I absolutely love Simon Sinek’s famous Ted talk, ‘Start with why’, which examines why some companies achieve things that completely exceed our expectations and defy our assumptions of what’s possible, whilst others simply don’t.
After re-watching this talk, I started to think about how it applies to the recruitment industry, which leads me to this; many people think that all recruitment agencies are the same and that there is no difference. They all just fill jobs, right?
What
Everyone knows what a recruitment agency is and what they do, or at least they think that they do.
All recruitment agencies (should) have this one essential thing in common, which is that they aim to place people into jobs.
Whilst this may sound contradictory, the majority of recruitment firms aren’t in the business to fill your jobs… they are in the business to make money.
How
Most recruitment firms don’t proactively search for candidates for your jobs, which may sound strange but hear me out…
A lot of firms are extremely passive, they run a number of roles and simply move their connections around multiple job roles (instead of proactively searching for new candidates whose skills meet the needs of the current client).
The fill ratio of most large recruitment firms is 20%, that’s 1 in 5 roles, and if they are any good then this may even be 1 in 4.
Why
A lot of this comes down to why firms do business, and their ‘why’ is normally quite internally focused. They have goals and targets they need to hit in order to please internal shareholders at the recruitment agency. Which I can tell you often doesn’t help the end client…
My advice is that you should understand what you want from your recruitment supply chain.
Are you after CVs or do you want them to fill the role?
If you want them to fill the role, are you incentivising them to do that successfully?
(I’ll give a quick tip here – sending jobs out to more agencies doesn’t get you better candidates… it gets you who they can get their hands on the quickest.)
Our Why
Our why is pretty simple. We believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in creative solutions and we believe in working together with people.
Our How
We do this by sourcing proactively for talent, by engaging people on a personal level and by adapting our model to suit our client’s needs.
Our What
We just so happen to want to fill your jobs…
We prefer to let our results talk for themselves, so rather than blow our own trumpets, you can check out some of our case studies here.
James Cumming is our MD, Interim and Transformation Search specialist. If you’ve got a hard-to-fill role and need some help, get in touch. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
