One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most over the last twenty years in recruitment is that your reputation is never finished. You can’t complete it.
You keep building it every single day.
In a profession built entirely around people, that’s harder than it sounds.
People are wonderfully unpredictable. Every hiring process is influenced by countless moving parts most of which sit well beyond a recruiter’s direct control. A candidate’s current employer might suddenly offer them a promotion. A partner may have concerns about the commute. Family circumstances can change overnight. Salary becomes more important than flexibility, or vice versa. Priorities shift. Confidence wobbles. Counter-offers arrive. That job process that seems dead in the water, now comes back offering the world. Budgets disappear. Hiring managers leave. Projects get delayed.
Every one of these factors, might change the course of a process.
As recruiters, we don’t walk candidates into the interview room. We don’t sit beside them while they’re being interviewed. We don’t hold the pen while they sign their contract. At every stage, people make their own decisions, influenced by factors we often know little about.
Fortunately, the majority of clients understand this. Hiring involves people, and people don’t always behave predictably.
That doesn’t make it any less painful when things go wrong though.
If you’ve spent weeks preparing someone, arranging interviews, keeping everyone informed and genuinely believing you’ve found the right match, only for the candidate not to turn up to interview, it hurts.
Not because you’ve lost the potential to earn a fee. They’ll be others.
Because your reputation is attached to that introduction.
The client trusted your judgement. The candidate trusted your advice. When either side lets the process down, you inevitably feel some responsibility, even when the circumstances were completely outside your control.
That’s the burden of working in a relationship-driven profession.
It’s also why I believe recruitment should be about more than simply filling vacancies.
For the last ten years I’ve invested my own time into running QE Babble, a series of free events for the software testing community. There was never a commercial objective behind it. I simply wanted to create something that people genuinely found worthwhile.
Ten years later, I’m still refining the format, challenging myself to find better topics, inviting different voices and looking for ways to improve the experience. If people are willing to give up their time to watch it, I want them to leave feeling it was genuinely worthwhile.
People also want advice from recruiters. What’s approaches are working? How should you position yourself in the market (we all know this changes frequently)? What companies/industries are doing well right now. I spend time each week talking to people about this, even If I don’t have the perfect role for them.
I do it because I care about the impression I leave on the industry, I’m fortunate enough to be part of.
Reputation isn’t built solely through the work you’re paid to do. It’s built through every interaction people have with you and the value you create, often long before someone becomes a client or a candidate.
The reality is that reputation takes years to build and seconds to lose.
As recruiters, we deal in trust. Clients trust us to represent their business professionally. Candidates trust us with career decisions that affect not only them, but often their finances, their family and their future. Neither relationship should ever be taken lightly.
That’s why I’ve never believed recruitment is simply about matching CVs to job descriptions.
It’s about understanding people well enough to reduce uncertainty.
The better I understand what genuinely motivates a candidate, the more likely I am to spot hesitation before it becomes a withdrawal. The better I understand what success really looks like for a client, the more likely I am to challenge a brief that isn’t quite right before valuable time is wasted.
Does that remove risk?
Of course not.
People will always surprise you.
This isn’t a sob story and I hope it’s not viewed in this way. My point is that relationships are first and foremost built on trust and a mutual understanding. Get these parts right and it’ll go a long to enhancing your reputation