Is a Recession the Ultimate Fitness Test for Recruiters?

Nobody likes recessions, especially when they're as long as the most recent one (and some people claim that the recession really isn't over, regardless of what the National Bureau of Economic Research is reporting). But is there value in a recession? In my previous blog post, I published the thoughts of five Top Echelon Network recruiters regarding what they've learned during the recession. Some might argue that what they've learned are things that all recruiters should keep in mind, no matter the economic conditions.

Some of these things include the following: streamlining your recruiting process, working both smarter and harder, making sure that the job orders you accept are tied to urgency, and realizing that how many job orders you have depends directly upon how hard and how much you look for them. When economic conditions head south, recruiters are more likely to come face-to-face with these issues than they would be during boom times, when job orders (and placements) are plentiful.

So the question is this—is a recession the ultimate fitness test for recruiters? In other words, can a recession actually be a training tool that improves the efficiency and productivity of individual recruiters, and by extension, an entire recruiting firm?

For those recruiters who survived the recession, the answer is yes.

That’s because in order to remain viable and maintain profit levels, recruiters must look at every single aspect of their business, evaluate what they do on a daily basis, and determine what leads to placements and what doesn’t.

What’s the bottom line? Basically that it’s human nature to sometimes ignore the basics during good times and to lose sight of practices that quite frankly aren’t that much fun to complete, regardless of how beneficial they can be. Consequently, it takes a recession to force recruiters to focus more on those practices.

So in essence . . . recruiters might not have necessarily learned new things during the recession (although for some, that has been the case). Instead, they’ve learned the importance of implementing the tried-and-true techniques and tactics that lead most directly to success—regardless of whether there’s a recession or not.

What are your thoughts? Has the recession helped you to run your desk or your firm better or more efficiently, or were your practices during the recession exactly the same as they were before the recession? If a recession is, indeed, the ultimate fitness test for recruiters, how well have you fared . . . and how many of the things you’re doing now do you plan to continue doing once economic conditions improve?