Swimming with recruiters
- Harris Madden
- 19 August 2008
Why do many people have such a low opinion of recruiters?
First of all, it’s fair to say some recruitment consultants are commission-driven salespeople. Recruitment companies are often expedient and commercialise the role of a recruiter by remunerating largely on commission and basing key performance indicators on sales behaviours. But there is another side of the coin and it’s about the way employers engage with recruiters.
Employers looking to fill middle and lower-level roles prefer the success-fee business model. This encourages the recruiter to focus on making a successful placement – not on giving the best advice about the role or the candidate. There is no incentive to add value.
Compare this to a retained search, where the recruiter uses his or her experience to help the employer carefully define the role and the attributes of the ideal person for the role.
Essentially, the consultant seeks to sell the candidate to the client. The success-fee model creates a commercial risk for the recruiter and they could seek to manage this risk in ways that are not in the employer’s best interests.
If an employer chooses one recruiter’s candidate over another’s, the successful recruiter could be tempted to ignore a negative reference check, for example.
Many employers think the way to recruit the best candidates is to put five or six recruitment companies on the same project. This delivers poor results for several reasons.
First, few recruiters will engage on this basis – those that do don’t value their own time and don’t have much value to add.
Generally, they won’t spend a lot of time searching for the best candidates and they are unlikely to find those elusive ‘passive candidates’ – people who don’t normally apply for jobs.
Often in specialist roles there are not that many candidates out there, and good candidates can be turned off if four or five recruiters approach them simultaneously. It cheapens the process.
Candidates become reluctant to express interest in a role if they feel the recruitment process is purely a financial transaction for the recruiter. Regardless of their capability, the recruiters involved have very little time to spend on the project. They may have ten speculative projects at any one time and on each of those jobs, they’re in a race with five or six competitors. How much time do you think they will devote to understanding the needs of your business and matching those with great candidates? This process can mean that employers need to sift through 20 or more résumés to work out which candidates are worth interviewing.
"This encourages the recruiter to focus on making a successful placement - not on giving the best advice about the role or the candidate"
Some recruiters will submit résumés almost at random, often without permission, hoping to get a hit. What should be a careful, human, value-added process soon ends up being highly competitive and transactional.
It is also very inefficient from a recruitment company point of view – lots of activity to produce few results. Consequently, fees stay high and employers complain about the cost and quality of the service.
Further, the transactional and sales-driven nature of recruiters makes business owners less inclined to want to deal directly with them.
The good news is that there are ways for both sides to get much more out of the recruitment process, which we’ll take a look at next month. Harris Madden manages the senior executive search practice at recruitment firm LaVolta.
