Hire for Attitude, Train for Skills

It’s not a new saying, but whenever it’s used now everyone instantly agrees, it should be a resourcing mantra, particularly in tougher times.

As recruiters we spend most of our time looking for people with a skillset, with a historical CV that ticks the boxes that clients want.

It’s changing.

Job description tick lists are no good, because you will rarely find the people who tick every box, and if you do there is no guarantee that they will succeed.

Past performance can be a very unreliable indicator of future achievement.

I was intrigued to read a blog from Katie McNab – Customers Aren’t Always Right.

Read it! Because she is UK Recruitment Manager for one of the largest FMCG brands on the planet. And she wants her team to challenge hiring managers, forget what may suit them and start looking at what the business needs.

My favourite part is:

A line manager with a team of 5-6 people might recruit once a year. He or she will have a very short-term goal in mind. They want someone to fill the “empty chair”. And while they don’t recruit very often, they usually still have some very firm views about what “good” looks like.

But we recruit all the time. We live and breathe this stuff. We know our markets, our industries and our legal obligations. And that gives us the right and the responsibility to challenge line managers on their requirements.

How many 3^rd party recruiters challenge a client? We also live and breathe this stuff, but how many of us push back and really help the client to be creative?

Very few I guess.

Are we too scared of losing the brief? Scared of missing a fee? Do we want to just fill empty chairs?

Have we lost the bottle to invest time in building credibility with the client by bringing some real INSIGHT to the process? Because that’s how long-term relationships are developed.

Ah yes, INSIGHT.

If you read my last blog you’ll know that the good people from LinkedIn said that the number one priority for a 3^rd party recruiter focusing on maintaining some form of market position is Insight over Data.

I would grab this as an opportunity to forget searching for historical CVs and start looking for real talent, with real potential and real attitude.

Clients use us because we can give them an insight to the market, a window onto the world of potential talent that is available, either actively or passively.

So stop giving them what they can find themselves…and start finding people that they can’t.

Rarely a day goes by without talk of a skill shortage…and most recruiters nod compliantly and see this as an opportunity…but an opportunity for what?

If the skills aren’t there, then they aren’t there. So instead of acquiescing, and firing out dozens of headhunt calls, and placing numerous online job ads, just STOP!

Remember Katie’s hypothetical example?

Given the choice of a solid Brand Manager from a global competitor or the owner of a small start up who has managed to launch a fantastic product with limited resources, and really creative solutions… I think the managers would instinctively lean towards one option. And I think the business as a whole would lean in the other direction.

3^rd party recruiters need to be able to offer the same approach, the same confidence…and the same INSIGHT.

Stop looking for skills and start looking for attitude…then let the best companies take care of the upskilling.

One Source To Rule Them All?

I’ve sensed for some time that the game is changing for 3^rd party recruiters. The industry has gorged for too long on easy fees and low value offerings and this has led to a lack of agility, an inability to invent, create and lead.

Ask any capable recruiter to name their main competition and they will reel off a number of companies who they battle against for the best briefs and candidates.

Rarely will they say LinkedIn. They see the platform as a tool that they may be able to use when they have the time, a source of candidates and vacancies, and a directory of soft headhunt targets.

Not sure how many see it as a primary resource for clients.

Clearly though, with each addition to functionality and capability being aimed solely at the corporate market, the platform has the ability marginalise any traditional transactional permanent recruiter.

On Tuesday I attended the Stepstone Solutions Summit 2010 on the Changing Face of Talent Management. I covered the event for UK Recruiter, and you can read my review of the event here

During the afternoon we had a presentation from LinkedIn. They shared some research findings which certainly captivated an audience of 200 HR and Talent professionals…the very people that most 3^rd party recruiters spend their working life trying to connect and build relationships with.

The main points were:

1) Most corporate recruiters worry that their competitors will learn to use social recruiting better than they do and build better talent pools

2) Biggest focus for corporate recruiters at the moment is to reduce spend on 3rd party recruiters/staffing agencies. Second biggest focus is to boost referral programmes.

3) Corporate development resources are now channelled on training in-house recruiters to find the best talent and on measuring quality of hire.

4) What’s next for LinkedIn? To increase investment in tools THAT INCREASE VALUE TO CORPORATE CUSTOMERS.

