Recruitment professionals should be better at being able to select the right opportunity for themselves — but that’s not always the case.

One challenge we face is that the long hours we work, sometimes in relatively controlled environments, mean that it’s really hard to get out of the office for interviews. Too often this leads to candidates looking at a smaller range of opportunities than they should do.
 
Fairly obviously, the more opportunities you look at, the more chance you have of finding the right opportunity.
 
Plan ahead and take off two or three days of holiday for your interviews. With enough notice and planning you should be able to arrange all of your first interviews on those days.

Then you must work out how you are going to get to those second interviews — but by then there’s more commitment from both sides so you’ll find a way and perhaps they will interview outside hours for you.
 
The other reason why we find it so hard to choose the right opportunity in recruitment is that on the surface, a lot of recruitment companies seem identical and it’s hard to distinguish between them.

Also the interviewer is usually a sales person so of course will work to create the best impression of the company. It’s not always easy to get behind that.
 
Be aware that if you are going for a position as a recruitment consultant, the director that you meet at interview doesn’t necessarily reflect the culture or style of the company. Nor do they necessarily give a true reflection of what it’s like to work there.
 
You’ll get that reality more from meeting the consultants so you should insist on that as part of the process. You should also ask to see the office during working hours of course, preferably at least twice during the process, and speak to people as you go round and see how they engage with you. That’s a great way of finding out if real people work there or robots.
 
One of the most important pieces of advice: the best choice for you and your career isn’t always the one that you get on with best of all. Nor is it the most enthusiastic.
 
As sales people ourselves it’s easy to be won over by sheer enthusiasm and passion in a director that we meet at interview. Admittedly those qualities are very attractive. Does that make for a solid business, however? Often not.

Keep these points in mind:

1) Clear vision and planning by the prospective employer are more important to the stability and success of your career with them.

2) Examine how clear they are about where they plan to be, and check whether all the individuals you meet all share the same vision.

3) Check where they were three years ago and whether they succeeded in their plans then for three years later.

4)  Don’t just look at the obvious prospect companies that are out there. Find out about the ones that you don’t know about;  they’re just as likely to satisfy your requirements. You can find those either through painstaking research or referrals. (Of course,  the other way of finding them is through a reputable recruitment-to-recruitment company!)

(Tim is the chairman of the REC’s recruitment-to-recruitment sector group.)