20 Jul Edible Recruitment. What Clients Need to Know.
We work in world that doesn’t always enjoy the highest levels of respect. Minimal regulation, minimal types of relevant third level qualification and quality assurance ensures a difficult landscape which can allow bad practice to flourish with the actions of the ‘talent rascals’ impacting on the remainder of the recruitment professionals striving to deliver for their clients and candidates alike. The most common negative feedback we get is on fees – ‘How can you charge 15% of a gross salary for a successful placement – you don’t do anything except stick it on a job board, phone a few people and hope for the best…. ‘
So welcome to the ‘Williams Recruitment Exemplar Kitchen’ where I will attempt to create a range of dishes which perhaps better describe the challenges of a sample of roles and the types of activity which are required to get the ‘golden chicken nugget’ clients richly deserve:
Toast – Entry Level Service Desk Support:
Everyone can make toast right? – the complexity is minimal. Source the right sort of whole grain loaf, find a toaster team that can deliver consistent colour and ensure that the butter is well… buttery. But what happens when you need 400 slices of toast in the same morning. Experienced Recruiters and RPO professionals know the process for sourcing this amount of bread, building a toaster that can assimilate volume talent in a consistent manner and ‘buttering’ candidates to just the right level is the difference between a failed and successful ramp up project. I see clients continually failing (or using the wrong type of agencies) to build the right sort of sourcing and attraction approaches, build the wrong type of internal recruitment teams and adopt small volume processes (or worse still use their existing infrastructure) to deal with volume projects. At this level speed is critically important – the salary levels are often low and candidates can easily fit into other client’s toasters.
Fish and Chips – Outbound & Inbound Sales:
Again most people can make fish and chips – but most of us don’t, as success can be mediocre at best. There is a good reason for this – fish and chip shops have more practice. The best will know exactly where the ‘cod’ was caught, was it ethically sourced, how it was transported, how it was prepped for cooking and controls how it is presented to the customer. Recruiting effective Sales Staff is a process requiring knowledge of a comparative candidate base, the most appropriate types of psychometric testing, where to ‘fish’ and how one needs to go way beyond the ‘CV’ when actively sourcing for perfect fit sales staff. Again there are lots of competitors in the market but select well and you will never go to another Fish and Chip shop again… even if they are not on your doorstep.
Spagetti Bolognese – Business Support – Marketing, HR and Finance:
Most people can have a good go at Spaghetti Bolognese – particularly if you just want something from the jar. In terms of the key support functions in our business Dolmio candidates in this space will rarely cut the mustard.. Or tomato. When we recruit for clients in this space we want to source the finest quality ingredients from multiple markets and sectors around the world – more importantly we want to quality check every ingredient. We also want to know what the other top Italian Restaurant is doing down the road – they probably have better tomatoes, or pasta .. sometimes both. Creating the perfect Bolognese takes time, effort and trial and error. We don’t want to give our clients something of the shelf from one of the larger ‘Supermarkets’.
T-Bone Steak – General IT roles:
Recruiting in IT at the moment is a bit like trying to buy and cook T-Bone steak when it was declared ‘illegal’ a number of years ago because of the ‘bone’ content. T-bone Steak became quite a rare commodity with the T-bone industry going dark and fans approaching butchers directly, buying T-Bone underneath the counter and murdering cows in the field… ok perhaps not the last one. Good IT Recruiters will find you ’T-Bone’ steak if you can be patient, you are prepared to pay a premium and you understand the minimal talent availability. At this level Recruiters will often make 100’s of phone calls and direct mails, they will post to ‘Butcher’ sites and they will leave no carcass left unturned. That’s even before they work out how you would like it cooked and presented. The danger is as always a huge part of the population love steak – if you don’t move fast enough someone else will take your steak or the butcher will keep it himself. 60% of IT candidate offers are subject to a counter – steak doesn’t always want to travel to someone else’s plate.
Black Truffles – PHP Developers:
Finding a PHP Developer has become the ‘Holy Quail’ of Recruitment with clients probably not fully aware of just how difficult (not impossible) this can be. To deliver on these types of roles we need a team of sourcing pigs (apologies the analogy appears more offensive than it was meant to be), people who understand where the truffles are hidden, the right tools to retrieve them and often a means to store and mark potential truffles for a later date. Again when a truffle is discovered the need to fully understand how it might be applied to the dish in question for greatest flavour is critical. The truffle search and dish process is expensive, painful and often requires months and years of work and understanding.
That’s why Recruitment often seems expensive – but remember you don’t pay if the dish isn’t delivered and if you don’t like the taste you can return the dish. Just think twice before you insult the chef – the kitchen can be a demanding place. 🙂