Why Recruitment Consultants Exist by Rich Wooten

Also known as the agency, they hate to be called that, as they’d like to consider themselves more sophisticated.

Typically, the Recruitment Consultant exists to fill the jobs of their client’s.

What will normally happen is that recruitment consultant will call companies asking if they have any jobs that he/she can fill. They finally get one and then the set the wheels in motion to finding the candidate.

Normally they’ll advertise the job and search through their database. This is why you get calls out of the blue.

The sole factor for the agent to exist is simply the agency acts as a forum for employer / employees in much the same way as a dating agency works.

Although the recruitment consultant never gives any guarantees that:

1. you will find a job or

the company will find the employee.

Candidates get the raw deal

Candidates tend to get the worst of the service as they are perceived as the customer as they don’t pay for the service

If you have ever looked for a job you will know, unless you work in a very specialised field, that it is very difficult to think of, say, 100 companies would be able to employ you.

Recruitment consultants do know this, good ones read news papers, keep themselves up to date with what’s happening in their local area or specialist field.

If you are currently working you will find out how time consuming finding a job is. Firstly you need to identify the companies you wish to target, and then you need to find the person you need to speak to. Then the hard part, you need to speak to that person and find out if they are looking for someone like you, 9 times out of 10 the answer will be "no".

Speculative CV's

Posted speculative CVs are rarely filled for viewing later when they are there is usually no mechanism for a company to retrieve that CV. I.E. a database.

Once they have said "yes", then no doubt want you to sell yourself a little, most people feel a little nervous about this. Hence the recruitment consultant steps in, as it is easier for a third party to do the "selling". Everyone hates talking about themselves, there are even recruitment consultancies that recruitment consultants can use - these are called Rec to Recs.

The reason companies use them is purely for convenience since they charge anything between 15% to 20%; so they are expensive but as any employer knows placing a job in the paper is a costly affair.

Not simply the actual cost of the advert but managing the response, writing the ad copy and spending time getting the advert just right to portray the company in the best light etc. It is far easier to give the job to an agency and then look at 3 or 4 CVs rather than 100-200 inappropriate ones.

This is for permanent employees - for temporary or contract employees it is a totally different kettle of fish, in that it would be time consuming and expensive to advertise a job that was only going to last a few weeks anyway. Also if it’s urgent, you may need to get some one who can start tomorrow, in comes the Recruitment Consultant.

So until Jobseekers have either the time or the confidence to get jobs for themselves and until employers stop using Recruitment Consultants for convenience, the Recruitment Consultant is here to stay.

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Do Smart People Make The Best Managers

Everbody's talking about IQ testing and the importance of raw intelligence. A 1999 article in Scientific American said that only the top 5% of Americans (those above an IQ of 125) are even potentially capable of doing senior roles. The bottom 5% (those below IQ of 75) are unlikely to be able to work and will form an underclass in society.

Company's have always recognised the importance of straightforward "academic smarts" both through specific graduate recruitment programmes and more generally in the way they select and recruit people.

There is an opposing point of view though. Some psychologists have criticised the whole idea of IQ. They either claim it doesn't actually exist or that it is simply a measure of how good you are at doing IQ tests! Others claim that it is biased against certain groups OR that it doesn't predict work success (work "smarts" are not the same as "academic brilliance"). Some theorists have claimed its too narrow a concept; that "intelligence" is in fact a bundle of different attributes from understanding language and manipulating numbers to being able to get on with people. Different jobs require different sets of skills.

In management terms, a lot of recent thinkers have questioned the whole idea of "manager as the best thinker in the team". The Emotional Intelligence movement and team theory suggests that not only does being intelligent not ensure someone will be a good manager; it might sometimes make them a bad manager. Belbins team role theory shows that the person acting as chairman or leader of a group should not be the brightest one; if he or she is cleverer than the rest he will swamp the group dynamics that create ideas more fertile than any individuals. Equally, management jobs are not all the same - in fact they're extremely different and its unlikely that one sort of person would, for instance, be equally good at running the technical side of a nuclear power plant as well as organising a touring ballet company.

