Why being out of recession isn’t completely good news for hiring companies.
Posted by Mitch on 12th March 2015
The recession is over and everyone is confident.
Companies are hiring and recruiters everywhere are happy – especially agency recruiters.
Recruiters are trumpeting how well the industry is doing, whilst conveniently forgetting that a huge chunk (91% to be exact) of its reported near £30 billion UK turnover comes from the temp/contract market where the margins are far lower than in permanent recruitment.
The “War for Talent” is back on. Hell, one bloke even went further..
2015 Will Be a Bloodbath for Talent http://t.co/clIVgRKexD via willrecruits</a></p>— Will Thomson (WillRecruits) March 10, 2015
So, big shortages of “talent”, everyone fishing in the same shallow candidate pools and recruitment agencies writing blogs and LinkedIn articles on why it’s critical that companies don’t waste any time making job offers to their candidates, because they won’t be on the market for long.
In other words, we’re back to a market that’s less about recruitment and more about candidate trading.
Now were back to agencies pitching candidates with same job/sector experience.
Now we’re back to hiring managers being too lazy and/or overworked to stop and wonder why someone doing the same job for another company would be interested in working for them, especially as he didn’t remember giving the recruitment agencies anything remotely resembling a brief, unless that 6 year old job spec they emailed over counts as a brief.
Many hiring managers, HR people and internal recruiters don’t actually know how to articulate what they really want from agencies, largely because they don’t think they’re going to get it even if they did ask.
This lack of confidence in the 3rd party recruitment sector has been underscored by years of agencies over-promising and under-delivering (“We have great candidates”, “We’re experts in your sector”, “We’re not like all those other agencies”, etc..) and so are resigned to having to deal with multiple agencies in the hope that one of them will get lucky.
So, what it is this near-mythical “recruitment consultancy service” that most of them would actually want, if it was on offer?
In simple terms, they want an external recruitment supplier who can:
1. Take a really detailed brief, having already done a lot of prior research. Part of this process will involve asking difficult questions like “Why would someone want to leave their job and work for you?” and “Why is the average length of stay of your salespeople less than 14 months?” and “Do you think how you usually recruit new staff has influenced this high turnover?”
2. Translate all that information, insight, negatives and positives into a compelling message (or series of messages) that sell the job to the right types of potential candidates, whilst dissuading those who wouldn’t be suitable.
3. Use this information and insight to assess candidates suitability and personalise aspects of the sales messages to reinforce their interest in the job. Then deliver these people to the client.
Ideally, they’d like one recruitment supplier to do this – partly because they don’t enjoy dealing with lots of recruiters at the same time and partly because they’ll easily understand why having 4 agencies all doing this would do more harm than good. Think litigious bun-fights over candidate duplication issues with the better candidates rolling their eyes and walking away.
The downside to the above scenario is that it requires the recruitment agency to be good at one particular and crucial thing. Recruitment.
That requires some knowledge and a lot of effort, so instead, most agencies prefer to go down the ‘candidate trading’ route because it’s what they know.
I think this is another of those vicious circles that most people can see but very few ever do anything about.
I recently stepped-in at the last minute to join a webinar on the role sales plays in recruitment. My exasperation that the participants couldn’t even define what selling is, led me to describe agency recruitment as “a clusterfuck”. Me not being invited back to anymore of those discussions, doesn’t make my description of how agencies and hiring companies do business together any less true. A clusterfuck is precisely what it is.
If you’re offended by bad language, please don’t read that last paragraph.