They admitted that the outlook was bleak for 3^rd party recruiters unless they could show clear differentiation and additional value. Key to this would be:

– Insight over data

– Understanding brand equity

– Creating real depth to relationships

The point that left the most lasting impression was what was referred to as ‘the end of the walled garden’. No more proprietary databases, deconstruct the talent pools, and crowdsource what you need.

I’ve reported those points fairly factually, because that’s how the audience heard them.

An audience who, as I mentioned before, are probably currently dealing with, and certainly getting business development calls from, a number of 3^rd parties.

Clearly LI are in selling mode, and I don’t doubt for one moment that their presentations are aimed very much at stimulating a compelling reason for corporates to use them.

Yet I don’t believe that any recruitment agency could have given that presentation. We no longer have the credibility or legitmacy. To address a talent management conference and present staffing sector findings, insights and future developments, in such a powerful way requires a commitment to innovation and a belief in the strength, ubiquity and robustness of your service that I am not sure recruiters can muster.

Change will come I’m sure, but as I wrote in a recent blog, we’re now playing catch up. I left the conference with another 200 potential hiring managers who now will wonder why they aren’t doing more themselves, how they can reduce agency spend and how well they need to ‘do’ social recruiting.

The ray of hope is that we will begin to offer insight, knowledge and value. Make the service less transactional and more about the quality of hire, less about the size of the fee.

Be a key resource, not part of the crowdsource.

At the moment though, there looks like could be one source to rule them all…and it’s LinkedIn not us.

Let me know what you think.

Is ‘Commission’ Becoming a Dirty Word?

‘We don’t work for commission, we work for you’

Walking through my local branch of the UKs largest electrical retailer you couldn’t escape that statement. It was printed on every price tag and every poster.

Flip this and you may think that if they worked for commission then they wouldn’t be working in your best interests.

Cross the road and enter one of the UKs largest mobile phone retailers. In their literature you’ll read…

‘This year we also made a big change to our Retail Reward Scheme; we scrapped our commission-based pay structure and introduced our new pay deal, which encourages better team-working, and more emphasis on providing great customer service’

Flip this and you may think that working on a commission-based pay structure does not encourage team working and an emphasis on greater customer service.

I’ve also noticed a growing tendency for financial services businesses to start advertising the fact that their staff do not receive commission…

…and I have sat in many client presentations where the fact that I was not remunerated by commission has been a big positive for the client.

Regular readers of this blog will know I believe that rewarding purely for sales achievements as opposed to providing a great service and experience has driven poor practices and behaviours in the recruitment industry.

Now it would appear that leading businesses in other sectors may be thinking about how commission based rewards affect behaviours…and seeing a no commission approach as giving them a competitive advantage.

So is ‘commission’ becoming a dirty word?

How can you provide an impartial, collaborative, customer centric service whilst incentivising individuals with commission?

Does a no commission policy give you a competitive advantage?

Let me know what you think…

Money For Old Rope??

“How can recruiters find candidates that the corporates can’t find themselves?”

That tweet caught my eye yesterday. I think it emanated from a TruAmsterdam chat, I don’t know who said it or the context but it stood out and really got me thinking…Why ask that now??

Why haven’t recruiters been asking this kind of question for years?

Surely that’s what recruiters should always do…find talent that clients can’t find for themselves.

The flipside of this would be to say that recruiters are too used to offering clients a route to market that the client could use themselves. Which is of course mainly true.

Job board advertising, CV databases…all very well, but why?? Surely a client has always been able to utilise those for themselves?

Unfortunately it’s been too easy for too long for most 3^rd party recruiters…take a brief, advertise the role, wait for response, blow the dust off a few database CVs…and charge a fee.

Money for old rope? Harsh, but looking at it from a client’s viewpoint you may ask where the value is.

Having said that, clients themselves have often been complicit in allowing this to happen, but the times they are a-changing…

Clients are doing it for themselves

Recruiters are now trying to use LinkedIn more, but guess what…they’ve missed the boat! Clients are already starting to use it…and LinkedIn themselves are offering functionality and capabilities that are ONLY for the corporate market. A corporate recruiter will now probably be able to find a much stronger shortlist than a third party using LinkedIn.

