Skype is an essential part of any recruiter’s toolset – and it’s free to use. It’s a dead easy way of screening or interviewing candidates who you may not otherwise have been able to meet.

A big part of your job as a recruiter is negotiating. It can be hard work sometimes, we know! Here are 10 negotiation tips to help you get a better deal, for yourself and others:

Interviews are the supreme gateway for talent to enter a business and they’re the most popular form of candidate assessment going. But, ironically, academic evidence suggests that interviews are only mildly effective at predicting a candidate's future success in the job. One particular study by Schmidt and Hunter revealed that interviews may only predict about 14% of the variability of employee performance. It is especially worrying that interviews have such low levels of reliability, given how much they are actually used to assess top talent.

Are you sick of doing searches over and over again? It’s one of the most time-consuming, frustrating, and ultimately expensive experiences a recruiter can have. If it’s an experience you know well, it’s time to look at your interview to hire ratio (or, if you’re not tracking it yet, now’s the time to begin!).

If your ratio is more than 4:1, stop. Something has gone wrong. Until you address it you’re going to be caught in an endless search for more candidates, only to have them rejected. Before you present any more candidates, get to the bottom of the issue.

Here are four common areas that could be affecting your interview to hire ratio:

There’s an interesting and extensive discussion going on over on Linkedin about whether or not it’s a good idea for recruiters to format candidate CVs. We all know that admin is the worst part of a recruiters job, however it does make a difference to go that extra mile for your hiring managers.

It’s all well and good outlining notes and tips for how the candidate could reformat the CV themselves, then sending it to them, waiting for them to carry out the task, receiving and checking what they’ve rewritten... but this all takes time. So how do you strike that balance between getting the CV ready to present to the hiring manager and doing the work for the candidate which could lead to misrepresentation?

Your candidate database is brimming with money. Each good candidate in there is worth £5k or more for every time you place them. Trouble is, that money is falling out of your database and into other recruitment agencies’ pockets. How does it happen? And, more importantly, how can you stop it from happening?

“We love our clients,” you say. For the most part, you mean it. But there’s always one. One client who, no matter what you seem to do, brings on headaches and eye-twitches across the office. The one who turns down every candidate you present; the one who thinks your job is easy; the one who wants all of your attention, all of the time. How do you handle someone like that?

With November comes dark mornings and dark evenings. You’re feeling the pressure: it’s been too long since you made your last placement and tensions are running high in the office. The star candidate you had lined up for interview this morning bailed out at the last minute. You’re working long, hard days looking for candidates with skills that are in short supply. At some point we’ve all arrived at the thought: “I didn’t even plan to be a recruiter in the first place! What am I doing?”

Making an offer should be the best part of your job. You’ve done the legwork and now it's time to make everyone happy: a new job for the candidate, a new hire for the client, and a fee for your hard work. It doesn’t always work out that way though.

LinkedIn boasts over 161 million users across over 200 countries: it’s the biggest source of candidates imaginable, and there’s little question why it’s the first bookmark in the browsers of most recruiters. Connecting with the right candidates isn’t easy though. If you’ve ever found yourself asking, “He’s perfect for this role – why won’t he connect with me?” then we’ve got 5 tips to help.