easy-peasy. Now, there’s pushback. This isn’t going to be the case for everyone from that crop of course. However, I can see a few running for the hills at the first sound of a “ring ring” during a BD role-play with a direct manager.

So, what is to be done? Well, a lot of agencies are, like me, going back to basics. Having a BD day or morning to get in front of things. Talking directly to my fellow consultants, you need to get out and see your client base. You need to be able to win new business but importantly you need to back the right horse. Partner with clients that can navigate the risky waters without dropping anchor and staying put. Get used to trawling the job boards again, see who is advertising a job, and give them a call. The good news from my client's perspective is that there are no sweeping redundancies, that's the last thing my client's clients would want to be honest. This means there is still a skill shortage out there so while things are stalling it's more likely that it's a wait-and-see attitude and the optimist in me thinks that a slow start to the year means a busy end of the year.

Most of the roles I’ve picked up recently have been of the ‘hunter’ variety BD is once again at the forefront. Consultants who have an aversion to BD always feel like they are bothering someone, it’s because they don’t believe that what they are doing is adding value. There needs to be a change in mindset. We help candidates get a better job and we help a business improve and yes, we dare to charge a fee for it! I was at the Auckland zoo last weekend with my wife. It’s class btw, they have a new Southeast Asia area and the orangutans are like 25ft up in the air. As usual, my mind always strays to recruitment, and I was thinking about these animals. Those born into captivity/hedonism, whatever way you want to view a zoo, they are fed multiple times throughout the day. If they were dropped back into the wild, would they survive? I guess we’re going to find out.