Respecting Recruiters
This article, on respecting recruiters, was taken from a reply to an article on the now defucnt www.ComputerContractor.net.
Recruitment Agents who are good make around 50-60 phone calls a day. It’s a bloody hard job to do. It doesn’t make it any easier that because a lot people are in it purely for the money or are just plain bad at it.
Very Little Professional Respect
We take a ridiculous amount of flack and receive very little professional respect.
Recruitment Consultants should fulfill the role of finding the right roles for contractors and the right contractors for clients. They should do it by keeping in on-going touch with both parties through these high levels of phone calls.
Individual clients do not have time to keep in contact with over 500 active contractors. Contractors do not have time to keep in touch with the 1000+ companies that could need their skills at any given time.
Seeking to Match Contractors with Clients
We should also act much like business analysts, probing to find the true requirements and motivations of both the parties we seek to match.
It is unfortunate that many contractors will talk their way into the wrong roles. Also, many clients will be unrealistic in what they actually need from a contractor for what they have to spend.
We make it easier for clients to hire and easier for contractors to land the right contracts.
Respecting Recruiters – Made the Match
Once we’ve made the match, helped both parties through the interview process and negotiated rates, admittedly we are not much more than a payroll service. However, we deserve to make a margin for the entire duration of the contract. This reflectc the work we do in bringing both parties together.
It is unrealistic to think that if you take away the Recruitment Consultant all that happens is that the contractor makes more money.
After the initial placement, yes, that’s true. However, believe me, if we didn’t exist a hell of a lot of contractors would be out of work for longer due to the necessity of finding their next contract, or working in the wrong contract because they had to compromise by taking the first thing they found, and a lot of clients would either hire the wrong people or never hire at all.
Necessary Service to Contractors
Yes we are middlemen, but we are middlemen that provide a useful and necessary service. Except for the big blue chips, who to be quite frank, are an utter waste of space – Spring, Hays IT, Parity, Harvey Nash, Alexander Man – we are all pure payroll services.
The Consultants sit there. A role is called in to them by BT, CSC, EDS, Cap Gemini, Barclays, Lloyds TSB etc. etc. 99% of the time they don‘t understand it.
They stick an ad on Jobserve by cutting and pasting a job spec that the client gave them.
They spend 2 minutes on the phone to the first ten contractors that reply. Then they send the five CVs that contain the largest number of words in common with the job spec over to the client. Then they payroll when the client hires.
Hit Hard By Opt In
It‘s no wonder people see Recruitment Consultants as unnecessary. It‘s unfortunate that it will be the smaller and medium sized agencies, most of whom work damn hard to help contractors and clients achieve a match who will be the hit hardest by contractors who don‘t opt out.
What will happen is that through the sheer volume of business made possible by having a brand name and a certain size of turnover, and through the lack of intensive work on behalf of their Consultants, contract vacancies will start to migrate to the larger agencies as the smaller ones go bankrupt.
The good recruitment consultant will leave the profession. That’s because there is no longer any job satisfaction it for them. The irony will be that contractors actually will end up paying agencies purely to act as payroll services.
Respecting recruiters, and the job they do for contractors, is something that should happen much more often.
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