Recruitment's Iceburg

Another regular source of recruitment related annoyance for candidates are the fees a recruitment agency charges. I've often seen comments along the line of:

"All they did was email my CV to the company and set up a couple of interviews and they get to charge 10 grand. What a f##king joke!".

The problem here is the candidate tends though to view the recruitment process solely through the prism of their own experience. From the perspective of a successful candidate, an agency probably didn't appear to do a great deal throughout the process. The reason for that is the candidate doesn't get to see the entire recruitment process, rather a small proportion of the recruitment process. It's a bit like thinking all there is to an iceberg is the bit sticking out above the water.



So what are the parts of the recruitment iceberg that a candidate may not see?

• Creating a candidate pool. This will typically incorporate searching our own database, LinkedIn, online databases such as LinkMe, writing ads for the job boards, asking our own contacts for referals, etc etc.
• Reviewing the CVs those searches yield. For any given role it's not uncommon to review as many as 300+ CVs
• Contacting and phone screening the long list, checking availiability, interest & suitability. 50+ calls would be the norm.
• Face to face interviewing the short list. In some cases this can still be upward of 10 people
• Submitting our best candidates to the hiring manager/HR team, along with a 3-4 paragraph executive summary that addresses the key selection criteria
• Facilitating the interviews, keeping in mind that we may still have as many as 4 candidates still under consideration at this stage
• Reference checking
• Managing the offer process. This by the way is far from trivial. The number of times either clients try to negotiate down or candidates try to negotiate up is mind boggling. And counteroffers are also rife.
• Trying up all loose ends - chasing up paperwork, organising start dates, etc

So when you can see the entire process, you can see there's a hell of a lot more involved than a couple of emails and a phone call.

The recruitment process is also very fragile. At any stage a company can change what they are looking for, a candidate can accept another offer and you pretty much go back to square one, without getting a cent for your efforts.

It's also worth noting that agencies certainly don't fill every role they work -far from it. Often you will find yourself competing against other agencies and internal recruitment teams, and if you don't find the successful candidate, you don't get paid. Same deal if a role gets withdrawn or placed on hold.