Time management is the bane of all recruiters’ existence. You have all of these plans for reaching goals, making money, and satisfying clients and candidates.
We have a tendency to feel like we’re accomplishing a lot just because we’re busy, but unfortunately, it can often be just the opposite. We get so overloaded sending emails and making phone calls and doing so much stuff that we don’t notice until we settle down and the smoke clears that we accomplished very little. Then we get in a panic to accomplish more and throw ourselves with even more determination into that busywork thinking it’ll eventually pan out. Contrary to our natural inclination, this is the time to slow down, possibly even stop, and evaluate what we’re doing.
Most recruiters measure their success by phone calls, but what if those phone calls aren’t fruitful? What have you accomplished? Largely a waste of time, that’s what. At the end of the day, week, month or year, look back on:

• How many candidates were hired
• How many candidates are satisfied with their new position after a few months
• How much money you made
• Whether your clients’ hiring goals were met
• If you built quality relationships with candidates for future jobs

If you haven’t already, create a target candidate profile that includes things like important experience, personality traits, preferred management styles, motivational factors, location, etc. This will help you develop a clear, definable, and fair tactic for considering candidates. You will end up spending less time deciding on and less time justifying your candidate selection with this profile. Make sure when you create this profile to further save yourself time by prioritizing the most important things to look for in a candidate. You don’t want to be too rigid about it, because you might overlook qualified candidates and end up spending unnecessary time looking for someone else, but you do want to have a targeted idea of who to pursue in the first place.
Don’t look into everyone who meets one or two criteria and waste time on a huge number of candidates. Do use a targeted candidate profile to home in on and give these people thorough consideration to make sure you don’t dismiss or accept someone too lightly.
Mastering the art of time management is down to developing a habit to automate your routine tasks, giving you more time for you to spend on tasks.