Recruitment: rewarding the bad guys.....
Employers
of the world! Today I’d like to talk type to you about bad recruiters.
The
shoddy ones who don’t understand your requirements!
The ones
who spam you with CVs of candidates they either haven’t spoken to or haven’t
spoken to enough!
The ones
who fail to represent the good candidates well and oversell the mediocre ones!
The ones
who don’t know how to punctuate!
What if I
told you that there’s a magic-wand-like method you can use to get rid of the
shoddy recruiters you always seem to be moaning about?
It’s
this: stop giving them money.
That’s
right.
[Taking a
breath.]
If some
agent puts out an ad and gets an application and sends you a generic CV and
fails to do the work of demonstrating how the candidate fits your job, and you
reject the CV, and the agent shrugs his or her shoulder-pads and forgets about
it, case closed, and then you engage us because of the other agency's wanton
whateverishness and we speak at length to the same candidate and discover,
through putting in actual, literal time and effort, just how this
candidate fits your role, and although we know his CV has already been spammed
to you anyway, and although…
[Taking a
breath.]
…the
other agency didn’t bother to even tell the candidate that he was rejected, we
decide that this is the right candidate for you, and our job is to get you the
right candidate, and so we talk to you about the candidate and you agree to
revisit the application, and the candidate says he wants us to represent
him, not that bone-idle big-name agency that showed him no duty of care, and
after revisiting the application you decide you want to INTERVIEW the
candidate…
[breath]
…you
don't necessarily have to cut us out and reward the shoddy agency for a job
badly done, when you wouldn’t even be considering this candidate any more if we
hadn’t intervened.
Or,
rather, it's sort of self-defeating to cut us out and then complain about
agencies being shoddy.
No sir.
We could have let this candidate's CV languish in your deleted items. We
didn’t. We fought his corner like the Littlest Hobo defending one of his many
temporary owners from muggers, and now some big agency novice is rubbing his
hands because you’re considering paying him (the agent, not the Littlest Hobo)
a full fee for doing virtually nothing, and he probably won't even send us a
card.
And
meanwhile the boutique agencies that do the job properly are vanishing.
Split the
fee, at the very least. That way you chasten the sloppy agency for doing a bad
job while giving them money they never expected, so they can hardly complain,
and you reward the good agency for doing the right thing, and it doesn't cost
you a penny extra, and you get the right candidate for your job. LIterally a
win-win-win-win situation. Hoorah!
Moral of
the story: the bad guys are only bad because, despite being bad, you keep
paying 'em. And the good guys are only scarce because they do the bad guys'
work and don't get anything for it.
