A Queensland-headquartered recruitment company's new learning and development program has reduced its exposure to the "single biggest" growth blocker in all recruitment businesses.

Davidson last year introduced the L&D model, which includes a large leadership development component, co-founder Rob Davidson told Shortlist.

"We identified very early on that probably the single biggest reason that recruitment businesses are unable to scale and to grow is the quality of the leadership.

"Typically, recruitment businesses are founded by a few entrepreneurial people. They're able to manage a team of four or five people each, but once you start to need a more sophisticated approach to leadership and to build in those multiple layers of leadership, that's when most agencies come undone, and because you don't have the people who can lead and grow teams the business itself can't grow.

"We've invested really heavily in a multi-tiered leadership development program that's aimed at executive level right down to team leaders and our aspiring leaders."

A comprehensive L&D program helps consultants position themselves as career professionals, rather than transactional salespeople, and it is also key to keeping up with evolving client needs, said Davidson.

"Recruitment and consulting is becoming a more sophisticated business, where the market is polarising," he said.

"[Niche recruitment boutiques] will remain small, effective agile businesses, and then the middle ground is disappearing and the remaining growth sector will be the larger, more sophisticated businesses which are structured more along the lines of a traditional professional services model and that's very much what we're aiming to replicate."

Extend development beyond technical skills

Where Davidson's L&D program differs to those that recruitment companies typically offer is its extension beyond technical skills, said Davidson.

"What we're aiming to do... with all of this, is to create a genuine learning culture in our organisations where people not just learn the technical skills but they learn how to learn and consult, which is a very difficult thing to accomplish," he said.

"Recruiter development that I've seen previously focuses on a few – pretty basic – recruitment skills and [is] heavily focused on sales skills, aimed at getting people up to speed quickly with minimal skillsets so they can start quickly in a transactional recruitment model."

That, however, is short-term thinking, because clients want to work with recruiters who have depth, substance and can add genuine value, said Davidson.

"Certainly, you're seeing in the request for tenders and proposals these days that generally there's a fairly significant component of that devoted to, 'what is your agency doing in terms of learning and development?' And, 'how are you upskilling your people so that they can add value to our organisation?'"

Davidson's L&D model includes components that help recruiters understand the business and HR issues their clients face, said Davidson.

"So, for example, things like what is HR strategy really? How does that link with business strategy? How does that link to recruitment needs? What is workforce planning?

"To be quite honest, there's a lot of clients out there that are really grappling with what these issues are themselves, so when you can train a workforce to actually go and add value to clients in terms of helping them to define and understand what these issues are, and then how to respond with designing and implementing the solutions, that's a really powerful differentiator in the market," he said.

The company also recently added an L&D component that aims to develop recruiters on a more personal level, Davidson said.

"It's one thing to build your leaders; it's another thing to build the consulting expertise and excellence, but there's a third component of course which is just building the whole person and... incorporating a personal development part," he said.

"Overall, what we're aiming to create is a really well-rounded consultant [or] a really well-rounded leader who, by virtue of having come to work in our environment, is able to honestly say, 'I'm a better recruiter than I was previously'."

Set recruiters up for their future career

The program aims to equip recruiters with skills that will assist in their future career – even if that takes them to a different employer or industry, said Davidson.

"It's our firm belief – and we certainly push this line with our clients – that in the fast-changing world of work none of us can say what we're going to be doing in five or 10 years' time.

"We can't say our jobs will exist or our businesses will exist, and I think that leaders in businesses today have a moral obligation to be trying to equip their people with the transferable skillsets to mean that they'll have the attitude and the skills and the personal attributes to survive in the future world of work."

To that end, Davidson now has a full-time L&D head running the program, along with part-time support staff in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand, he said.

"Because we've always, as a business, invested heavily in senior people such as myself having the luxury of not running billing desks, we also train our team leaders and our business managers to assist heavily in that learning and development process, both as trainers and as coaches."

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