Paul Carroll, founder of Communique and now owner of Zuma 011, thinks both employers and job seekers alike should boycott recruitment consultants, whom he says are "mercenary brigands" and about as useful as wasps.
We suspect Mr Carroll's postman may be delivering slightly fewer Christmas cards this year...
A Vacant Situation
Traffic Wardens get a very raw deal in my opinion. Why? Because they regularly feature at the head of those noisome “most hated profession” league tables that PRs love so much (ironically, PRs are also universally reviled in these rankings, normally level-pegging with Estate Agents).
But I contend that if you ran a survey among marketing professionals as to their most hated occupation, our old friends ‘recruitment consultants’ would romp home with a larger margin of victory than Usain Bolt.
I recently made a less than complimentary reference to recruitment consultants in 'Joining up the Dots' which led to a rather lengthy, impassioned and somewhat inadequate defence of the noble arts of recruitment in the form of a published letter in The Drum.
I’ve never – and I mean this - met any agency owner who thinks that recruitment consultants are anything less than mercenary brigands who charge a lot, and provide very little in exchange.
It’s a bit like the poser ‘what are wasps for?’ There is no positive answer.
I’ve met plenty of candidates – many during interviews – who naively defend their decision to supply their CVs to a recruitment consultant as being their understanding of how the job market works.
Says who? Well I think you can guess.
It’s very rare for the marketing media to criticise the role recruitment consultants play in the professional sector. And no wonder, when one looks at how much money publishers make from recruitment consultants via advertising. Why, there are even recruitment awards now to honour their efforts.
Consequently there’s very little industry debate on how unnecessary recruitment consultants are, how manipulative the process is, how needlessly expensive it all is. No publisher leads a debate on how to find a better system.
It’s a tad reminiscent of the Dirty Squad in late 60s/70s Soho defending their inability to reduce vice by saying ‘Pornography has existed for centuries and it is unlikely that it can ever be stamped out’. The subsequent Government Corruption enquiry discovered there were other reasons (younger readers can catch up on this via the DVD box set of Ashes to Ashes).
So what would make for a better recruitment process for the marketing industry?
First of all, employers should boycott the use of recruitment consultants. Many do, and they don’t suffer – far from it. They advertise positions when they have them and the more savvy ones are constantly evaluating candidates from unsolicited CVs.
Secondly, candidates should eschew recruitment consultants. They should learn, and quickly, that they don’t add any value, and should go directly to employers they fancy working for. What’s so difficult about that in this day and age – you can use the Internet, and read the marketing press. Can’t you?
Also, work out the maths as to whether you’ll win the job against an equally qualified candidate if you come with a 25% commission on top.
Publishers shouldn’t worry unduly about the demise of the recruitment consultant because they’d be generating ad revenue directly from individual employers with actual jobs to fill (rather than the “PR Account Director, Midlands” type CV trawls they currently run on behalf of recruitment consultants). Who knows, they may even make more money.
And, at a stroke, employers would be able to recruit better staff, pay better salaries and not jeopardise their businesses by hiring ‘over-sold’ goods who then turn out to be duck-eggs (they’re not going to get a refund anyway if they’ve employed said duck-egg for longer than 9.69 seconds).
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