So which is it? Manager as smarty-pants or manager as personally gifted leader figure.

Of course there' some truth in both, as you and I working in industry have always known. Folk psychology - how you and I judge people - is being shown to be very accurate about certain things.

The provisional answer to "Do Smart People Make the Best Managers?" is NO! We all know very clever people who are not just bad managers but are socially totally ineffective; people who seem almost lopsided.

Yet intelligence as defined in IQ is important. IQ is often defined as being able to deal with increasingly complexity - and most managers do have to do that.

Intelligence seems to be a hurdle you have to jump over. You need a certain amount of intelligence to get into a management role. The more senior you get, the more different management jobs get and therefore the wider the variety of skills you'll need.

Think about Dulewicz and Higgs IQ/EI % contribution to management success.

Think about the different combinations of personal attributes you may need for different management jobs.

Think about particularly changes in fast track graduate schemes. There is a collapse in confidence that degrees and other academic qualifications measure what they were measuring even 5 or 6 years ago: and the evidence is that this is in fact the case. Thus many graduate recruiters are doing ancillary measures of high level reasoning to check who are the real high fliers. But the real trick is not only to measure raw cognitive intelligence but those other attributes which may lead to success later on in careers.

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Recruitment: What is the return on your investment?

When considering whether or not to invest, most of us ask perfectly sensible questions like: "What will the return be?", "What's the risk?" and "How quickly will I get the returns?" Would you put your hard-earned money into high-risk investment schemes without knowing about their past performance? Would you invest with professionals who are very thorough, but who can't prove that their methods deliver business results?

As organisations, one of the biggest investments we will ever make is in recruitment. Conservative estimates put the figure at over £4,300 per position - and it is often a lot higher. Fortunately, as HR professionals, we can all prove that the business is getting outstanding returns on this investment. We can point at the money spent, and put intelligent estimates on the financial and human benefits accrued. We can show that our recruitment processes deliver outstanding performance, control costs, increase sales, maintain efficiency and develop the organisation. We do not employ poor performers. The confidence of the business in what we do is exceptional, and we are perceived as being directly pivotal to the performance of the whole organisation. Our credibility is beyond doubt.

That would be a wonderful position to be in, wouldn't it?

How many organisations expect sensible questions about the return on recruitment investment to be answered? The truth is that very few really do. Recruitment is evaluated on the basis of the speed with which positions are filled, the feedback from participants and the percentages of candidates who end up being employed. Very few organisations expect that the true impact on business performance can ever be proven, or recruitment processes fine-tuned to deliver precisely the business benefits required. Instead, recruitment is allowed to carry on without anyone ever knowing if it is delivering the goods, or if opportunities are being missed.

Because recruitment is not an exact science, it is allowed to continue (often very thoroughly) without proving its true value.

But is it really so unrealistic to believe that we can measure the business impact of different approaches to recruitment? More and more organisations are asking these questions, and the ones who can respond effectively are achieving surprising business results through their HR functions. A wide range of organisations, from British Airways to Greggs, have invested in examining the business success of their recruitment practices, and achieved clear returns.

Organisations are starting to find that, with some skill, it is possible to assess the return on investment. It is possible to define the business benefits required, and track the results. This is not just a bean-counting exercise aimed at proving that we are right - it points the way to improve results, and deliver business performance through HR.