Barely a day passes without another blog or article criticising the attitudes and behaviours of 3^rd party recruiters, and you can’t deny that we often give them an easy target.

In the last couple of days we’ve had ’12 Lies Recruiters Like to Tell’ by Christine Livingston and ‘I Strongly Dislike Recruiters’ by Veronica Ludwig. There was also had a long piece in Recruiter Magazine which further drove a wedge between agency and in-house recruiters, painting them as two tribes with different views, attitudes, aims and rewards. My colleague Andy Young responded to that with the excellent ‘It’s not WHERE you work, it’s HOW’

We seem to be here on a weekly basis. I wrote recently about the sales model and how it was responsible for so many of the behaviours that annoy clients and candidates and had the usual range of responses from believers and deniers.

In reality there seems to be a real ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ attitude and unfortunately the measure of ‘broke’ isn’t customer satisfaction but bank balances.

The belief seems that it makes money, and if it makes money it must be right. New offerings, which are invariably old offerings with new price models, are aimed at cost and speed, not really with providing a better or different experience or building long term relationships.

There seems little appetite for re-invention. We hear talk of communities, talent pools & puddles, social sourcing, but ultimately most 3^rd party recruiters are remunerated and incentivised to place as many people as possible, whilst their employers look for the cheapest, quickest routes to market.

So what are we really doing that’s different?

What do most 3^rd party recruiters offer clients that they couldn’t do for themselves?

How are we adding VALUE?

Let me know your thoughts.

Blogs mentioned above:

It’s not WHERE you work, it’s HOW

12 Lies Recruiters Like to Tell

I Strongly Dislike Recruiters

Making the Switch

When Sorry Seems To Be The Easiest Word

I was on the receiving end of some poor customer experience at the weekend. The word ‘sorry’ was used, but in such a gratuitous, throwaway manner that it actually made the experience worse.

And having had many debates around the candidate experience within recruitment I was interested to see the parallels with other commercial sectors.

My conclusion, not unsurprisingly, was…bad experience sucks! However it’s delivered, a bad experience makes you want to shout and scream, tell everyone you know about it, and never use that business again.

And ‘sorry’ is a word that is often rendered meaningless by the way it’s delivered.

Here’s what happened. It was a simple, everyday shopping situation…

1) Went in to a local branch of a major bookstore to buy a specific greeting card from a range I had been looking at the day before.

2) Range wasn’t there. Was told that the range had not sold well so had been moved to stock to be replaced by another range. Asked if someone could go to stock and get me the one I wanted and was told that no-one could.

3) Chose a different card and joined a queue (in third place) to pay.

4) Two more joined behind me prompting a second sales person to come over and help out (wearing a t-shirt saying ‘Christmas Helper’). This sales person started serving from the back of the queue, ignoring the people who had been waiting the longest.

5) When it was pointed out that she had ignored the people waiting the longest she said, without even turning to look properly at us…

Sorry, I didn’t see you there

(not sure what their training is, but if she missed a queue of five people I suggest that she’s not cut out for this line of work)

6) To make things worse, when I did get served I was given the wrong change. The till had been closed so I had to wait until the ‘Christmas Helper’ had finished a long transaction at the other till before getting my correct change. I told her of my frustrations and she said…

I’ve already said sorry, what more do you want

7) I replied…

A gratuitous ‘sorry’ doesn’t make a bad experience better

So next time a candidate applies for a role and…

– The role has already been filled, or pulled, or put on hold, or never existed

– The CV isn’t a good match

– The candidate has made attempts to get you and not heard back…

– …or keeps applying and no-one tells them that they are unsuitable

Then an auto e-mail saying thank you for your CV, if you don’t hear from us within 14 days you can assume that you are unsuitable for the position is very frustrating and not very informative…

…a message ignored is disrespectful

…and a

‘sorry, what’s your name? I can’t seem to find you here can you send it in again’

…is a very bad experience.

As I said before, bad experience sucks…and every person who interacts with your business and goes away with a negative impression is someone who may well shout and scream, and tell everyone about it.

What are you doing to make sure that all your customers, clients and candidates are having a good experience??

It’s a Beautiful Noise…

I was watching a documentary about Neil Diamond on Saturday night and he was talking about his song Beautiful Noise, and how the idea came from his daughter listening to a parade and hearing all the different music which merged together to form a beautiful sound.

