Executive Recruiting Online

Recruiter – Friend or Foe?
There are two types of recruiter available to employers, those who work and those who don’t.
Since I started my recruitment career in the early 1980’s, the recruitment industry has changed beyond recognition.

The UK market (where I worked) and the USA markets are very similar, mostly run on contingency fees where the employer only pays a fee to the employer when a candidate is hired.

This is the standard model employed by most recruitment firms, but of course, there are also “head-hunters” who charge huge up-front fees for the privilege of filling your vacancies.

In this article, I will concentrate on the contingency recruitment model.

These days, it is difficult to know a good recruiter from a bad one and in all honesty, you won’t know until you’ve experienced the good and the bad.

A good recruiter is usually (but not exclusively) a mature recruiter – somebody who has been around the block a few times and who understands commerce and industry.

These types of recruiter understand service. They know that in order to fill a client’s vacancy, they will need to:

1. Gain an understanding of your workplace
2. Understand the job / person specification
3. Be able to communicate these to potential candidates
4. Be able to find candidates
5. Be able to interview candidates
6. Be able to sell your company to the candidates
7. Have the ability to close candidates and secure their services

That’s a tall order.

Can you, in all sincerity, say that your recruiter can do all of this?

First of all, let me reassure you about something. I am no longer in the recruitment industry. I am not looking for your business. I don’t need your money.

There is no agenda, so my views are unbiased and independent.

My view is that the recruitment industry has taken a big backward step with the introduction of job sites.

Candidates no longer feel that they have to work at finding a new job. It’s all been made too easy for them with automatic resume or CV submission services.

All they have to do is register with a jobs portal, copy and paste their details into a form and WHAM!, their details are immediately available to 100,000 recruiters who, if they have the right keywords (notice, I didn’t say “skills) on their details, will beat a path to their door.

The only problem is that recruiters don’t beat a path to their door anymore, because on the whole, they are lazy and they too, rely too much on automation.

In many cases, particularly in the competitive fields like IT and legal recruitment, the recruiter will only ever his or her email inbox for an “alert” to say that a candidate has registered who has the same keywords in their profile as the recruiter placed on a job board.

At that point, it becomes a rush to the finishing line!

What should happen, is that the recruiter calls the candidate and arranges a face to face or at worst, a thorough telephone interview.

Sadly, because recruiters work on a contingency fee basis, they simply forward the resume to you, the client.

Before you know it, you have 20 or more identical resumes.

Nobody talks to the candidates anymore. It’s a sad reflection on an industry that claims to pride itself on professionalism.

The first the candidate is likely to learn about your job vacancy is when one of the recruiters actually picks up the telephone to speak to him (or her). That will only happen if the client wants to arrange an interview.

This is the beginning of your problems as an employer, because you now have to choose which recruiter you want to represent you with this candidate.

“Ah, but that’s easy” I hear you say. “We’ll just go with the first one who sent the resume”.

That, my friend, is the root cause of the problem. By encouraging a “first past the post” regime, you are inviting your recruiter to take short cuts.

By using a more professional and probably mature recruiter, you will your life a lot easier.

Discourage the first past the post mentality and you will save countless hours in wasted interviews, because your recruiter will make an effort to ensure that all candidates are interviewed and pre-qualified before you even get to see their resume.

This will create an environment whereby the candidate will actually be interested in learning more about you, will want to meet you and, if the recruiter has done his job right, will want to join you.