What is a job?

In most cases the simple definition is a daily, weekly or monthly collection of tasks you have to complete.

How do you complete those tasks? Through a variety of skills or specialist knowledge you have gathered over time.

How do you become competent in any job? Usually by repetition of tasks you know and also adding new skills to your repertoire over time.

In a candidate light market, where there are more jobs to fill than available skilled candidates, employers are increasingly looking at the viability of cross training.

No, not that new fitness fad, cross-fit, but the idea of finding someone from a different role or sector who possesses some of the most relevant skills or comparable or compatible experience, and then providing additional training to fill the gap in their skills or experience.

If we break down most common jobs into skills and competencies we can see that cross training in the current market is a massive opportunity for both the worker and the employer.

Looking at FRS Recruitment for example, a classic approach in the recruitment industry has often been to take young and energetic graduates and train them in the entire process of 360 recruitment, which for most can be a monumental task. Through the academy program however we have taken the approach to look for workers who have been employed in a wide variety of fields and identify those relevant and complimentary skills and experience, so that we can focus on training and support around the recruitment process and leverage their existing skills and experience from their non-recruitment jobs.

Putting aside the recruitment process, the skills and competencies that a successful recruiter should have are:

  • Administration
  • Sales, ideally selling a service
  • Attention to detail
  • Public facing experience
  • Empathy
  • Problem Solving
  • Resilience

By identifying these traits in workers from other sectors we have successfully cross trained a large and growing number of people into the recruitment sector, benefitting the company overall by adding new domain knowledge each time.

Ironically the world of Temp recruitment has always been a scenario of fitting a round peg into a square hole, or understanding the minimum competency requirement that a job or client would require to complete their task and selecting a potential candidate who may not necessarily be the 100% ideal candidate at first glance, so you could say that FRS Recruitment has a lot of experience in solving employers problems in a challenging candidate drive market.

If you feel that you possess the skills or competencies that make up a good recruiter, and if you have experience in a niche or interesting work sector, perhaps cross training into recruitment might be a new opportunity for you. FRS runs academy hiring programs a few times each year so you may be eligible to join us and take a step out of your comfort zone and into the dynamic world of recruitment.