This resonated with me, as earlier that day I had been reading some really strong posts from new bloggers, and was really impressed with the way so many of the new bloggers, from different backgrounds and viewpoints, were reaching out and really making a difference, writing some interesting and thought provoking stuff.

We talk about white noise on social media, but when people dig deep and make this kind of effort to give us a different insight into our day to day interactions, then this is really a Beautiful Noise.

There were three people in particular that made a difference to me this weekend and I think they all deserve a big mention and a wider audience. Each one shines a different light on the power of social media and how it can be used to inform and transform.

Firstly, Alison Chisnell. She is an HR Director who came along to the ConnectingHR unconference and was clearly bitten by the social media bug. She has been a willing participant in the ConnectingHR community and is there for our weekly #chrchat. On Friday she posted about her efforts to get her company interested in using social media for communication. Not only did she write this on her blog, but she then posted the Pecha Kucha presentation that she used.

Wow! No nerves, no trepidation, just reaching out to the community with her thoughts and ideas. Jumping in and being part of the conversation.

HR professionals in the UK have tended to be slow adopters of social media, but with ambassadors like Alison I am convinced that the conversion will be quicker.

The second blog that really hit home was from @recruitgal – she is a UK Recruitment Manager with a major global brand and a new blogger. What did she write about? How not to do Cold Calls. A really informative and entertaining blog, and as a third party recruiter this is a great resource. Clearly she is frustrated by some of the approaches that she gets.

A potential client contact telling us how not to approach her. What more could you want? How else could you have got this information? I know that recruiters are not exactly welcoming of potential clients telling them what’s wrong with the industry, but seriously…how can you argue with an in-house recruitment manager telling you how not to try and do business with her. The blog is there…available through social media…no need to cold call to try and get a conversation.

Finally, and most heart warmingly, my friend Sarah Knight. Some of you may already be aware of her quest to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and raise money for a very worthy charity. Some may have even seen another UK HR blogger use his own blog to help raise £1000 in sponsorship for her…and have also read her blog of thanks. For me, her story epitomises everything that is good about social media connections, and how the willingness to engage and share goes way beyond trying to sell your latest product or service.

I have now met her twice socially, and spoken to her on the phone a few times. I didn’t know her before we connected on Twitter, yet there is little doubt that we are now ‘friends’. I encouraged her to start blogging about her quest, have offered my support when things were getting tough, and we are both part of a small Twitter community of people who have pulled together to encourage and inspire her.

So here’s my beautiful noise for this week…

Alison Chisnell – read about how she has tried to transform her company’s attitude towards social media – Practical ideas for becoming more social…and keeping it simple – and watch the presentation that she used – HR becoming social

Katie McNab ( @Recruitgal ) – find out what does and doesn’t work when you are trying to sell to a recruitment manager form a global brand – A cold calling masterclass…how not to do it

Sarah Knight – see how social media really works…if you work with someone who thinks it’s for geeks and nerds then get them to read it too – @theHRD…I thank you

Hope you enjoy reading them…let me know who’s making a beautiful noise for you this week?

I’m a Dude, Yeah!

Now I do like a challenge. There I was trying to pen a belated birthday post – the blog’s birthday, not mine – when I read Kevin Grossman’s Rocking Carnival of HR challenge!

How to combine the two? Easy!

Bloggers rock! Oh, they so do! Bloggers are rockstars, and we need more. All companies should have bloggers too.

Blogging is a way to share and learn, inform and inspire.

Let’s face it, more and more of us are now getting our fix of news and views from blogs…and more and more of us are putting our thoughts and ideas into blogs. Very few of us are trained writers or journalists, but we have a passion and interest that we want to share. A great blog really can inspire debate and get you thinking.

And where’s the music angle? Well regular followers of T Recs will know that David Bowie is one of my all time favourite rock stars…and there’s a clue in one of his songs…

“All The Young Dudes/Carry The News/Boogaloo Dudes/Carry The News”

Oh yes! Bowie’s apocalyptic song envisaged a dying world, with only five years left. (The track was originally written for the Ziggy Stardust album). No need for entertainment hence no need for musicians…they were left to ‘carry the news’ not unlike the wandering minstrels of medieval England, moving from town to town telling people what was happening.

