Are there any positive outcomes for Customer Experience Recruitment from COVID?
As a Director and owner of CX Talent Ltd, I have spent many hours lamenting the lack of CX roles, wondering if we can continue to trade as a business with the very few roles we’ve managed to hold on to and fill during the last few months. I know that I am not alone in this – many of the recruitment agencies we all know of may sadly not make it through. In House resourcing teams are under enormous pressure to fill roles internally rather than use agency partners in order to help reduce costs. We’ve all seen the tsunamis of candidates applying for each and every role! With that sort of role demand – what’s the point of appointing an agency? I wont lie – there have been moments of panic and several sleepless nights!
Advantages of Appointing an Agency at this moment in time:
There are many advantages to appointing a specialist recruitment agency for specialist roles. In a nutshell, we can fill them REALLY quickly and efficiently with the right people and the best talent, while ensuring an excellent candidate exprience. I don’t need to advertise unless we don’t have the right people with the right skill set, in the right location for the right money. Other than that – we use our extensive network and database. But enough of that – I’ve talked about it at length in previous posts and this is not the purpose of this particular post
I still have moments of despair and worry about the state of the economy and the lack of roles out there. However, I do have more and more moments of clarity and positivity. I’d like to share them as even in adversity you can find positives to reflect upon:
Listening and Talking with increased number of diverse individuals:
Over the past few months I have spoken to several fantastic individuals both from the CX world and external to it. I have really enjoyed listening to other people’s stories and in many cases being able to help them move forward effectively in their job search. LinkedIn has been our mouthpiece to talk about issues around recruitment and customer experience that we find useful and interesting (and hopefully you do too). Our post engagement seems to be growing – so I take this as a good sign?!
Our huge and rapidly growing top talent database:
Our candidate database, which was already amazing, is now bursting at the seams with the most amazing Customer Experience candidates. I would be confident of filling any Customer Insight, Research, Strategy, Implementation, Change and Transformation, Digital, Product role in a heartbeat. When the market does eventually return to some degree of normality our reach in the Customer Experience world both here in the UK also internationally looks likely to be unrivalled.
Kindness and Longevity of relationships:
We’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and graciousness of those candidates and individuals that we have spoken to and advised, some of whom have even gone on to publicly thank us. I cannot tell you how much that means to both Kate and myself, it makes all the hours of work and all the conversations more than worthwhile. We see our relationship with candidates and contacts as ongoing and beyond just the next role. Whether we place candidates this time or in 1,2 or 5 years is irrelevant – once you are in our world you’ll stay in it as long as you’d like to, whether that be as candidate or client.
Magic Hour:
We continue to offer and enjoy our Magic Hour sessions with candidates and again, are delighted with the feedback and thanks we have received. These are not just interesting but also so rewarding, as we are helping people position themselves to their best advantage to help them secure the next role – wherever that might be from.
Best Mates and Laughter:
Talking personally – I am so lucky to work with one of my dearest friends. There is never a day that goes by that we don’t find something to laugh at! We pick each other up off the floor when needed and celebrate when things go well. We discuss the matters of the day, current affairs (always an opinion to be shared and very usually agreed upon), and very occasionally the frustrations of being a WFH mum of school age children (Quite a few actually) and newly WFH partners as well (Quite a lot more!). I genuinely would not enjoy my job as half as much if it was not for the fact I work with Kate.
So all in all – though business may not be where I’d like it to be and though I’m not able to help as many of our candidates into roles as I would like, I count my blessings. It might just be that when we get out of these strange times or indeed learn to live with them – CX Talent Ltd will be better, stronger and more resilient as a business than ever before.
If you are thinking of expanding your customer teams and need to act fast and efficiently – please contact Kate or myself. We pride ourselves on being open and transparent and kinder than many other agencies out there. We are fast, efficient and offer the best candidate and client experience we possibly can and WE REALLY CARE about doing the best job, finding the best talent and finding the best talent the right jobs.
