Creative hiring and untrustworthy recruitment agencies

September 26th, 2018 | Industry News

How to find good candidates in a buyers’ market

Every HR department knows that recruiting is getting more difficult. While recruitment software can help sift through the available candidates, it can’t magic suitable candidates out of thin air! So how can recruitment agencies and HR teams find those elusive ‘suitable candidates’?

One way is to move from job descriptions to position personas. The standard recruitment outline describes the job and the person required to do it in terms of skills, qualifications and experience. In a shrinking candidate pool, persona descriptions look at softer skills, empathy, resilience, self-propulsion, sociability etc. – they enlarge the candidate base by allowing organisations to use their web based recruitment software to identify people who could be up-skilled or re-qualified to fulfil the job description.

Another creative route is to explore the potential network of your existing personnel, especially those who’ve joined you in the past year because they are the most likely to know others who are ready to move. The best recruitment CRM allows you to map the relationships between external candidates and current personnel. It doesn’t have to be as crude as offering a bonus for each recruit that your staff bring in – you can offer recruitment debriefs where the HR team sit down with every recent recruit, find out how they are doing and ask if they know anybody who might be looking for a new opportunity.

Unprincipled recruitment practices

Two ugly little surveys have shown that the UK’s recruitment agencies have a long way to go. ‘Trust in Recruitment’ was a survey of over 1000 employers and jobseekers and half of those responses said that they didn’t feel the recruitment agencies they’d worked with in the previous year had been honest. Even more shocking, less than 5% felt they could rely on a recruitment agency to advise if a role or candidate was ‘right’. Ouch!

At the same time the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reveals that complaints about recruitment agencies have skyrocketed in the past 12 months from 828 in 2016/17 to 1261 in 2017/18. Nearly a quarter of these complaints were related to the hospitality and healthcare sectors. So what’s going wrong? Fake adverts to bring in candidates and failure to pay a temporary worker are the bulk of the complaints. No recruitment database software can compensate for this kind of practice – it’s a combination of poor treatment and unscrupulous behaviour which has caused the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate (EAS) to consider 11 prosecutions this year.

SAAS recruitment agencies are inevitably more transparent than their more traditional counterparts and because record keeping is a key factor in poor practice it’s a sign of business health when a recruitment agency opts to use online recruitment software.