How does this relate to blogging, I hear you ask??

I see bloggers, be they concerned with politics or economics, entertainment or culture, daily routines or grand schemes…or HR and Recruiting…to be the Young Dudes! The world (thankfully) really has a bit longer than 5 years to go…but I’m not sure print media has. Its online bloggers who will increasingly help spread the news, insight and new thinking.

So plug in that guitar…get ready for that opening riff…I’m a Dude, Yeah!

Wide Awake at truNORA

There’s a rumour going around the Twitterverse that I dozed off during truNORA on Thursday. It’s complete nonsense I can assure you.

Flicking through the excellent set of images that Sara Headworth has produced you may see one of those photographic moments where a mixture of light, angle and shutter speed combine to give a false impression…proof that the camera can easily lie.

The offending picture was actually taken during a track that I was co-leading about the candidate experience…there was plenty of debate there to ensure that I didn’t doze off.

I’ll start my thoughts of the day with the candidate experience track as it’s the second candidate experience track that I have co-led at a tru event this year, and it’s a subject that has filled blogs, comments and numerous conversations, both online and offline.

This conversation was similar to the last, in that it featured a mix of representatives from job boards and seasoned (cough, experienced!) recruiters and my conclusions are the same.

Candidate experience is a state of mind not something you should have to think about doing. Automated acknowledgements, no matter how personally written, are not an experience. They should be an absolute minimum expectation as a matter of respect and service and should be followed up by a more personal interaction. Personally I think 3^rd party recruiters get too involved in conversations around job board functionality. The experience that matters to the candidate is the one that happens after they have applied, and is most probably important to the candidate whose application is unsuccessful.

Interestingly the recruiters who talked most of the importance of personal contact in this process, of candidates becoming clients and ambassadors for your service, were the most experienced recruiters, those who have been around for 20 years or more…maybe the candidate experience really is just good recruiting habit. In which case shame on the industry for turning its back on it recent years.

I heard a lot about Linked In too, and have to say that each improvement and enhancement to functionality seems to signal another nail in the coffin of traditional 3rd party niche permanent recruiters. Just my opinion, I know, but the industry really does have to come up with a value proposition and offering that does not include something that a client can do for themselves. Posting on job boards and searching on LinkedIn are both routes to market that a well connected hiring director has available directly…we should be able to offer something more that justifies our fee. Most new LI tools are aimed at clients, not at recruiters, which I fear could well lead to a client being able to put together a stronger shortlist than a recruiter unless we look seriously at what we can offer.

With recruiters slow on the LI uptake, it was even more interesting to hear employKyle talk of his age group’s indifference to the platform. Recruiters should be ahead of the curve, not playing catch up…which is why we need to be on top of how the next generation workforce will communicate and engage.

I really enjoyed hearing about Hard Rock and what they do. Loved the Authenticity – Lifestyle – Purpose approach to engagement and believe it is something that all companies should aspire to. I have long thought that trusting your staff, and enabling them see a wider purpose to their role and your business, is key to getting the best out of them. Companies have nothing to fear from social media if they have an engaged, collaborative workforce. If you fear your people will use social media to portray a negative image for your business then your problem is not social media…its much closer to home.

All in all another interesting, thought provoking day offering the chance to chat and debate with old friends and new faces…

…and certainly no time for napping!

Keeping It Real

What is it with some people and optimism? I mean, it’s nice to be optimistic sometimes…I always believe my team are going to win, am certain that my son will deliver good grades in his exams, and hope upon hope that Santa will bring me a new iPod.

But I pretty much know that the economy isn’t going into overdrive any time soon.

I wrote a blog nearly a year ago called Optimistic Recruiters Don’t Create Jobs. It was true then and it’s true now. For the record:

Growing companies create jobs.

Companies grow when demand for their goods and services grow.

Companies hire when their capacity to fulfil the growth in demand is limited by manpower.

This is fairly basic stuff but you would be surprised how many people seem to think that if we think everything is going to be alright then it will be. I can accept that there are one or two exceptions, that in a GROWING economy some firms will forward hire in anticipation of future demand either in existing or new markets.

But now isn’t one of those times.

