Bigger, badder, not better.
Posted by Mitch on 9th October 2015
Whenever I need to use a recruitment agency, I nearly always favour working with the smaller boutique variety rather than the large national multi-branch operations.
Most of this discrimination has been formed as the result of working for, and dealing, with large recruitment agencies.
In my experience, the number of capable recruiters per capita in large agencies is much lower than in the boutiques.
Obviously, there will be a small number of exceptions; SThree spring to mind as a possibility.
But generally the bigger an agency becomes, the more it becomes about metrics and revenue rather than customer satisfaction or the only meaningful agency metric; job to placement conversion rates.
I think that the bigger a recruitment agency gets, the more their recruitment gene pool starts to become shallower than the piss-puddle of a Chihuahua with a water infection.
This may not be the most popular opinion I’ve ever had.