Belief in a Candidate, and belief in your Rec2Rec, always ends with a happy result. 👊

I bloody do!!!

Right in the middle of the brutal death grip of Covid, I got a call from a great Recruiter.

5 years with the same company. Great billing history. Articulate, educated and personable.

Under normal market conditions, he’d be (what they call) “a walking placement”.

I was excited to work with him. But also worried.

I knew it would be hard to place him, given practically nobody was hiring.

But I didn’t think it would be as hard as it turned out to be!

To further compound the challenge of the process, this Candidate had to be in a job SOON, as he’d bought a property off plan with his Partner, and he had a fast approaching deadline to submit paperwork proving his salary and income.

I believed in this Candidate, and vowed to him, and myself, to make the impossible happen, and find him a job within the barren desert, formally known as the Australian Recruitment Industry.

I’ll make this story short, because the reality of the story is way too long for LinkedIn.

But I reckon I spoke to 20-30 companies for this guy, and sold him passionately, every time.

And this happened over a period of many weeks.

 

Getting him interviews wasn’t that difficult. A lot of businesses were keen to meet him.

But they’d never go to second interview. And the story was always the same.

Rejection, because of Covid.

My Candidate, to his absolute credit, attacked every single interview with infectious energy, positivity and endless hope.

He was an inspiration.

But doors kept being relentlessly slammed in our face.

Eventually, after weeks and weeks of trying, we found a business potentially interested in hiring this chap, with a long term, post Covid lens.

To our delight and relief, an offer was made.

But we weren’t quite out of the woods.

His previous employer hadn’t loved the fact that this guy had left, and provided an “OK” reference, but not exactly a glowing reference.

For a day or so, we sat with baited breath to see if the offer would stand.

There was also some last minute haggling over Terms of Business. (Of course there was! 😆)

But eventually, the good news came through that the paperwork was on its way.

It was genuinely a moment of joy, for so many reasons. For both of us.

I look back at this particular placement as one of the highlights of my 20+ year recruitment career.

It genuinely made me fall in love with my job again, at a time when I was desperate to do anything BUT recruitment.

Two years later, having survived the Covid years, the Candidate is still in the job.

This is the card he sent me, with a gift, once he was happily sitting with his feet under his remote desk from home, in his new gig.

Morale of the story?

Belief in a Candidate, and belief in your Recruiter, always ends with a happy result.