There was a bit of a fuss this morning with a CIPD press release forecasting that there could be as many as 1.6m extra job losses in the UK over the next 5 years. The belief is that these will be covered by new jobs created by the private sector…yet to do that would require a level of consistent growth in the UK economy that it is nowhere near achieving any time in the near future. The CIPDs economist – a man I have a lot of time for, and one who has been right a number of times in recent years – was speaking to the Treasury select committee and that was what he was going to advise. Let’s not forget that there are already 2.5m claiming jobseekers allowance (many more inactives not claiming too).

So what was being said here is that total unemployment COULD rise to 4m (almost certainly will be 3m+ it seems) and the very best we can hope for in terms of new jobs is 1.8m, but that the circumstances needed for those 1.8m to be created are not yet in place.

Shouldn’t have really been a shock to anyone. Certainly not a shock to anyone working in recruitment and HR, for whom you may have thought this was a quite relevant viewpoint. It should highlight a big cause for concern.

It is an economist’s view; one heavily involved in our industry, and as such I would have thought of interest to us.

But the problem seemed to be that it was a negative message. It prompted some angry tweeting and blogging, including this rant by Andy Headworth.

People seem to want optimism. Had the press release said that lots of new jobs were about to be created, maybe it would have been more acceptable.

Why? Because if we believe that the jobs are coming then they will come? Is this the CIPDs fault?

We will be getting new figures from the REC on recruitment activity soon…if the figures aren’t good will it be the RECs fault? (It won’t be down to them if the figures are good!)

All of this makes me think of the Stockdale Paradox. Written about in the book Good To Great, it refers to an American Captain in the Vietnam war who became a prisoner of war. On his coping strategy he said:

“I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

In answer to the question ‘Who were the people who didn’t make it’ he said

“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

If you’re reading this blog there is a strong chance that you are a someone who is advising or helping people in their careers and job searches.

I would have thought a bit of realism would go down well, a valuable part of helping people.

Apparently not.

Clearly I don’t believe optimism is good for business and I don’t believe that it is good for our candidates and clients. I do believe that we need to be honest and truthful and deal with things as they are.

So I’m throwing down a challenge.

Tell me why you think I’m wrong. Why is it better to be optimistic, even though it is may be completely unfounded? Are we in danger of leading those who rely on us in to the disappointment?

Surely we all want to be the Stockdales, coming out the other side….

It’s The Sales Model, Stupid!!

Whatever the industry cheerleaders will have you believe, there can be little doubt that the recruitment sector is facing critical problems that whilst not terminal, could be very damaging. Threats from direct sourcing, downward pressure on fees and timescales, upward pressure on candidate and regulatory volumes, increasing service demands and expectations from clients and candidates, and the advocacy that social media brings enabling poor practice and experience to be communicated widely and quickly, will inevitably create burdens that many underfunded, complacent, inflexible recruiters will struggle to see off.

The debate has raged again in the blogosphere this week with a quite stark view from @theHRD on this blog. Needless to say, it attracted opinion on both sides, and the debate immediately moved to figures and semantics…always a stifler to any argument of ideas, ideals and passion.

Only a few commentators picked up on the obvious fact…this piece was written by a client. The HR Director of a fairly major (so we believe) business who would almost certainly a ‘sales’ target for pretty much every 3^rd party recruiter in the UK and here he was telling the industry that the party was over, the days of high volumes and big bonus cheques were probably disappearing fast…and what was the initial reaction?

To disagree with him!

Can you think of any other industry in which a customer telling you that your offering is poor, outdated and no longer does what is wanted would be told that he was wrong??

Me neither!

I wouldn’t mind but the industry prides itself on being a sales led industry…and what is one of the first things a trainee salesman learns? Don’t say ‘yes, but’! You don’t win business from someone by disagreeing with them and telling them they’re wrong.

But then optimism, whether unfounded or real, is a key driver for a sales business.

So what’s the main thing wrong with recruitment industry in my opinion?

It’s the transactional sales model!!

It’s been unchanged for 50 years and there seems no appetite to change it now. Not when it’s made many people wealthy in the past. I can’t think of another business sector that has a standard operating model that has been unchanged for so long.

Before I go on, let me try and establish a case for having such a strong opinion on this. It’s not just thrown together! I have been a billing recruiter, month after month, for over 20 years. I spent a number of those years placing recruiters, during which time I must have interviewed at least 3000 experienced and trainee recruiters and sat in well over 500 client meetings where I have been briefed by directors/managers of agencies on their requirements, culture, values and goals.

