Choosing the right recruitment supplier
A few weeks back I was reading an agency website that claimed they were better than their competitors because they “cut through the noise” and are able to attract better quality candidates.
Then the acid test.
I read their job ads.
All of them looked like this and included long lists of demands (“you will be doing..”, “you must have..”) rounded-off with a message saying that only successful candidates will be contacted.
A classic example of leakage.
Leakage is where a business says one thing but does something opposite. In this case, that’s a recruitment agency saying they know how to attract great candidates, but their actions suggesting otherwise.
Choosing a recruitment agency for most hiring managers is a task they take to with the same enthusiasm the rest of us have for calling Sky’s customer service.
Some take refuge in agency claims to be specialists in whatever job it is they need to fill – mostly because that is what they want to hear; that this specialist recruiter is going to know what to do. Because most hiring managers dislike dealing with anything recruitment related.
But is someone calling themselves a specialist enough? Some of these specialists were selling mobile phones or gym memberships less than 2 years ago. But even despite that, selecting a recruiter based purely on age or experience can sometimes be a little short-sighted.
Probably a more reliable way of assessing a recruiter’s ability to do their job well, is to check their job postings.
If their job adverts are useless, chances are they’re still going to be useless when sourcing potential candidates via other channels too.
Here’s a quick 4-point checklist of what useless job adverts look like:
1. A list of ‘must haves’ and very little about what’s in it for the reader. We should be calling them “readers” because they’re not candidates yet.
2. A copy and paste of a job description.
3. It’s formulaic. Check the agency’s other job ads. If they all read the same, they’re formulaic.
4. Grammar and spelling. I’m talking serious stuff like “manor” instead of “manner”. “Loose” instead of “lose”. “Shit Manager” instead of “Shift Manager”. That kind of thing.
Basically, job ads that have had such little effort put into them that the only logical conclusion is that the company think they’re doing everybody a favour just by having job vacancies.
The most reliable way of assessing recruiters that I don’t know (or haven’t worked with before) is to see if they can produce job content that’s been written freehand, and with no spelling mistakes. If nothing else, that shows they at least try to interpret what their clients are looking for rather than just posting the job description.
And if they do that, then for me, it’s evidence that some thinking has happened at some point. Thinking is good.
Checking a recruiter’s social media output (and especially their jobs) has got to be the most logical starting point for any hiring manager when deciding which recruiters are going to work on their vacancies.
Many of them do this for candidates, so why not do it for recruitment suppliers too?
In fact, it’s probably the closest you can get to testing a recruiter’s ability in the real world. You know, that world that’s different to the one where suppliers tell you how brilliant they think they are.
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
