How to Spot Good Recruiters

Main Stream Contingent Recruitment Companies constitute 94% of the market. These recruiters compete with other agencies to fill a post. They sometimes also compete with their client who may be advertising on a job board or their website. The recruiter will only get paid should they successfully fill the role, so it’s all about delivering lots of CVs, fast! Quality is rarely their key concern. Recruitment for such mainstream recruiters normally constitutes a job board search, an advert, a sweep of their database and an overly rigid dependence on an increasingly unreliable LinkedIn – that’s it. This type of sourcing typically attracts the 3U’s – Unemployed, Unsuccessful & Unhappy Candidates. Typically, active job-seeking candidates who respond to Job Boards and adverts are artificially expensive. They are approached by multiple Contingent Recruitment companies, leading to more time wasted for you, the client. They are typically registered with 4/5 other agencies so, even before you interview, your chance of a successful hire is around 20/25% and then you will pay artificially high salaries for under-skilled talent. Of most concern with mainstream recruitment is that they generally get coverage of about 20% of the market. The real talent is often hidden away, not considering a move and certainly not perusing advertisements or job boards. They are not tied in to recruiters and have only a low key or no on-line profile. The recruiter’s real job is to find those people and to entice them! Nearly every recruiter will claim to be an “Industry Expert”, will promise to map the entire market for you and to get you the top 10% of candidates. However, they very rarely do. If a bigger fee walks through the door or your assignment proves difficult, yours will move to the bottom of the pile. This is even more likely if you skimp on the fee and engage multiple recruiters – then you really are making a rod for your own back since the Recruitment Company will chase the bigger fees and align their best candidates to where those fees are. Generally mainstream recruitment is bad for businesses across most sectors due to its reactive nature and the client having to overpay for under skilled talent. They tell you they headhunt and they don’t. They tell you they have enough expertise of your sector, your business and the role, but they don’t. They say they scan the world, but they don’t – they scan only what’s clearly visible to anyone. Many of these simply disappear into the night, never to be heard from again. The remaining 6% of the industry includes Executive Search Agencies (Head Hunters) and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) or Managed Service Providers, all of which take on exclusive search mandates. Most claim to use head hunting or targeted search to seek out and engage passive potential candidates on a selective and individual basis, rather than through broad brush advertising. When a client engages an RPO/MS provider, the client manages all or part of its permanent recruitment through one external agency, wheres Executive Search is generally related to one or very few searches only. Both the Executive Search and the RPO/MS approach can be very effective, but only if the provider has expertise in your industry, function or project. Unfortunately, less than 1% have such deep expertise – they tend to be generalists rather than specialists. Therefore, finding a great recruiter to work with is like finding a needle in a haystack! We discuss both further below.