At ASE, we work with many of our clients to deliver business benefits from recruitment. Because every organisation is trying to achieve different things, each project is different. However, it is clear from our experience that some approaches tend to lead to tangible business benefits from recruitment:

• Start off with a clear analysis of the organisational and commercial outcomes required from recruitment. What is the business trying to achieve, and what part will successful candidates need to play?
• Develop clear ways of tracking and measuring these outcomes
• Carry out an objective and open-minded analysis of the qualities people need to perform. Ruthlessly avoid your judgement being coloured by past practice or "knowing what works from experience". if doing this well seems expensive in the short run, it's never as expensive as doing it badly in the long run!
• Ensure that you assess the full range of qualities needed for success - include personality, motivation and aptitude as well as experience
• Ensure that everyone involved in recruitment is trained to the highest possible standards

Carefully connect recruitment to induction, training, management and performance management - to ensure that the business does not just get the right people, but nurtures and capitalises in them as well

These appraoches deliver returns of investment because they identify people who perform, reduce the risk of employing people who cannot (or will not) perform, cut the costs of recruitment and development, and play a major part in driving forwards organisational change.

In common with all people processes, recruitment is there to deliver tangible human and business benefits. Devoting a little time to considering the return on investment is not a nebulous luxury - it is essential to delivering the results the organisation needs. It is also a powerful way of positioning HR at the heart of the business. You will not regret it!

Ed Hurst
Head of Consultancy, ASE

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Socially Responsible HR By Richard Donkin

Ever since companies began to make the link between employee welfare and productivity, human resource management has found itself pivotal in balancing the needs of employers with those of employees.

The HR profession has its roots in the European welfare movement established some 90 years ago when a number of like-minded social entrepreneurs, including Seebohm Rowntree, became convinced of the need for companies to provide attractive workplace conditions for their employees. Their theory was that a happy workforce was not only more socially preferable to the sweatshops of the industrial revolution, but was also potentially far more productive and therefore good for business.

At the same time HR was beginning to immerse itself in the work study practices of scientific management which concentrated on measuring and refining the physical actions that went in to specific jobs.

Today the welfare concepts behind the human relations movement have given way to business and ethical arguments for greater social awareness. The new debate on corporate social responsibility centres on the desire to satisfy the concerns of “stakeholder” groups – customers, employees, shareholders and legislators. Underpinning this debate is the realisation that companies cannot divorce themselves from the social issues that define both the communities they serve and the communities from which they source their labour. This is why diversity has become so important to employers.

Employers who do not take these issues seriously not only risk infringing labour laws, they take the risk of alienating themselves from their markets. The potential alienation is double-edged. On the one hand there is a risk of disaffecting part of your customer base. On the other, there can be missed opportunities to take advantages of talented employees from diverse backgrounds.

The markets, therefore, perhaps more than any other influence, are once again elevating social responsibility in human resources management. Even the most hard-nosed managements cannot ignore the demographic trends across Europe where populations are no longer replacing themselves.

At the same time growing competition harnessed to the modern forces of globalisation, internet technology, and lean management means that few companies remain willing or able to support the large community-sized workforces that bred employer paternalism. This means that policy makers and the business community must re-think their approaches to retirement, immigration and labour flexibility.

The so-called “war for talent” has been focussed mistakenly in the past on employee elites when it would have made much more sense to design inclusive employment strategies aimed at capturing talent from a much wider cross-section of the community. A more inclusive approach to labour sourcing also demands greater attention to training, re-skilling and the employment of older people and people with disabilities.

While market forces are beginning to dictate labour sourcing decisions, social concerns within companies remain important for their own sake. A business community that is prepared to exclude large sections of society will be unsustainable in the long term. A more outward-facing approach to employment and the community, will mean that businesses take an increasing interest in their stakeholders, ensuring, for example, that suppliers are providing the kind of working conditions, training and wages necessary for a sustainable and stable society.

When employers begin to experience the business benefits of adopting such policies they will see that the kind of socially responsible approach that strives to eliminate discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, gender, disability and age is more than a legal and ethical issue; it is a business issue. Companies in future will stand or fall on the strength of their HR policies.

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The Art of Recruiting

IYJN JEN's WORLD ... FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Recruiting seems to be one of those things that is poorly understood (sometimes even by those who call themselves Recruiters). I thought it may be a good thing to define their functions here, for anyone who is interested. There are several types of recruiting, but the mechanics and psychology of it are all the same.

