At The Secret Event Service we have worked with a range of clients. Some of the best events with purpose we’ve helped to organise for clients have been in the recruitment sector. So it got me thinking – why should recruiters be investing in events? Really that question should be “why should anybody in business be investing anything in anything?”. The answer of course is that it’s a worthy investment of time, resource and money. Here’s 3 reasons why:
1. Events give you the platform to build new relationships – building relationships is hard in any industry, but the recruitment industry has a particularly negative reputation when it comes to this. I remember when I used to work for a recruiter, I would cold call so many businesses a day and couldn’t get through the gatekeeper, or if I managed to get through, I would be faced often with a harsh tongued MD on the other end of the phone who felt I was wasting their time. It’s difficult to get across your value over the phone and it’s nearly impossible to get a meeting face to face to begin with too. You need to break the ice with the client, give them a reason to trust you, to consider you as someone who really understands their needs. Events give you an opportunity to get people together for peer to peer networking and to discuss topics of interest to their industry. Being the organiser means that you get to be part of these discussions and therefore you’re more trusted and able to build those all- important relationships. It also gives you a reason to be making that first call that takes the edge off – you’re not selling, you’re helping!
2. Events give you the opportunity to hear cross-industry problems – being part of the conversation when peers are talking about the problems they share in the industry gives you a unique opportunity to help them find solutions. As you do this, you of course become part of the plan to help to solve some of these problems. Not only that but often you hear about these opportunities first, meaning you’ve got the edge on your competitors when it comes to delivering what your target industry needs!
3. Events open you up to discovering new markets – if you find that in discussions at your events that one of the top problems faced across the industry is finding new talent in X field, and you hear this over and over, you’re able to see a pattern that could lead to you developing bespoke solutions before your competitors have time to catch up. This puts you in a prime position as a thought leader to best help develop and grow that industry!
So now you know why you should be running the events in the first place, the next thing you need to ask yourself is what kind of events should you be running and how do you make best impact with these events? If you’d like to find out more about how to answer these questions, you can contact me directly on kate@secreteventservice.comor 0113 4874900.