Goodbye recruitment cowboys/girls.

With the recruitment market picking up and a candidate shortage quickly becoming a reality you would expect the benefit of using a recruiter will come from their consultative approach and knowledge of the people that they are representing. Still it never ceases to amaze me when I hear stories of recruiters and some ‘typical’ bad habits.

Just today, I was on the phone with a candidate who I’ve known for sometime, who was thrilled in conveying that she had taken a permanent role just before the end of the calendar year. The circumstances under which she had secured this role were unbelievable, but unfortunately not uncommon. She had applied for an agency advertisement (a very large, well known recruiter) and then the day after, received a call from that same agency telling her they had arranged for her to have an interview with the hiring manager for that afternoon. Understandably the candidate was shocked, but hey, this was an interview for a permanent role, so she went along having never met the recruiter or detailed her background and experience. The story got stranger still, as in the interview the hiring manager she met with commented on more than one occasion how much ‘faith’ the recruiter had in her skills, her personality and her fit for the job. Shortly after the interview the candidate received a call with the good news she had been offered the job to start ASAP, which she did. On her second day, during her lunch break she took the initiative (with no invitation) to go and actually meet the recruiter at his office just to say thanks for his ‘hard work’.

I was obviously stunned and understandably aggravated by this story and couldn’t help but ask myself “is this really what passes for being a ‘recruitment consultant ’ these days?”

Thankfully the story continues and after a couple of weeks in the role and an increasing level of comfort with her Manager she shared this same story. The Manager, a Group FC in this instance took immediate offense to this process and the recruiter’s approach and believed she had been ‘hoodwinked’ and worse, lied to on more than one occasion. The ultimate result being one placement, secured under dubious circumstances has cost that recruiter and therefore their employer, a potential wealth of future business with a well-known and growing business.

While it’s sad to need such a catalyst, I’m hoping the recent changes to local visa conditions in relation to sponsoring potential recruitment consultants, will lift the barriers to entry and as a result, coerce an industry, that has a largely unwarranted reputation caused by a few bad seeds like this, to lift it’s game on consulting and service delivery.

Goodbye to the recruitment cowboys/girls.