Perceptions are a great thing aren’t they (“The mice think they are right, but my cat eats them anyways. This is the point, reality is nothing, perception is everything.”) The recruitment industry has lots of them (good and bad, but according to perceptions, mainly bad) and each day, here at Arras, we have to deal with the perceptions first and then quickly move on to doing business the way we’ve always done it. So what are the perceptions and how can recruitment agencies do better at addressing the perceptions and ultimately get rid of them altogether?
- No understanding of the role an organisation needs to recruit for
Pretty basic requirement you would have thought but just last week I was speaking to a client about their recruitment experiences and the first thing mentioned was this. This client had spent time with their recruitment agent, going through the job spec, explaining every line on the job spec and still ending up with CV’s that were a complete waste of time. The morale of the story for this particular client, we might have a PSL (Preferred Suppliers List) but what’s the point if we’re not getting the resources we need? - Bombarded with CV’s (and of little relevance)
Until this practice stops, the recruitment industry will never be able to shake off the perception its gained. The second most irritating thing clients find after spending time talking through their vacancy, leaving the recruiting agent with a good insight into the role and organisation is that they’re then bombarded with CV’s which may or may not match the job specification but it’s expected that the client will spend time sifting through these (in effect doing the recruitment agents job for them). Throwing CV’s at a client and hoping one will stick is a shoddy unprofessional practice that really does show the lack of understanding in recruitment agencies today and ultimately shows the lack of respect to the paying customer. - The perception of value
One of the fundamentals of good sales practice is ensuring that each party in the deal is happy with the deal they made, no one wants to feel they’ve been given the hard sell and left to feel disgruntled before the recruitment process is even underway. The perception of value works in two ways in recruitment – the low value (or low rate) and the high value (high rate), both bringing two different sets of behaviors and feelings. Low value or low rates are OK for high volume, general roles (administration, customer service, finance etc) but not so good for one off, difficult to fill specialist roles – like project management. The high value/high rates should be reserved for a particular level of service needed to attract staff at the higher level (after all the investment in the senior role will make a difference to an organisation’s bottom line so the appointment needs to spot on). Clients recognising that high quality successful recruitment partners may cost a few more % and are happy to make the investment are equally disgruntled when they find that the extra % has just given them the same service levels they experienced on their high volume recruitment – still loads of irrelevant CV’s and still a recruitment agent that doesn’t understand their roles! The client organisation are quite right to ask themselves the question “Did I get value for my money?” - Lack of communication – do you want my business or not?
Incredibly this ranks highly on an organisation’s list of perceived weaknesses in using recruitment agents, generally it’s a sign that the agent is struggling with a role and doesn’t have the candidates to submit. So why the lack of communication? At Arras, we specialise in those hard to fill project management positions so the recruitment process can often take just that little bit longer to find the right person so it’s crucial that we keep the communication channels open. If the role is difficult to fill we are often spending time consulting with our clients – asking those questions to gleam further information so we can rethink job specifications and the options available to us to attract the right candidates – recruitment is never straight forward but good communications certainly make it easier and less frustrating for everyone!
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