What to Expect and Making the Most of Professional Qualifications - Part Three
Your recruitment career
Part three – How this qualification has helped your career
Our Level 3 Certificate in Recruitment Practice teaches the most important fundamentals recruitment consultants need to know to succeed in their profession and uphold best practice. Libby Stanitsas of D R Newitt talked through how this course rocketed her career.
This blog has been broken down into four parts, you can jump to each part outlined below:
Part one - Working in Recruitment
Part two - Practicalities of the Qualification
Part three - How this qualification has helped your career
12 How would you say this course has helped you progress in your career professionally?
13 Who was your trainer?
14 It sounds like you had a really good experience with your trainer, Joe Moore.
15 What would you say are the biggest, most important things you have learnt from the qualification?
16 Who would you recommend this specific course to?
Part four - Bonus knowledge, skills and take-homes gleaned from this course
12 How would you say this course has helped you progress in your career professionally?
I think it lines out for you the exact route that is possible. The nice thing about recruitment is there’s not timescales, you can’t say to someone on day one, in a years’ time you earn this, or in two years’ time you’ll be leading a team. There’s no timescale, timescales are set by you. What you want to do and how far you want to go. It’s a ready-made checklist. Everything you need to tick off and go through and go up and go on. And I quite like that very logical way of thinking.
It’s actually… we’re the first group of people in this company to do a certification through yourself and it has actually meant that even some of the managers have rung me up and asked, will you double check this for me, about what you were told? Yeah, I’ve got the book, I can tell you. I’ve helped my managers out, my colleagues, so many candidates. I mean they’ve all helped me out in one way or another so it’s only fair.
Joe Moore.
He was great, he dedicated so much extra time to us and he was really patient with extra questions and challenges to the material. He was always really quick at coming back to us on emails and follow up questions as well. I struggled with a couple of the course questions and I emailed him and he got back to me straight away. He marked all of the coursework within an evening and got it back to us the very next day; he was really quick and responsive. As I said, when I had to go down to London to conduct a massive meeting with the advocate and recruitment company he really helped me get everything in order for it. I was panicking, I’ve made placements before including placements at mid-management level but never at the director or VP levels- it’s not an easy recruitment thing to get into, especially with a company of that size. Anyway my trainer made me so much more comfortable, and ready to go into that meeting. He was really good and went far above and beyond what he needed to do to help me simply pass the course. And to be honest he was like that with absolutely everyone. Nobody had any complaints about Joe. There were a few occasions that we did struggle with understanding and having things line up because, of course, we’re a recruitment agency not a business, but you have to have good understanding of both. I don’t think anyone in the room had any experience of that sort of recruitment. So he definitely took the time to go through everything with us thoroughly. He even went ‘off-book’ when that was necessary for helping us understand about extra things we were just interested in and had more questions about, which was great! So, we really took all the information we possibly could. He was definitely worth every penny for his tuition.
He even taught really well when we were trying to catch him out! For example, talking about how people can be discriminated against, and how you can’t discriminate against a pregnant person, so we started asking ‘can we ask or say x, y or z to a pregnant person?’ etc and Joe was able to answer these questions as far as was sensibly possible before he had to reign it all in and get back to the specified syllabus. Sometimes you’re in a lesson and everyone’s really interested in the topic and you start going down a rabbit hole of ‘what if this? and what if that?’ But these questions and the trainer’s super-useful answers really helped put things in context so we understood it all much better and gained confidence in being able to apply this knowledge to our real working lives. We supplied him with tea and biscuits though so he was fine as well! He was really considerate as well. Because when he came in, of course we were all still working, we still have offers undergoing and important bits coming in and calls we needed to make. So, when we needed to, he would let us go outside if we needed to make a call, you know and have a negotiation or make an offer or something it really fitted well within our working day. They weren’t putting calls through to the room or anything but every so often we might take five minutes out so people could go to the loo or have a coffee or whatever and others could make those important phone calls.
15 What would you say are the biggest, most important things you have learnt from the qualification?
What I most enjoyed over the training was the perspective. It’s very rare that you get the chance to stop and look at things from the outside in. We do it every single day, they are habits. We know we have to do them. It’s actually understanding why, understanding what that brings to your career, to the name of the brand, to your individual brand. Looking at that from the outside in, it can really make a big difference on how you want to handle yourself going forwards.
I also think it makes everything a lot more logical, a better approach. Because of the way the training course is set out, everything is step-by-step, it’s all broken down. So quite often, because we know what we are doing we jump straight to step four and you can already see in your mindset that you have already gone through steps one, two and three. Do you really understand them or should you get some more clarification on that?
It almost slows you down rather than speeds you up which can be a good thing, you know it’s more about quality not quantity sometimes. I mean, I could place ten jobs in a month, but if six of them fall out, what’s the point.
A good relationship, a good foundation, I’d say that was pretty important. I also really enjoyed probably the most difficult section on the exam, the legal aspect of it. On all the legal jargon or legal understanding. That has been fantastic! Not just for dealing with HR with clients, but also with candidates. Only being in permanent recruitment, but I’ve got such a better understanding of the IR35, How they get paid, how they get taxed. It’s actually saves me contacting the wrong people and it helps me give advice to a person who isn’t too sure from someone who is sure because I’m a lot more confident and I’m leading them down the right path.
Fantastic! So it’s really added value then?
Yeah, definitely. It’s opened my eyes to doing a bit more research as well. I used to scroll through Instagram or Facebook on the way into work, but now I look at things like Food Man Jobs or the REC website. I look at corresponding news articles that are related, especially when it comes to Brexit because I may not have to have to conversation one-on-one, but it helps me understand exactly what is affecting hiring managers; what their thought processes are, so it makes it a bit more streamlined.
16 Who would you recommend this specific course to?
I think you have to have a reasonable base understanding before you move onto this level of recruitment knowledge and understanding. Somebody who has been in recruitment for six months to a year, who understands building relationships. I was lucky, I got straight into the recruitment role, I picked it up straight away, but I think a lot of people get to do that. Sometimes people do 180s, you know, professionally. I think it develops, almost, a fear in people about building relationships with the clients. We have got two people who have started here, recently they’ve done a 180 in terms of jobs and they’ve freaked themselves out over what should be the most natural part of the process.
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