Three Into One Does Go
Posted by Mitch on 6th September 2012
I spend a lot of time on social media – LinkedIn and Twitter mostly.
I use both places to network with recruiters (agency and inhouse) as well as industry suppliers, a few techies, marketers, bloggers, journalists and Arsenal fans. But mostly recruiters.
A lot of what I see recruiters complaining about are related to issues surrounding their market being eroded – either by the emergence of more inhouse recruiters and the lowering of margins.
Most of these things can be solved by making one simple decision. I don’t mean they can be solved instantly, but they can be solved in time, let’s say within a year, by making just one decision.
That one decision is this:
To evolve your client base from one that only buys contingency recruitment services to one that buys exclusive recruitment services.
And ‘exclusive’ doesn’t mean recruitment services that can’t be found anywhere else, it means recruitment services they only get from you.
It all boils down to this – if your client has outsourced a particular vacancy to you and you alone, you will have the time and resources to fill it by working all the sourcing channels.
That means what you’re NOT selling is candidates.
What you’re now selling is the knowledge that the client has probably hired the best person currently available.
That’s the polar opposite of pain. It’s comfort. Client’s like comfort.
This is the future for recruitment agencies.
That doesn’t mean that contingency recruitment is going to disappear, it won’t, but I think it will increasingly become a recruiting method that’s seen more as a preliminary, ‘getting to know you’ stage before an agency and a hiring company formalise their working relationship.
It’s not just me that’s saying this either.
It’s also an opinion that’s been expressed by Mark Stephens, Strategy Director at the F10 Recruitment Group and by that popular recruitment sage, Greg Savage.
All three of us saying pretty much the same thing, albeit in slightly differing ways.
That’s three battle-scarred recruiters with one way to improve client satisfaction and agency profits.
And in this particular recruiter’s case, it’s what I’ve been selling to clients for 3 years now. It works.
What else do you need to be convinced?