Shooting in the dark- recruiters who fail.

Recruitment Agencies Fail on Customer Service

One of the outcomes of the present recession is that as notifications of vacancies by employers have fallen, a wide range of agencies involved in recruitment and selection have also cut back on their own staffing. The is quite understandable as the cost levels of the agencies have not allowed them to retain staff who, in turn have not been able to place people in return for commissions. Agency recruiters who work under such conditions must feel the danger of losing their own jobs even on a daily basis if they were to fail to match the needs of the job hunter with demands of the advertiser on a regular basis.

It seems however that many recruitment agencies which normally try to protect their reputations against poor service may have, during the last six months at least, given up under pressure or decided that as the customer may have to become more tolerant of the agencies or face the risk of alienating them. A former colleague who has been looking for the last six months says “ It almost feels at times that the jobs squeeze has given the agencies special ‘powers’ to become less responsive and more arrogant when they deal with us”.  Let us hope that she is wrong.

The use of email to submit applications seems to have suited all parties involved in the recruitment and selection process. There should be better information flow, more opportunities to match people against live and ‘stale’ vacancies and to make the job search more customer friendly from the point of view of the job hunter. The reality as reported by friends and colleagues suggests that something else may have been going on. Agency bosses and operators have a hard task of matching skills in their own teams. The decisions that are being made to provide strong and proactive support to recruiters and interviewers seems to be producing variable results. Under normal trading conditions there must be a critical mass of vacancies that sustains the overhead costs of the agencies. It seems that during the last three months the balancing act has been largely failing or even abandoned by agency managers.  Senior candidates for prestigious jobs talk about sending their applications to well established agencies and losing them in cyberspace or the IT ‘hole’. Very few agencies seem to be sending out acknowledgements confirming receipt of applications and there is extremely limited feedback on how the processing of applications even for time-sensitive jobs may be progressing. The agency is the ‘king’ and customer has been dethroned. Has the customer lost their importance just because there are more applicants and fewer jobs? Serious and honest answers are needed if good candidates are not to be stopped from applying. In that case the prospective employer pays the price. International agencies have also been known to disregard good recruitment practice for many years in preference for cost savings.

It would seem that there are systemic failures in agency operations.  With a few exceptions, most agencies have not installed automated response mechanisms suggesting that they are actually much smaller than their advertising board seems to suggest or that they have not made the right decisions relating to digital business design. Perhaps they ought to be taking a few tips from Slywotzky and Morrison who say that ‘Becoming a digital business is not about having a great website, setting up separate e-businesses, having next-generation software or wiring your workforce. It’s about using digital technology to become unique…to create and capture profits in new ways”.

It is said that the tail-end of the recession is a good time to invest in new forms of efficiency creation. Where agencies have lost good consultants or support staff, the least they may want to consider is to upgrade their digital preparedness.

There is a final point. The recruitment consultants who took for expertise and skills in their clients may need to occasionally turn the mirror on themselves. While their skills in sector-specific knowledge and interviewing techniques may be beyond reproach, have they mastered the basics of the in-house digital response system which may be abandoned as junior staff has left?