When you look at the recruiter behaviours that most annoy candidates and clients I believe they can all be traced back to the transactional sales model. So let’s consider a few inconvenient truths about the sales model. For starters…

It makes the recruitment process all about the fee and not about the person.

Yep, it sure does. Number one target for any recruiter is fees. Don’t bring in the fees; you don’t keep your job. In fact I can think of few business sectors in which an employee can have a clause in their employment contract which states that failure to meet targets for 2 consecutive months will lead to a written warning. I have seen these contracts and people sign them. Unbelievable short-termism. Similarly I cannot think of another industry in which an employee can be told that they are now on a commission only deal, and if they don’t like it they can leave. Yep, I’ve seen that too. In fact I’ve heard directors talk of having done it. In a tough market, with pressures on all sides, those fees have to be made…and when your job could be at stake, that’s quite a pressure.

There’s no money in candidate experience.

Damn right there’s not! (Irony alert) Well, there’s not if you’re measured on fees, jobs bought in, interviews, CVs submitted, and interviews gained with client. Why spend an hour interviewing someone you can’t place in a job this month? Why spend a few minutes ringing back candidates who have applied but aren’t relevant? Get on the phone…find a new vacancy or find a candidate you can place. This isn’t a guess on my part…it’s something I have been told many times by recruiters.

As I’ve blogged before, in my company we have a team who speak to every single candidate who applies for a role. They don’t have targets. A year on I have still to find another recruitment business that understands the value in a candidate facing team that have no fee or activity targets.**

No time for feedback.

I blogged about this last year…inspired mainly by a comment from a recruiter in another business who told a candidate chasing feedback “To be fair if we spent all day phoning people who were ‘no’, which we’d like to do because it’s the ‘experience’ as much as anything that counts, we simply would go bust”. So there you have it from the horse’s mouth. No money in feedback…get back on that phone and cold call. If you spend time talking to unsuccessful candidates you’ll go out of business.

Inappropriate and poorly matched CVs sent to clients.

Another metric favoured by agencies is number of send outs. It also pays to send as many CVs as possible, in case a competitor sends the candidate over. More CVs may also get you more chance of interviews…it’s all a numbers game. And it’s sticking to the numbers that will keep you in your job.

I could go on, but that’s enough for now.

None of this should come as a surprise to regular readers. My first ever blog was about how I believed that tomorrow’s recruiter should be incentivised on feedback not fees. I’ve recently blogged on how business communication is changing and how business to business sales is changing.

This isn’t an anti recruitment industry rant. Anyone who was at the last Recruiters Networking evening would have heard me debate passionately in support of the industry. It’s the way we operate that needs to change. The transactional sales model rewards behaviours that have gradually dragged us in to disrepute…which is probably the biggest inconvenient truth of all.

I am also lucky enough to work within a business that rewards on client and candidate feedback and is prepared to invest in areas that do not lead to immediate fees, but provide a service and experience to the candidates and clients who use us.

At least the recruitment industry apologists all seem to agree that behaviours have to change…but my question would be how…without changing the operating model? You can’t change the way people behave without changing the way they are rewarded and motivated, and they way that their performance is measured.

I just scanned some online ads for recruiters and picked up these essential qualities:

‘Successful candidates will have a good academic background, but most importantly will be focused on entering a target driven environment where there is the opportunity for rapid career progression as well as significant earning potential within the first 12 months’

‘You must be hardworking, driven and determined with a strong aspiration to make a lot of money and a desire for success’

‘The role is a traditional recruitment position involving, winning, maintaining and developing business. You will do this in a mature environment and have the ability to work both autonomously and also as part of a team’

‘You will not be afraid to pick up the phone and enjoy business development as this is a key part of the role’

‘You will be a graduate with some sales experience’

These people will be looking after your careers and recruitment processes.

Reading that lot, I can’t see behaviours changing anytime soon…can you?

** Previous posts mentioned are:

Incentivising Tomorrow’s recruiters – it’s Feedback, not Fees

No transferability, No feedback…Candidates have feelings too

The End of the Phone?

Four reasons why recruitment sales is changing

Candidate Care – do you value your currency