Recruiter Comments

The Recruitment Times features opinions and commentary from recruiters. We conduct surveys on topical issues surrounding the industry. If you would like to provide your comments to the questions we pose email us.

“Recruitment is a challenge. It's a challenge to find quality candidates, a challenge to find clients and a challenge to try and be the best at recruiting each and every day. It's a true test of sales skills.”
Isaak Badru, Non-Exec Director REC London

1. How Far Do You Go To Be Seen as Professional? How professional and efficient are you? What high standards do you try to maintain?
As members of the REC we work to their guidelines but on a daily basis we work on the concept of quality over quantity.
I don’t have a target number of Business development calls to make or numbers of interviews attended. My MD would far rather that we concentrate on the quality of service we are giving our clients and also our candidates thus making us more efficient as we aren’t making phone calls for the sake of it!
We pride ourselves on our reputation for giving good service and for taking the time to put the right candidate in a job that is right for them. Our candidates stay in jobs and don’t leave.
To increase my professionalism I am due to undertake the Degree in Recruitment Practice, I think that the more knowledge I can gain of the industry the better for myself, clients and candidates. I also think it shows that the company is committed to the industry we are in.
Recruitment gets a bad press and sometimes rightly so, when I was last looking for a new job I put my CV on websites with only my mobile number for contact. A large well known rec to rec company took it upon themselves to track down my office number and call me there!!!
Andrea Pillinger, DoveTail HRS

I think professionalism has to be intrinsic to our business. We believe in transparency at all times when dealing with clients and candidates alike. As such, all parties are aware where their details are being sent to and what opportunities lie therein. Hillman Saunders deal with organisations that understand our professional approach and that helps with building long-lasting mutually beneficial rewards.
Desmond Menewe, Hillman Saunders

We invest in training, not just the technical skills but the soft skills and personal motivation. That includes the managers, fee earners and support staff. Everyone needs to know what their job is and what it achieves, how it plugs into other roles and what impact it has on the organisation. This is best started from a formal induction (ours lasts about seven days, including systems training). Technical skills are then added for each role. A competency based approach means that managers can let staff get on with their roles, making informed decisions and feeding back initiatives. Management can get on with the business of managing the organisation, supporting staff and resolving issues that inevitably arise in business.
Del Hunter FREC FInstSMM, SSR Personnel

2. It’s a Candidate Driven Market: How hard is it to source good candidates these days? What are the pitfalls in client satisfaction when suitable candidates are scarce?
Define a ‘good’ candidate! A candidate is only as good as the opportunity you currently have or manage to find for them. As recruiters we have huge resources available to us to initially find that candidate and anyone can tap a few words into a search engine on a website! The key to weeding out the candidates you know you can use and place is by getting to know that candidate thoroughly, understanding their motives, what they are looking for and what makes them ‘tick’. Make your candidates feel valued and important, because they are!! Taking the time to get to know your candidate is surely an investment and avoids you wasting your time further on down the line????

We constantly hear stories from candidates who are bullied into to going for interviews or going in to temporary jobs that they know are not right for them. This kind of practice is going to annoy a client, ruin the recruiter's reputation and make the candidate look flakey!
When good candidates are scarce I try to manage the clients expectations from the outset and gain a really good understanding of exactly what they are looking for and what aspects they can compromise on. If you are honest with a client from the beginning I find that you gain their respect, in general clients are not expert recruiters, that is why they come to us and giving them good advice is part of the service.
Andrea Pillinger, DoveTail HRS

Sourcing quality candidates is a very difficult problem. Blueport specialises in professional people and the proliferation of job sites has diluted the market to the extent that the quality candidates do not bother to register and poor quality ones register on all of them, particularly those from overseas (with little or no prospect of obtaining a work permit). These candidates apply online to any job advert they see with little care taken about what it is they are applying for (I have had chefs apply for qualified accountant positions) or the manner in which they apply. They just hope that if they apply for enough jobs then one may stick! This approach is doubly frustrating because it is difficult to distinguish the quality candidates from the myriad of rubbish out there, together with wasting an awful amount of time.
Your statement about it being a candidate driven market is completely correct. Blueport is a boutique provider of recruitment services to a specialised marketplace. Our ability to survive is dependant upon our ability to provide quality candidates to our clients. If any one thing would cause the demise of Blueport, it is the lack of candidates.
David Roberts, Blueport Resources Limited

Sourcing candidates is a major part of our business! A good quality recruitment consultant should always ensure they have a network of contacts to source good quality candidates from. Hillman Saunders implements a policy of proactively sourcing candidates to fill client requirements. We employ a dedicated team of industry-trained consultants whose understanding of their marketplace is exemplary.
Desmond Menewe, Hillman Saunders

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