Recruitment: rewarding the bad guys.....

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.