WHY RECRUITMENT AGENCIES FAIL. SURGE
Many of you have businesses of your own and have made use of Recruitment Agencies for handling your staff needs with very little success. The one agency or the several agencies that you used that were tasked with doing the one thing they are supposedly good at and professional at doing failed you and due to the fact that this has occurred to you so many times you eventually concluded Recruitment Agencies suck and are a complete failure.
Perhaps some of the experiences you had may be the fact that the Agency is sending you CV's at random, with a hit or miss approach, hoping he or she might strike the right skill you are searching for that you will hire and pay them for. This resulting in you getting flooded with useless, random CV's that you have to filter through to find the right skill. Which is no different to advertising in a newspaper and getting flooded with random CV's.
Or perhaps the Agent or Agencies "fakes it until he/she makes it" wherein they pretend to completely understand what you're talking about, what you're looking for and as the old saying goes "The proof is in the pudding" their results turned out telling the real story. They never understood a thing you said and sent you CV's completely disrelated to what your needs and wants or are sending you candidates not in your industry.
Perhaps you tried to be smarter and diversified in that you used multiple agencies and thought you might get the best results and found yourself receiving the exact same CV's / candidates from each of the different Agencies you decided to use.
Why does all this happen? you might wonder.
What is causing this and how could Recruitment Agencies be so bad at their own game they play all day long, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year yet still turn out horrible products, deliver terrible service, waste your time and in the worst case scenario over sell you on how great a particular candidate is when in truth, they're the opposite. Why has this industry earned itself such a bad name and what is the root of it all?
The answer lies in two points. That is it.
Generalisation and wrong pool.
Generalisation. What do I mean by that?
Well let us look up the definition of the word "General" it means: "Affecting or concerning all or most people or things; widespread."
Key word "WIDESPREAD"
Most Recruitment Agencies are widespread in their game, they're not specialist. They recruit Nurses, Doctors, Teacher, Cashiers, Construction Workers, Engineers, I.T Specialists, Cleaners, Draughtsman, Architects, Drivers, Truck Drivers, Bus Drivers, Divers, Technician, Graduates, Housekeepers, Waiters, Concierge, Bell Hops, Valet, Mechanics, Bartenders, you name it, EVERYTHING and ANYTHING to make a quick fast buck.
They do not specialise in a particular trade, they therefore dabble and never go deep into a particular trade or industry. They're, so to speak, superficial, there is an almost un-seriousness about who they are, what they are and what they're supposed to do or deliver and therefore end up failing because it is literally impossible to know the jargon or nomenclature of every single industry when you're a generalist as opposed to when you're a specialist that knows the ins and outs of a trade and even the various nuances.
You need a specialist, a skilled recruiter in a particular field or trade made and trained for that and nothing else. Who can get results faster because he or she knows exactly what to do and what not to do.
Wrong pool - What are the most famous Job Portals candidates use to look for jobs and put their CV's up for grabs by Agencies or companies? there are many but the most famous ones, at least in South Africa, are Pnet, Careers 24, Jobmail & Junkmail, yes, everyone from your HR Department to Recruitment Agency uses these pools as recruitment pools to recruit from and to find and hire candidates.
So your HR fishes from here, when he or she fails, you then call a Recruitment Agency, he or she rocks up and pretends to know it all, then he goes back to the exact same pool your people have been fishes from and send you the exact same candidates your HR fished out and other Recruitment Agencies have also fished out. And therein lies the answer to why you are getting the same CV's from different sources.
You need an Agency that is creative in its ways to hunt and find skill, not one that headhunts candidates it literally has placed with its client, some agencies will do that to make a quick buck.
What I mean is Agency A places candidate B with company C, then company D needs a candidate like candidate B so Agency A goes back to candidate B, rips him off company C's organigram to place them with company D for another load of cash. This is dishonesty and this actually happens, company C finds this out and therefore concludes "All Recruitment Agencies useless and are a bunch of scam artists."
Yes, dishonest Recruitment Agents exist just like dishonesty exists in every other industry. The point is you just need to find a specialists, not generalists.
Professionals that are groomed in a particular trade, practised, drilled and rehearsed in their trade, techniques that can identify your exact need and want then go ahead and provide that to you. Preferably professionals that also come from the same industry they are recruiting for as they'll have a better idea of your needs and can quickly provide that to you.
Find them, they're out there and Surge Ahead of your competition!
Surge Ahead!
Daniel