An innovative approach to recruitment

In the middle of a recession I left a full time job in Executive Recruitment to start a business in recruitment. Risky thing to do for sure, however that's my personality and taking risks and seizing opportunity is what I do best...it is actually a strength of mine.

True Colours Recruitment is a blended recruitment and coaching company which uses a proven profiling tool to establish what our candidates strengths as well as their level of optimism. You can read more about this at www.synergysuccessstrategies.com.au

So why did I start a recruitment company in a recession? Simple, I saw the big picture and had the guts to do it. .At the time, before I left my job, I felt I had nothing of extra value as an added service for my clients. Times were tough and people were not hiring so getting jobs on meant you had to have something special to offer. I worked for a company that promoted being 'carbon neutral' as their big USP. I thought that was pretty cool but it didn't offer my clients anything extra, especially when they were all doing it pretty tough at the time.

Traditional recruitment companies charge outrageous fees with little value add service, however I saw how it could be different. So I approached a profiling and coaching firm and we work together as a blended recruitment company offering a lot of value for money.

We also developed a process that includes onboarding a candidate into the new team by profiling the management team and then once we have placed the candidate a performance coach helps the candidate and new manager on how they best communicate with each other. We saw a unique way of adding much more value for money, a better way of guaranteeing the candidate will stay and is the right match. The benefit to the client is that they may not have a training budget and can utilise this service to help improve staff morale by offering this personal coaching session. We also have a unique insight into human behaviour as we come from a training background and profile all our candidates to help match with company culture.

It is proven that onboarding candidates and making their first day feel like they are already part of the team, will help retain them. Onboarding is a process that goes over weeks or months. The best companies to work for are those that understand the importance of onboarding. As a new employee, nothing is better than walking into your new job feeling like you already belong. Even better if the CEO and other Senior Executives makes the effort to welcome the new employee, after all you want this to be a long term relationship if you have found that perfect candidate.

Debbie Carr is the Director of Recruitment at True Colours Recruitment and can be contacted via the website.