CWS 3.0: October 22, 2014

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Recruiting agents versus consultants: Why the difference matters

A friend of mine who works in software development is contacted weekly by recruiters looking either to place workers at his company or to recruit him for another job. Every week he says, “no thanks, please don’t contact me again,” but the calls keep coming — as do the voicemails and emails.

At a recent event hosted by staffing industry consultant and advisor Graham Palfery-Smith, I asked industry executives for their thoughts on my friend’s experience. Are these nuisance calls just part of the recruitment game nowadays? Are recruitment businesses actually benefitting from these tactics, or are they just losing potential and future clients? As it turns out, it has more to do with the breed of the recruiter.

“There are only a few genuine recruitment consultants,” said Andy Brack, director of Evolution Recruitment Solutions. “Most are recruitment agents; driven by key performance indicators (KPIs), targets or incentives. Consultants build relationships and give the industry a good name.”

“Everything about this is internally generated,” Graham added. “It is ‘sales’ by rote.”

That sentiment was echoed by Michelle Reilly, managing director of CXC Global. “It comes from the top, from the management, that hard sell tactic that people at the top are pushing into their staff,” she said.

During the recession when jobs were scarce, it was easy to find work as a recruiter, which may be part of the problem. In the lean recession years, when people were desperate for work, the promise of a decent basic salary and the ever-alluring on-target-earnings bonus tempted many people who were, perhaps, not best suited for it.

These recruitment agents were tasked with calling as many businesses as possible. Cold-calling, or business development as some companies call it, is a numbers game. Recruiters make enough phone calls to meet targets and earn their bonus.

But this could be damaging to staffing and recruitment firms in the long-run, which could in turn affect whether their clients are getting the best candidates for their open positions. For example, my friend knows which recruitment firms have called him incessantly; it’s highly unlikely that he will ever use their services in future.

But the true consultant can prove his or her value even to the passive candidate like my friend. There are different ways to do this. “You become a recruitment consultant when you move past meeting targets and start to realize that developing relationships is the way to go,” said Brack.

“To be a true consultant, you need to feel invited to work in partnership with a candidate or client, and you need to be able to feel like you can add value to both,” said Jennifer Kinnear, managing director of Profiles Creative “To achieve that, you have to have respect — for the candidates and client you work with, but also for your own part in the process.”

“Recruiters can often get short shrift from the people they call and that’s then self-perpetuating as they then show less respect for the people they are approaching. Hard core cold calling I think is very old fashioned,” she added.

Sarah Fitzgerald, managing director of Executives in Africa, commented: “A good consultant can turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ But it requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. It’s about long-term goals versus short-term goals. Africa is all about long-term relationships. We want to hire people in our business who consult.”

Success comes from a simple concept, said Charles Daw, director of sales at CXC Global. “The person who wins the deal, is the one who listened. The consultant that heard what the client had to say. Even if it’s a ‘no,’ it could turn into a ‘yes’ at a later date. ”