When are the clients going to start taking some of the blame?
In the very early days of my social media career, a lot of agency recruiters used to label me a “recruiter basher”, mostly because I used to promote the idea that companies should do whatever they could to bring their recruitment inhouse.
Given the amount of recruiter bashing that’s been going on over at LinkedIn these past few years (nearly all of which has been from candidates by the way) my criticisms of the 3rd party sector look anaemic.
To blame recruitment agencies for poor service or bad behaviour is too convenient and, if I’m honest, a little stupid. I wonder when the hiring companies are going to start being apportioned some share of the blame for agency behaviour? After all, they choose which agencies they give their job vacancies to.
If they really did have an employment culture that is worth protecting, they’d be more careful about who they allowed to represent them to their prospective future employees, wouldn’t they?
And if a company really did have a positive employee culture, surely that would be reflected in how they attracted, assessed and treated their future employees during the hiring process, wouldn’t it?
They’d care about the kinds of advertising messages being used to attract these people, how they were first engaged with and how they were screened, surely?
They’d want someone credible being the interface between them and their future employee, right?
But if you believe all the online commentary about recruitment agencies from non-recruiters about things like inappropriate emails, unprofessional phone calls and spamming candidate CVs, none of this is being addressed. From the outside, it looks like some companies select recruitment agencies with their eyes shut.
When a hiring company gives several agencies the same vacancy to work on, they’re effectively giving those agencies permission to play the numbers game.
Those hiring companies will argue that they need to hedge their bets because their previous experiences with agencies has been unreliable. Perhaps no one has told them that 1 recruiter doing everything properly will always outperform 5 recruiters doing everything badly.
Agencies will mount all kinds of arguments to justify being one of five agencies all racing each other to the bottom on every vacancy they take in. The most laughable is when they say that they really are giving a good service – but a cursory look at their ads will tell you that all they’re really doing is acting like a clearing house for jobs.
I’m looking forward to one day seeing a hiring manager (or an HR person) posting something on LinkedIn that basically says something like;
“I’ve had a job go unfilled for 3 months because all the agencies working the vacancy were fucking useless and generated nothing but the wrong type of candidates. But you know what? It’s my fault because I chose them. I didn’t do any due-dligence. I was fucking careless and I won’t make that mistake again.”
They might not swear as much as I did, but you get my drift…
I’m starting to tire of people moaning about bad agency practice – not because I’m an apologist for the industry, because I’m not, but because they ought to start doing something about it themselves.
How about researching the agency before giving your vacancies to them? LinkedIn alone is a mine of valuable information about recruiters.
Does the recruiter look like someone who will appear credible to those Management Accountants you need to find?
Can they sell jobs? Or do they just post versions of a job description?
What does their email marketing look like?
Do they screen and/or assess candidates? If so, how?
How professional do they sound when you talk to them?
How smart are the questions they ask?
Do they ever challenge you?
If you only work with competent agency recruiters, the amount of potential candidates who think that if your hiring process is messy then you’re probably going to be messy to work for, will dramatically reduce. Which means it will get progressively easier to find suitable people for similar vacancies in the future.
Just stop believing they’re the best recruiters because they tell you they are.
Them being an “expert in your field” – apart from being mostly untrue – is no guarantee they know anything about the art of recruitment. The art of recruitment are all those small but critically important things that need to be done if someone is going to be persuaded to leave a job and take another one with your company.
Things like the depth of the research, the quality of the brief, the attractiveness of the job marketing, the professionalism of the candidate screening, assessment and management, the commitment to take (and make) candidate calls in the evenings and weekends.
All those little things that hiring managers either can’t do, or won’t do.
Those are the things the recruiters who charge big fees should be very good at doing. Those are not the things recruiters whose fees are only 10-12% are going to be good at. And I don’t care how “passionate about recruitment” they tell you they are.
If you’re a hiring manager (or an HR person) and a recruitment agency working on one of your vacancies acts unprofessionally, it’s ultimately your fault.
When he’s not running copywriter training courses, Mitch can be found on LinkedIn.
