The challenge

I’d only been working for Response for three months and it was my weekend to be on-call when one of our clients, a large bakery, telephoned at 9.00pm on
Friday evening!

The bakery had received a rush order from a supermarket and urgently needed more staff to be able to fulfil it. Normally they used Response to supply
staff during the day, with one of our competitors supplying the night staff.

On this occasion the second agency had said that it was too late to help! The client was under pressure. They operated within a very competitive market and didn’t want to turn down a rush order because this could result in the supermarket turning to a different supplier in the future.

The approach

During the interview process it became obvious that the company preferred to employ Consultants who had little or no recruitment experience. What they were looking for were people who were enthusiastic and keen to develop themselves and their career. They explained all of the ups and downs, but this only made me more determined. I could really make a difference. I decided that the challenge appealed to me and so when the job was offered I accepted it without any concerns.

Starting work so early was hard to begin with, but it meant that you were available to sort out any early morning issues. Practical experience was complimented by the company Operations Manual, which introduced me to the most effective way to deal with life as a Recruitment Consultant. This manual helped me the most, it detailed every single task that I needed to do to provide a focused, quality service to our clients. It did this on an hour-by-hour basis starting from Sunday evening going through to Friday night. It meant that I knew what I should be doing at any particular moment in time and so the clients could be guaranteed a consistently high level of service and support.

For example, we would phone all of our temps on a Sunday night to make sure that they were able to go to work Monday morning. On their first day with a new client we always took the temps to work, introduced them to our contact and explained the job in every detail. On the second and subsequent days afterwards, we always phoned the client 15 minutes after the temp started work to make sure that they had arrived safely. We wanted to ensure we were in control of the whole process and we were ahead of the game if a problem started to arise

The benefits

After starting work at Response, I began to realise that the recruitment companies I had initially applied to had missed the point. It’s not about delivering any temp to any client, it’s the desire and enthusiasm to do the best for the client and the temp. What’s more, it’s about understanding their issues and prioritising the day to consistently deliver the best service you can, around the clock.

Response Recruitment will only recruit Consultants with the right qualities, not the number of years recruitment experience. We have a comprehensive training system that gives all of our staff the ability to provide a service to our clients that not only has unrivalled care but passion too.