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Let us in!

Let us in!

about 4 years ago
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​Let Us In!

Client: “Hi there, we’d love it if you could help us with some urgent recruitment. We’ve been let down by several recruiters on our PSL and the CV’s we’re receiving just aren’t cutting it”

Recruiter: “Of course, we’d love to help, thank you for thinking of us. We’ll send over our terms and fees, and then let’s get a meeting in the diary so we can come and pick up the brief and understand your business needs”

Client: “Sorry, but we’re far too busy for a meeting and we always work at 10%, we’d just like to see some CV’s…”


At Beyond the Book, we’re fortunate that this dialogue is a rarity. Most of our clients come from referrals and have seen the added benefits of briefing us first (often exclusively), and from letting us in to absorb the company culture and really get ‘under the skin’ of a brief/business need.

As specialist Marketing and Creative recruiters, we make it our business to really work at the quality end of recruitment, and do to that, we need to be working in partnership with our clients.

Let’s dig a little deeper in to the above dialogue:

“We’re far too busy for a meeting” - We get it; in the professional world, there are far too many meetings that could have simply been an email. Precious time is eaten up in meetings, when it would be better spent just ‘getting on’. However, when it comes to investing in your next member of staff, we can’t stress enough the value of allowing us in. Poor and ineffective recruitment is expensive, but a half an hour meeting can be priceless.

We sometimes hear clients tell us, “it’s not our policy to let recruiters in”, and in the same breath we hear, “the CV’s we’re receiving just aren’t cutting it”. Don’t forget, that whilst you may know your business inside out and back to front, recruiters and potential new employees don’t. To really understand the business, where the role fits in to the wider team, and the overall culture of a business (which in turn results in a well-qualified, well suited and long-term hire), we need to experience it first hand and hear it from the person that this role reports to.

The time invested in a half an hour meeting with a recruiter you’re prepared to partner and work closely with will undoubtedly result in a much higher quality of candidate After all why would you want to sift through 50 ill-considered CV’s from a PSL of 5 recruiters, all competing against each other to chuck over any old CV that seems to match the brief (because after all you’re only working at 10%), when you could in fact receive just 3 to 5 outstanding CV’s from pre-qualified, pre-interviewed candidates who want your job not just any job?

“We’d just like to see some CV’s” – Again, we can’t stress enough how ineffective it is when hiring your next team member to just see some CV’s. We’d say 9/10 (if not more) of our clients say that cultural fit is as important (if not more important) than skill set. Whilst skills can be trained, the ability to work and fit in with the wider team is often considered far more valuable. When you let us in, we can really get under the skin of the company culture; and best of all, we can ‘sell’ the dream to candidates. After all, we’ve seen the office space, had a laugh with the hiring manager, talked about the social side of the business and understood what benefits there are working for you.

If it’s CV’s that you want, there’s technology out there that can deliver on that for you, but if it’s people that you want, take time to invest in quality recruitment, let us in, and understand that good, long-term recruitment stems from relationships. Half an hour here could potentially save you thousands of pounds, and valuable hours rectifying poor decisions further down the line.

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