Most of you think of me as a recruiter don’t you? You think my job is finding Indirect Tax people for jobs and Indirect Tax jobs for people?
If, heaven forbid, I had to fill in timesheets for Mr G Barrand, BLT employee and business owner, I reckon it would look something like this:
20% Advice on how to achieve long term career aspirations
10% Advice on how to handle difficult situations at work
10% Advice to clients on market/role positioning
10% Finding connection/building rapport
4% Provision of reality checks
3% Networking (e.g. events attendance, maintaining contact with network)
3% Marketing/advertising including LinkedIn posts
2% BLT strategy & people management
2% Business accounting for BLT
1% Wrestling with online recruitment portals and other unexciting admin
So that leaves 35% of my time spent on the more obvious job content of talking to people about specific jobs/organisations; talking to clients about specific candidates; sourcing candidates and jobs, processing applications, arranging and preparing people for interviews; feedback; offer negotiation etc.
My business only gets paid for the 35%, but it’s the other 65% that’s the foundation work which allows commercial success to happen.
Whilst this variety has been my spice of life for many years, I wonder whether you might actually be able to apply the same approximate ratio to most career scenarios – 65% of effort on doing the fundamentals right in order to get results with the rest. Something to bear in mind maybe….
- by Guy Barrand