… and another thing!
September 14, 2008
After my rant yesterday about dodgy recruitment agencies, I was thinking about the differences in experience I’ve had with recruiters working for my organisation and thought I would share a couple more anecdotes about things to look out for when using agencies.
Recently I’ve had cause to terminate quite a long established agreement with our main recruiter, after I had heard a stream of complaints about his poor practice in the last year and after losing a few employees because they hadn’t been managed properly in the process of finding a job. The problem is that many recruitment consultants are heavily targeted (and commissioned) on everything from new business generated to number of conversions (i.e. how many job offers were received against the number of candidates put forward), and this means that some of the more pressured ones end up giving a less than satisfactory service to both the candidate and employing company in order to force through recruits and hit their targets. The complaints I received recently were that the recruitment consultant had mis-sold the company and the job to the candidate and on another occasion had promised a salary review at a much earlier time than our organisation would ever offer. In both these occasions, the agency cannot be held completely responsible for both misunderstandings, as it is down to the company and employee to establish expectations and make the job role and company very clear. However one candidate, who ended up leaving quite soon after starting, said that he had not asked as many questions as he could have done in the interview because he felt the recruitment consultant had given a really clear picture of the role, and as this was his first role out of education he had not thought to check this out himself. He then found that the description had been completely wrong just to suit what he was looking for in a role. With the employee who was given an incorrect salary review date, his initial paperwork from the company made the correct date clear from the outset, but the fact that he had effectively been ‘convinced’ into the role with incorrect information reflected badly on my organisation and made for a poor start to the employment relationship.
I also have examples of the opposite to this scenario. Having worked for a while with a small locally based agency, I have found the service much more reliable and honest. Whilst the size of the company may mean that sometimes they struggle to cope with the large volume of recruitment we throw at them, I think the main consultant we work with has really taken the time to understand the organisation and what is needed. Sometimes we discuss a candidate before they are put forward and during the conversation, the consultant will say ‘I’m not putting them forward because after what you’re just said, they’re not right for the job’, which is a refreshing change from the CV farming we see from some others – where they have simply looked on a jobsite and found CVs for people with the relevant skills, had a quick chat to them over the phone and sent them through for us to discover whether they’re right or not. I think that for the not insubstantial amounts companies pay for recruitment services, a more in depth pre-screening should be standard practice.
One thing we will now be doing is asking specific questions to candidates and newly recruited employees regarding their experience of the recruitment agency, including how they found the company (e.g. advertising, word of mouth or were contacted directly from the agency), how the role was explained, the pre-screening process and how they found the consultant (e.g. were they pushy, did they listen etc). This is something I am hoping will help us to keep finding quality candidates without the worry of how the company is being represented to them.
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