Following on from the last post here is more of my interview with Bronwyn Murphy.

James: Do you think that people leave school, leave university and start a different career and so on, and think, ‘My lifetime ambition is to be a recruitment consultant.’ Or do, generally speaking, people just fall into it?

Bronwyn: In the many years that I’ve been doing it, I’ve probably met three people who have wanted to be a recruitment consultant.

James: So out of the thousands that you’ve met, only three?

Bronwyn: Except, obviously, in the interview. When I’ve been interviewing them to join an agency, they’ve all said they wanted to do it.

James: ‘It’s been my lifetime goal.’

Bronwyn: Right. But no, most people fall into it, and I fell into it. I just happened to answer a job ad, because I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’. A lot of people enter it thinking that it’s HR. It’s a component of HR, but it’s not HR

James: Another question for you … recruitment is a big sector and you’re working with lots of different clients, small, medium, and large. In a typical recruitment agency, knowing full well that within Australia alone, there are literally thousands of recruitment firms from one man bands right up to multinationals – but if we take a typical firm, say based in a CBD like Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane, what are the main jobs or roles within a recruitment agency?

Bronwyn: There are  three categories that you can put the main roles into. One is support, one is consulting, and the other sales. On top of that there is senior management. Let’s start at what’s considered the more junior level, which I don’t necessarily think is. People call them paraconsultants, resourcers, or back-end admin – they’re people who do the everyday crossing of the t’s and dotting of the i’s. So they’re probably doing a lot of the paperwork, updating databases and the like.  Often this is seen as a stepping stone into being a fully-fledged recruitment consultant. Then you’ve got your recruitment consultant. You’ve got a couple of different strands of that, you’ve got what we call a 360 consultant, who is someone who takes a job from cradle to grave. That is, they go and find the client or the candidate, then they match them up with the client or the candidate, depending on what’s come first. And they do all the follow through. Or you have recruitment consultants who are possibly 180. So, they get given the client, so they source the candidate and they do it from there.

You’ve then got account managers who have a major account, so you might have a number of consultants who work with you on that account.  They’re the conduit between the agency and the client. Their purpose is to try and to make sure that everybody’s happy, and work out where things stand. Then you’ve got your sales aspect, so you’ve got your business developers, who are people who go out to find the business. So that can be anything from cold calling – smaller agencies – or looking at large strategies to bring in large multinational clients, and work with them across all sectors.

James: Great. Is there a natural size for, in your experience, for someone who is either wanting to go into the sector, or feels stagnant within the recruitment job that they have, is it better to work for a small recruitment firm or a large recruitment firm?

Bronwyn: It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. I think with a  smaller recruitment firm, you tend to do the 360 recruitment, where you’re doing cradle to grave. With the larger firms, and the multinationals, they often have very good training programs, succession and career plans in place. You can then decide where your passion lies, and that often tends to be what you’re innately good at, whether that be sales, or account management, or even staff management.

Thats it for now.

Warm regards,

James E

James Evangelidis

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