First, let me explain, for those who don't know; there are Corporate Recruiters (those who are employed by a company for the purpose of finding and qualifying new employees for the company). And there are 3rd party Recruiters (those who are subcontracted to by a company for the same purpose).

There are a couple of different types of 3rd party recruiters, but the main difference lies in how they are compensated.

Both are paid by the hiring company, but Retained Recruiters typically have an 'exclusive' with the company and are paid a portion of their fee upfront, and the balance paid when the search is over. Retained recruiters are typically used for executive level positions.

Contingency Recruiters don't typically have an exclusive relationship with the company, and are paid a fee only if the company hires a candidate through their efforts. (Most 3rd party recruiters fall into this category.)

I do some (volunteer) interviewing skills training, among other things, and am often asked about recruiters by job seekers. Among the comments/questions I hear the most are;

1. "Recruiters often call and ask for my resume, but then I never hear from them again."

2. "A recruiter sent me on an interview, but I can't seem to get any feedback about how I did. ...They say the company is still interviewing, so I can't assess where I may have gone wrong (so that I may do a better job on my next interview)."

3. "I have sent out dozens of resumes (sometimes 100's) to recruiters, but I never hear from them, and can't get them to return my calls."

There are various reasons for the above situations, but many of them boil down to one thing... money. To successfully work with recruiters, one must first understand that they are not working for you (the job seeker), but the company.

It is the company that pays their fees. It is the company they must ultimately satisfy if they are to get paid for all of their hard work. 3rd party recruiters are typically compensated 20-30%, or more, of a placed candidate's first year annual salary. (If a job seeker could pay them $10,000-$25,000 to find them a job, the job seeker may find a shift in attention from a recruiter, but that's not going to happen, so forget about that.)

A company wants what they want, after all they are paying well to get it, and if a recruiter were to bombard the company with resumes of people who just don't fit the job, they would find themselves not being called by the company the next time there are jobs to be filled. Don't take that personally.

If you fit the job they are actively recruiting for, you can bet your bottom dollar that the recruiter will do everything in their power to be sure you are successfully hired by the company.

However, there are ways to determine whether your recruiter is a seasoned professional, or an amateur. An experienced recruiter will always get feedback from a company following an interview they have arranged. They won't continue to send applicants to the company without knowing why the ones they have already sent didn't cut the mustard. Without such critical feedback, the recruiter also has no way of knowing where they are falling short, so that they may do a better job at sending the right kinds of candidates.

Another sign of an amateur (or a fisherman) is if they do nothing but collect resumes for no apparent purpose. If you are contacted by a recruiter about sending them your resume, don't be afraid to ask questions about why they want to see it.

I would ask the following questions --"Is there a specific job you have in mind for me?" --"Once you have my resume in hand, when can I expect to hear from you again?" --"Will you ever send my resume to one of your clients without my knowledge and/or consent?"

If a recruiter ever contacts you and asks for a resume before knowing anything about your professional background, don't do it. Your resume could land in places where you don't want it to be. A 'good' recruiter, though as I said is working for their client, not you, will want to insure that you are a 'good' candidate.

They will ask questions such as --"What is it that you are seeking in a new employer that you don't currently have available where you are presently working?" --"Would you consider relocation for the right job, and if so, where?" (If you say you would consider relocation, they should also ask about your family situation.) --"Does your spouse work?" --"Do you have children still in school?" This will help them determine whether or not you (and your family) will be happy, and stay with the job, should moving be a necessity.

A professional recruiter will want to know that they have not only done a good job for their client, but they will also have your best interest in mind as well. (When I was recruiting, most of my referrals came from candidates that I had done a good job for; treated with respect and gave them the courtesy of thorough communication, even if I didn't necessarily place them on a new job for one reason or another.)

Understanding your recruiter, and being sure they understand you, is the first step in successfully working with one.

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