Recruitment; Productivity.. not Activity!

Having been in recruitment for 6 years now and worked in four different businesses both in the UK and Australia, I’m confident in saying I’ve seen my fair share of how various firms incentivise their staff. And it still baffles me how recruitment agency managers and owners feel the need to target consultants by activity metrics. Now there are heaps of amazing recruiters out there. And there are heaps still spamming. Are the later the ones still giving the industry a bad rep? I guess…

I’ve met with a few recruiters this week who have had issues around this and only last night I saw on Linkedin that a recruiter in London had put up a status saying;

Fellow recruiters, Please be aware that (various made up names and software development titles) are all fake candidates. How do I know? They all have the same phone number. If you try ringing them, you’ll need to leave a voicemail so that the right consultant, I mean candidate, can call back and try to find out who your clients are. This is exactly why recruiters have such a poor reputation. Please share this with your network so that nobody else falls victim to these cowboys

This basically means (for those not in recruitment), that a recruitment agent is pulling leads from other recruiters, picking up company names and then cold-calling or floating CVs over to them.

Now the Technology space (especially software dev) is a massively busy one at the moment. Actually it has been for years.. and hopefully will continue to be. Tech needs to?evolve and clients want niche skill-sets. How the hell recruiters don’t have enough real, qualified jobs on to work baffles me!? Where do they still find the time to do this sh!t?!! Writing up fake cvs, thinking up names, fake job titles… etc etc.. lol. Madness.

I think the root of the issue is pressure from corporate managers who perhaps had a good time in recruitment between 1998 and 2005..yep - before the GFC, before talent acquisition and before on-site recruitment solutions, coming down hard on their consultants saying; You MUST have 6 meetings this week – you MUST send 12 CVs out the door this week – you MUST have 8 hours out-going calls on the phone, whilst the recruiters sit there, nervous, probably thinking; ‘mmm yeah I’d like to see you have a go at this now’ or ‘if I ring this person AGAIN just to help my call times, they’re going to think Im a twat… but ok.. I’ll call them’.

I’ve also seen this in smaller businesses too. Sure – it’s scary when it’s your own business and money on the line, putting food on the table and a roof over your families head. The knee-jerk reaction in your recruitment company is to want to see your staff making phone calls and upping their activity whilst you sit there thinking ‘ahh they’re on the phone – money should be coming in soon’.

But it’s all wrong. Classic example; Recruiter needs to send 12 CVs per week. Its Friday, they’ve sent 7. That means 5 go out un-solicited (probably without the candidates knowing) to clients they’ve never heard of or have terms with.

My point -?the game has changed. Lets incentivise recruiters more intelligently around productivity / networking / helping others / customer service and doing what’s right ethically. I personally like it when I see other recruiters doing well from stuff like this. More please.

I'm a partner @ Just Digital People, building the Sydney business with Jase Roulston. I recruit software engineering and testing talent and crack bad jokes in the process.?