What do Recruitment Consultants do all day?
This is probably not something you lose much sleep over. Or more correctly – it’s something you don’t lose sleep over until your Chief Technical Architect tells you he has won the Euromillions and is on the first plane to Mustique. Then it’s a case of all hands to the Rolladex, grab the crumpled card that was pressed into your hand at some unremembered networking event and brief a recruitment consultancy.
And then wait.
And wait.
And wait.
It’s at this point that many clients do actually start to wonder what their recruitment consultant is doing on their behalf. And start to care. Very much. The system is falling over, the team are muttering in dark corners and the CEO has stopped returning your calls. What the hell is going on?
If you’ve reached this point hoping for either a salacious exposé on the executive search industry or infantile mud slinging at Michael Page’s competitors then I’m afraid that I’ll have to disappoint you. The former is my retirement project and hence some years away. The latter is just bad manners. I am prepared, however, to share some advice about what to do next time to make sure you are not left high and dry again.
Most clients don’t enjoy recruitment or, more accurately, they don’t enjoy the recruitment process. Fair enough, and that’s partly why we’re here. But generally some time spent – particularly at the beginning of the process – is time well spent. Briefing on a role conducted by phone or, worse, email isn’t ever going to give your consultant the full picture or, if I’m honest, get their full attention. Recruitment consultants are, in all but a few cases, human beings who want to engage with their customers and do a good job for them. If they’re not able to engage, they can lose heart. If you’re wondering what the recruitment consultant who you’re hoping is working hard for you is doing, they’re probably working hard for someone else. Some of this is simple economics – it’s much easier to fill a job if you’ve met the client - but in reality it’s more that we prefer to work closely with our customer.
“But I’ve spent two hours giving the guy a briefing and he’s still not coming up with the goods.” I did promise earlier to resist odious comparisons, but I’m sure that you can think of one of your competitor organisations which are less good than you. (If you can’t, please send me your CV). I can too. It may be that you’ve engaged the wrong people. With practice they are easy to spot.
There are basically two types of jobs – jobs with large target populations (e.g. 1st line support) and small target populations (e.g. Chief Technical Architect with fluent Kyrgyz). However neither of these is ‘easy to fill’ and any consultant who tells you they are isn’t going to work hard for you. Sometimes this is completely obvious. You’ve been looking for a Central Asian IT Yoda for years and you know they are difficult to come by. Anyone who says different is clearly either not ‘in the market’ or a fool. But what about the consultant who tells you, “1st liner. No problem, guv. I’ll have 30 CVs with you by 4pm.” Surely he’s going to be proactive? Surely he’ll fill the job?
Possibly – but more by luck than judgement. True, most first line support candidates will have a reasonably generic skill set, but that in no way means they are all appropriate to be sent to you. Do their ambitions fit with yours? Are they a good cultural fit? Do they have the ‘legs’ to progress with your organisation? Will they work for the salary offered? In reality there are probably 3-5 1st liners in the market who merit your close attention. They may be among the 20 CVs clogging your email server, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to secure them – not least because the same 20 unbriefed, and quite possibly unavailable, candidates are also in every inbox from Maidstone to Mandalay. You’re going to have to make a lot of the running if you want to hire one of them.
Is your consultant working the market for you? Are they meeting candidates or just hastily reformatting CVs off Jobserve? Are they exercising their judgement to save your time? Are they fighting the ‘war for talent’ on your behalf? If not, look elsewhere.
However, there are times when even a well briefed and professional agency ‘goes cold’ on a client. “They were recommended, they met with us for two hours and took a full brief, but they’re not pushing the process along.” I hear this a lot – an increasing amount. Back in the day, a fairly common criticism of recruiters was that we were too pushy, too keen to drive along a process, too impatient for feedback and too driven to fill jobs. Too good at our job in truth. In the last 20 years, however, the industry has undoubtedly ‘grown up’, meaning its bigger and better regulated, more technologically enabled, more transparent. All of these are good things, but it does mean that not every consultant in the market is best able to fight and win the war for your talent on your behalf. He who hesitates is lost.
We ask for feedback at the end of every assignment and, generally, it’s a pretty rewarding read, given the fact we handle thousands of vacancies every year. Occasionally I receive ‘challenging feedback’, and I always act on it. If a customer is unhappy, then I’m very unhappy - with one important caveat. I have to admit that when I hear that while the candidates were excellent, the service was attentive and a high calibre appointment made, one of my consultants pushed HR and/or Line too insistently, I’m unlikely to shed a tear. I know I should, but I’m just hard wired not to. I suppose it’s because I don’t really believe that you want to be my friend. If you do, I’m genuinely sorry and I’ll go for a beer with you at my local and we can discuss all the stuff I chat to my friends about; Tottenham Hotspur, what I’m doing at Christmas, whether scampi fries are a better pub snack than pork scratchings. Fancy a pint?
Thought not.
Equally, I rail against the description (sometimes self-ascribed) of recruiters as a ‘necessary evil’. If this is your opinion then I’d like to challenge it – and have my people challenge it. While we do not need to be best pals, I do want to feel that you benefit from our relationship; gain from it, learn from it, are challenged by it and, significantly, hire the best talent as a result of it. All the best partnerships that an individual or organisation engages in have times of disagreement, doubt and drama. That’s why they’re successful partnerships. A client will always get more from a recruitment consultant who is prepared to challenge them, push them for interview times or feedback, drive on the process. This is what we want to do for our customers, both candidates and clients - make successful placements.
So, assuming you’ve engaged personally with the right agency, if you’re not being pushed for feedback on CVs, chased for interview times, hurried for interview feedback, pushed to make an offer to your preferred candidate or persuaded to get an offer letter out, it’s because we think you don’t want us to.
So we’re doing it for someone else. That’s what recruitment consultants do all day.
Written by Stephen Rutherford, Managing Director of Michael Page Technology.
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