Recruitment Candidate Manager. No selling. Senior (£100k+) IT roles.

Introduction

IRC is a niche recruitment business who place high value software sales people with mid sized, niche software vendors. Please disregard the tarnished image you may have of salespeople; this market is very different and the candidates we place are execs rather than the cliched salesperson image 

Our typical client is a software company with 5-15 sales people where the sales people earn £100k basic, £200k OTE.

We tend to work with clients as their only supplier and offer a search and selection style service.

The IT market is flying. It’s the best I’ve seen it in 21 years as a sales recruiter. We are under terrific pressure to find a high volume of good quality candidates. That is great and we are very fortunate. However, it brings its own pressure. The two founders are the key sellers of IRC to the market and if we’re fulfilling roles, we’re not finding new clients which will stop our growth.

We don't work on huge volumes. The clients and candidates are discerning about what they want and the IT market is so vast that there are often on a handful of candidates for each client and clients for each candidate. (See more on onboarding below which references training). 

We need to find someone to help with candidate sourcing and candidate management. To explain where this role fits, it’s worth explaining our process.

1  - Get a brief (not part of this role)

We take time to get a detailed understanding of the client requirement. We then replay our understanding of the requirement to the client to ensure we’ve understood them correctly.

2 - Find candidates

That’s your job. What at your disposal?

Media. We often create media versions of the jobs to promote the roles to our candidates. You can do this or we can do this or we can meet somewhere in the middle.

Researchers. We understand the market and know where to look but, it’s a little like trying to find a cone shell on a beach. We know the beach, we’ll give you a little spade but you need to painstakingly filter through the metaphorical sand.

You’ll have researchers to help you. We currently have the researchers finding appropriate candidate profiles which we then contact. We’re open to keep it that way or change it.

3 - Qualify candidates

Our clients pay us to qualify the candidates. Our candidates like us because we won't waste their time. They want to know that the candidates are looking for a new role, not just fishing for a pay rise from their current employer. They want to know what they do as their job titles are often misleading and lack information.

• What does the candidate sell?
• How does the candidate sell it?
• Who does the candidate sell it to?

They’re all typical questions that determine whether the candidate is a match.

4 - Tell the candidates about the role

You’ll have detailed notes from us. If they’re not detailed enough or you don’t understand, you can ask until you’re sure you’re sure.

At some point, the candidate needs to know about the role and be happy to have their details sent to the client.

It’s a misperception that we force candidates to go to interviews. Some recruiters do but we don’t. We make sure we have enough candidates so that if someone doesn’t want to go, we’ve got someone else who does.

5 - hand back over to the consultant who has the relationship to the client.

It may be that as you learn and grow in the job, you want to deal with the clients as well. We're open to that happening but happy if it doesn't. 

Environment

We operate a home working environment and are flexible on hours worked as long as you’re able to do the job. E.g. you can’t do this job from 10pm to 2am.

We meet online as a team at several set times during the week and lots more on an ad hoc basis.

We meet in person from time to time. There will be a hot desk in your local Regus that you can use. The Directors are based in Leeds and we tend to use The Pinnacle in the centre. 

We're very happy to consider candidates from anywhere in the UK. 

Our preference is the you use your own computer and phone and we pay £100/month to cover those costs. We will supply the kit if you need us to though.

Applicant requirements

Essential

Organised. We often deal with lots of clients and lots of candidates all at the same time.

Intelligent. We need people who think about the consequences of their actions. We're trusted by lots of people with lots of very personal information. We are self regulators of what’s right.

Comfort dealing with confident people. Whatever your image of a sales person is, forget it. This is a different market. The candidates are rarely aggressive, rarely lie and are generally pleasant people. They do earn a lot (often £100k-£400k) and they are confident and comfortable talking about money, being very honest and happy to disagree without being purposefully disagreeable.

Home working environment. It would be hard to do this job if you don’t have a quiet place where you can work uninterrupted.

Ideal

Recruitment of senior execs or sales would be an advantage. It's worth reiterating that we don't place lunatics who'd sell their Grannies. We place people who earn £100k-£200k per year (often more). 

Package/hours

We’ll most likely recruit someone on 20-30 hours per week, probably split over 3-5 days. We’re open to suggestions.

The role will equate to £25k-£40k per year on a pro rata basis.

Holidays are 20 days plus bank holidays plus 2-3 days between Christmas and New Year. No one in IT sales works between Christmas and New Year, including us!

Onboarding

We use a lot of different pieces of software. There will be detailed training for all.

You’ll need to learn a bit about the IT market, nothing technical, more about the market in general. i.e. who are the different software companies in different sectors? Which companies pay the most? What types of jobs are candidates attracted to?

You’ll learn how to do the job lot as you get to work on different briefs and we recognise that you’ll need more help earlier on but we're always on hand. 

We like to think of ourselves as a nice, helpful, friendly bunch.