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.

IT Recruiters - why aren't they technical?

Anyone who read my short bio below (and for those that can't be bothered, here's my LinkedIn profile) will have noticed that I don't have any formal training or certification in IT. Indeed this is true of most IT Recruiters, and this is typically something that mystifies candidates. How we we effectively recruit IT roles if we don't have a deep understanding of the technology?

There are four key points I'd like to make addressing this question:

(1) IT recruitment is first and foremost a sales role, not an IT role. You spend a huge proportion of your day selling your services to clients, selling opportunities to candidates, and candidates back to hiring managers. If your heart lies in technology rather than sales, recuitment is not going to suit you.

(2) Candidates tend to be obsessed with technical skill, where are employers are more concerned about soft skills. Just about all of my clients tell me they would much rather hire the person that is 9 out of 10 for cultural fit and 5 out of 10 technically rather that the person who is 5 out of 10 for cultural fit and 9 out of 10 technically. Hence we put our focus into getting the person who is a great fit personality wise rather than someone who is a technical guru.

It's also worth noting that much like beauty, technical skill is in the eye of the beholder.

(3) IT is extremely broad. The nature of the roles I am recruiting change massively week to week - Java Developers, Helpdeskers, Business Analysts, Change Managers, Unix Engineers, Project Managers, SAP functional consultants, CIOs, ITIL specialists, etc etc etc. Even if I went out and got a certification such as a CCNA, 95% of the time it would have little to no relevance to the role I'm trying to recruit. And not having the opportunity to apply my skills means any technical nouse would rot on the vine, so to speak.

(4) Most decent IT recruiters do develop quite a good high level understanding of IT. You do need to be able to have a sensible discussion about technology.

To be honest I think a lot of candidates like playing the "Recruiters aren't technical" card when they aren't getting a lot of traction out in the market and want someone to blame. I will though expand on that in another post.

So who is The Hated Recruiter?

My name is Greg Pankhurst, and I'm an Account Manager and Co-owner of a rapidly growing Recruitment Company called Balance Recruitment. Balance has specialist IT and Finance divisions, though my own personal history is exclusively on the IT side.

Balance is not my first stop in IT recruitment. I spent over 3 years with Candle ICT, one of the big names of the IT recruitment sector.

Between my time with the two organisations, I feel like I've developed an excellent handle on the Australian IT recruitment industry. I've filled roles from CIO level down to helpdeskers and have worked accounts ranging from industry heavweights like Westpac through to small fledgling startups making their first hire. Development, infrastucture, contract, permanent -you name it, I've probably done it.

I am though a compartively late starter in recruitment. I actually started my career has a Biochemist, having done a PhD at the University of Sydney, and spent 5 years doing post docs with the Heart Research Institute and St Vincents Hospital. Perhaps not the standard background for the typical IT recruiter, but then again, I'm not sure such a thing exists.

Welcome to The Hated Recruiter

I've spent the past several months lurking and posting on the jobs forum at Whirlpool. Now for those of you unfamilar with Whirlpool, it's probably Australia's leading internet and technology discussion boards, with some 400000+ users and 1000000+ threads. And one of the more active forums is the jobs forum. People discuss resume formats, interview strategies, debate the merits (or otherwise) of different employers, and discuss the general goings on within the Australian IT industry as they impact on recruitment. As an IT Recruiter, it's quite an interesting community to be involved in.

Two things stand out to me from my time spent on Whirlpool:

(1) IT Recruiters are widely disliked, and
(2) There are a huge number of misconceptions about how the IT Recruitment Industry works.

The first point doesn't shock me - I remember when I was first looking to start out in recruitment I was frequnetly told that this was not the most respected of careers. I am though somewhat surprised by the depth and vehemence of that dislike from some individuals, and also the bredth of that dislike.

The second point though is perhaps the more interesting one, and I can't help but feel that a number of the misconceptions that surround the industry fuel the contempt that exists for my chosen profession.

So this blog has been created with the idea of trying to address some of those misconceptions and perhaps better explain how the recruitment industry works. If nothing else it might allay the frustrations of some of the regulars on Whirpool, though perhaps I'm being naive.......