Hiring by example? How agencies source their own

Peter Crush

Samantha Rathling, Recruitment Magic

They rightly pride themselves on sourcing the best, most suitable talent for their clients, but what about the staff agencies actually hire themselves? Peter Crush investigates agencies’ own approaches to recruitment.  

According to many, this is something that still has a lot to be desired. Glance at comments posted on a recent thread on moneysavingexpert.com (entitled ‘Recruitment Agencies are Useless’) and it reveals significant customer ire: “They [staff] can’t even manage an email to tell you what the hell is going on (maybe they think I am psychic)!” writes one. “Google the name of the recruitment consultant,” suggests another. “They’ll have a Facebook page along with their LinkedIn details. You’ll quickly find you’ve been dealing with some wannabe student who never grew up and couldn’t get a real job.” 

Perhaps this thread was always likely to generate extremes, but this is not just the view of candidates – it’s also an opinion held by practitioners too. “Most recruitment agencies hire sales people, those who are results-driven, target-oriented and commission-based,” says Samantha Rathling, MD of Recruitment Magic. “As a result, staff are only worried about where their next commission is coming from and whether or not they are going to hit their targets. The focus on giving the candidate and client exceptional customer service gets lost.”

Recruitment ‘types’

The notion that agencies hire (and attract) certain ‘types’ that are a reflection of the way the business is organised is not new. Back in 2007, research by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering found that four in five agencies in its sector offered just ‘average’ or ‘poor’ service. It blamed target-driven staff with little in the way of softer, client-side skills. “I remember working in my first role as a recruiter in 2002,” recalls Rathling. “My boss said: “Your target this week is to send out 400 CVs each to clients; if you throw enough mud out there, some of it will stick”.

Since launching her own consultancy, she has been adamant that none of her staff will get paid on a commission basis for this very reason. It means, she says, that she has freedom to hire for what she and clients really want: customer service skills. But do agencies really have to change their remuneration models before they can attract great staff? Not everything thinks so.

David Younger, founder of CY Partners, which places candidates in the science and engineering sector, believes the people agencies need to recruit into their own business is always a function of where they are in their growth curve. “You need sales- and target-driven staff to grow the business, and it’s only afterwards that you need an account management, client services function,” he says.

He calls this needing a mix of both ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’ – those that hunt down business, and those who nurture it. As Ed Scrivner wrote last year, in a blog entitled ‘In defence of recruitment consultants’ (a repost to criticism about agency staff): “Recruitment is a sales profession; an agent sells their services to organisation and they sell roles to jobseekers.”

Specialist knowledge

Adrian Kinnersley, Twenty Recruitment

Adrian Kinnersley, MD of Twenty Recruitment Group, which employs 45 staff, believes recruiting the best staff for agencies is so important that he has his own division that specialises in just this – it only recruits staff for itself and other recruitment agencies. “It means we’re hiring people into agencies that ultimately complete with us,” he admits, “but demand for better agency staff is a side of our business that’s growing.”

Just some of the methods he uses to guarantee quality in his own hires include having them undergo 360-degree feedback; only hiring those with four to five years’ experience (and experience in a vertical market); and being clear about linking 20% of any bonus they get to service-related metrics. “You can’t sell service if someone only has eight weeks’ experience;” he says. “Thankfully, I think the recession means the stereotypical image of pile it high, sell it cheap agency staff can no longer continue, because while it’s still a sales-orientated job, clients demand a more subtle, more evolved person.”

What this more ‘evolved’ person ought be is a real hot topic now. “I think there’s an argument for saying agencies need to be hiring marketers rather than sales people,” says Marc Cohen, MD, ConSol Partners, which needs staff to recruit for the tech sector. He says he only looks for three things when he hires staff for his own business – drive, energy and ambition, and because ConSol does lot of its own training, the people with those qualities “tend to come to the fore”, says Cohen. He adds: “We don’t want salespeople, we want consultants – our people must be able to be credible and have market knowledge.” Even when he has hired people who have come from other agencies, he says he’s had to spend significant amount of time ‘de-programming’ them from their old, set ways.

Just how quickly recruitment agencies look more closely at hiring their own staff is unclear, but what is certain is that the sector is at an interesting point in time. Should recruitment bounce back to its pre-recession days (already it’s forecast to grow 4 to 5% this year), some fear old habits will die hard, and agencies will return to their well-trodden, gung-ho days. “Short periods of ‘bust’ have always been replaced by volume hiring again,” says Kinnersley, “and this has typically meant attracting people with a set of behaviours.” However he says one difference about now is that commoditised recruitment tend to be done in-house, “leaving only more strategic-level hiring to agencies.”

Some however, are less convinced. “The old model of hiring a lot of hungry, young people made a lot of recruiters very rich,” says Cohen. “Some who joined these companies as young staff, and who are now setting up agencies of their own are repeating this, because it’s seen as the recipe for success.” But, he thinks there could be a shake-out: “Gen Y employees don’t thrive under the previous sort of pressure typified by agencies. If the people agencies want to hire no longer exist, then agencies will have to change the type of person they hire.”

And perhaps this won’t be a bad thing. “Agencies that hire non sales-driven recruiters can still survive and many do well,” concludes Rathling. “It should be a sales team or the business owner focusing on bringing new clients in, never the recruiters themselves.”