Other than enjoying the great surroundings and networking with some great people with whom I shared the same highs and lows of operating a small niche recruitment firm, I came away with three key points. We will be implementing some of these strategies with our key exclusive clients in the coming months.

Customer Service

We heard from Martin Grunstein – an expert on customer service. It was great listening to someone outside the recruitment industry give us their take on our sector from a customer service point of view. He challenged us to change our thinking in terms of what we sell, we don’t sell products (candidates) or services, but in fact we sell perceptions through our ability to create empathy and massage the recruitment process from both ends. In reality we sell stress management services – as good recruiters we take the hassle out of hiring. By focusing on what we really sell, we will be able to deliver to our clients much more effectively.

Recruiter Skills

The skills of our recruitment teams will be key to delivering top results to our clients in the future. We need to hire well, train well and empower and motivate our teams to deliver. Greg Savage expounded his thoughts on what the make-up of a great recruiter is these days and how we need to find a happy medium between the use of technology and skilled human interaction. As recruiters of today or the future we are great at sourcing candidates through a wide variety of means, fantastic seducers of top talent, have a well-respected personal brand or profile, be masters at influencing, be excellent networkers and challenge ourselves to continually upskill, develop and learn.

Change / Digital

A large majority of the speakers all touched on the topic of change and keeping up with this change in the digital age. We heard from Marty Wilson, Sophie Robertson, Chris South, Michael McQueen and Chris Riddell who all spoke from their various perspectives. What did I take away from all these amazing speakers? Change is inevitable – we need to deal with it. Gen Y and Gen Z are fast growing up and are becoming candidates and decision makers respectively, we need to change our approach of how we deal with these people as they grew up in a different world. We need to constantly be aware of what it is we really sell and don’t fall into the trap of pushing a product or service that clients no longer require.

It was great to get out of the office, re-calibrate, network with some great industry peers and be able to come back and implement some fantastic new strategies for our key exclusive clients.