It must be very hard to be a recruitment consultant or headhunter these days unless you are adding a lot of value to your clients. It's so much easier to find a selection of candidates for a role, and then filter through them to a build a shortlist before inviting them for an interview. For a few hundred pounds per month, as an employer, you can access a site like 'Monster' and search through a vast database of candidates.
You can also use services like 'LinkedIn' to find prospective candidates to where business people will list their career history, skills and experience.
In certain sectors of the economy there is bound to be a larger supply of candidates then there are positions open. Many of my oldest friends are in this industry and make a good living from it. But with the vast majority of recruitment consultants are not very good at illustrating how they add value to their clients.
Every day our office receives calls from recruitment consultants trying to help us fill the roles we have open and which are advertised on our web site. I admire their enterprise for calling and trying to place their candidates with us. But their calls meet with our policy on not using headhunters to recruit new people.
Our experience with headhunters has been disappointing. When we have accepted the terms of a headhunter who then sends us candidates for our project manager or developer roles, their candidates were no better than the individuals we found through the online services like 'Monster' or through networking. The difference is that you pay a large percentage of the successful candidate's first year salary to a headhunter and you can save yourself some time trawling through the online services.
But the fact is that many headhunters send us the same candidates that we have found ourselves through the online services. Furthermore, we can find potential candidates through LinkedIn for free, bar the time spent contacting them.
So, the difference between paying 25% to 30% of the first year's salary of a successful candidates salary through a headhunter and what you pay to trawl through 'Monster' yourself is so wide that you would expect a recruitment consultant to add something more valuable than if you did the leg work yourself. You would expect them to have vetted them to check their suitability, skills and experience for the role. This is simply not the case in our experience.
Digital technology and social media tools are shedding light on the mediocre and poor headhunters who add no value to the challenging task of hiring good people into a business. In the current economic climate, recruitment companies are going to have to work hard to show their value to clients. They used to take the leg work out of finding candidates by going down to the Jobcentre for you or placing ads in newspapers for juicy sounding jobs to attract prospective candidates.
You can do most of this yourself by simply learning to use the advanced search functions in the online job sites now. Top recruitment companies now have to do more for the large fees if they want to survive rather than using hope and 'mud-throwing' as a strategies to get a candidate to 'stick.' You would, at least, expect them to have a rigorous selection process themselves. The good ones will do this. Most of them don't.
Excellent post! If this group does not reinvent itself they will be the next group to be disintermediated by the web.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree with your observations and experiences. Being in recruitment, and specifically within digital marketing, where many clients and candidates are very clued up in digital technology and social media, then we do have to adapt and change quickly, probably more so than recruiters in other specialisms.
ReplyDeleteThe point you make is one I have come across on a fairly regular basis and seems to get brought up every time there is a new advancement in how people can recruit. When Monster and similar generic job boards were first launched about 10 years ago, people were commenting that is would be the end for recruitment consultants. What previous experience has shown is, however they very rarely bring to a complete end more traditional methods, but make them sharpen up and, as you say, adapt their services.
There has always been the option for clients to recruit directly, and although the methods have become cheaper and more accessible with advances in digital media, I genuinely believe there is still the need for professionals offering recruitment consultancy. The main issue has always been those recruiters who don't consult and who just rely on having a database and sending CVs which match a few basic points with those outlined on a job spec, cross their fingers, and hope they get lucky. From my experience these are the minority, and tend to be the less specialised recruiters who don't really understand the market or discipline they are recruiting for.
In addition, there are still a lot of clients and candidates who like to have that 3rd party involvement to help them manage their recruitment journey, but I agree that there has to be an added value provided. Those who can show they understand both their clients and candidates needs are the ones who I believe still have a place in the recruitment process.
I'm finding that, although challenging, it is an exciting time to be in recruitment, and it will be interesting to see what the recruitment landscape looks like this time next year.
Hi Matt,
ReplyDeleteThank you for a well thought through and interesting comment.
In my case, for the last few roles I have had in businesses, I have neither been placed by a recruiter nor been contacted through placing my CV onto an online service. I have found all of my roles through personal contacts and networking. The beauty of this is that it allows both the employer and me to measure each other up and lower the risk of making a mistake by knowing each other's reputations and capabilities.
This is, of course, what most employers would like their recruitment consultants to do for them, and many do, as you state. Digital technology will simply cut away the recruitment consultants who do not carry the necessary filtering and assessment of candidates.
There will always be a place for good recruiters, of course, with a 'rifle' methodology to placing candidates. But there will be no room for recruiters with a 'shotgun' methodology.
Thanks again,
Will
[...] time ago, I wrote an entry about traditional recruitment companies facing the challenge of showing their value to employers [...]
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