What makes a standout candidate in today’s construction and property industry?

🤎24% of businesses plan to increase recruitment in Q2 2025. 🖤 25% of workers are expected to leave their employers for better opportunities. At the moment, recruitment is a client led industry. Job-seekers aren’t settling for a shabby service or someone who does a half-arsed job because they don’t have to. If they’re not happy with a recruitment company, they can simply move on to another one because there are plenty who are trying to fill the same roles. According to Total Jobs, 85% of employers experience challenges related to poor-quality job applications, which means two things: 1. Competition is fierce 2. Hiring managers and recruiters need to up their game and think outside the box For us, this means looking beyond a CV and taking the time to get to know about someone’s skills, energy and adaptability. It goes without saying that experience and qualifications are still hugely important, but there is often more to a person than a document about their career history. We’ve put a ‘wild card’ forward for an interview on more than one occasion, but there’s a lot to be said about a gut feeling, and following your instinct about someone. We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘There’s just something about them,’ and it’s that ‘something’ that can give you an edge from a recruitment perspective. You just need to make the effort to find it. 🔥

Earlier this year, Madeleine attended a LinkedIn event called ‘Future Ready’ that focused on AI and how it can drive business development in the recruitment industry. Poor Mads had been joking for ages that one day her job would be overtaken by ChatGPT, so it was good to see her looking relieved the next day! 😂 As much as we use AI regularly to speed up certain tasks and save time, the human element is still very much needed to get decent results. For Chat GPT (or any AI software) to be of any real use, the processes behind it need to be solid, consistent and applied properly. You wouldn’t hire an admin assistant without giving them some training and we think of AI in the same way. If you wanted to use it to write a job spec, for example, you’d need to use a prompt that specifies the correct tone of voice, then check the text for inaccuracies, dodgy spelling and any missing information. AI is never going to replace our team’s decision-making, intuition or judge of character, so they don’t need to worry about being replaced! But what it does do is improve productivity so we can spend more time interacting with people and doing what we’re good at.