Staffing and Recruiting Consultant (Part 1) – The Talent Scout
By Tonya Holowitski, RPR, RPT, CMP, LinkedIn, published on March 26, 2018
No one grows up and graduates saying I want to work in the Staffing and Recruitment Industry. In fact, most people aren’t even familiar with this profession. In this series, we are going to uncover the different facets of staffing that make the career interesting, the different traits that make a strong staffing professional and how to properly leverage staffing professionals if you are a job seeker.
One of the many interesting roles we play in this profession is acting as a talent scout. The difference between us and a sports talent scout is we don’t have the opportunity to watch people play on the field and then approach the best team player. We have to cold call, analyze resumes on job boards, surf the sea of social media, attend networking events (think wine and cheese, or fancy meals with guest speakers) and job fairs. Essentially we are paid to talk to people.
As we meet people who specialize in the professional arena we focus on, we meet with them in person or via Skype to learn more. For example, some staffing professionals focus on accounting and finance, others may deal in light industrial, while others may do engineering, so on and so forth. We are regularly meeting with talented people to identify what makes each and every individual stand out. No different than the Sports Talent Scout, not every athletic professional they meet are they going to bring in to the major leagues, but they never stop looking. Just like the Sports Talent Scout, we are paid to find the best talent appropriate to a specific team, so we may not place every individual, but we are always looking.
A difference between the staffing professional and the Sports Talent Scout is we can be engaged by many teams and many different industries (think a high variety of sports). We sometimes are looking for a long-term solution for a team, other times, we are identifying talent to step in and provide support while the current star professional is injured, on leave or departs. We call it Permanent Staffing Solutions (long-term) and Temporary Staffing solutions (short term).