Agency Recruitment
Wow, it’s been a whirlwind start to the year. I can’t believe it’s the end of January – I seem to remember the days when January crawled. There is definitely an air of optimisim in the air, long may it continue.
Have you got the right team?
One of the hardest things to do having won a great piece of work is having to put a team together to fulfil it only to figure out that there are gaps, and new bodies are required. My background is digital and as such you would think “oh well that’s easy set prospectives a task, if they can do it, give them the job.” Not so.
But lets rewind – finding a new bod. Who on earth said that recruitment companies would die now that most people are up to speed with LinkedIn? Don’t get me wrong, from a business development tool I’ve found it amazingly effective but hell – you do profile searches only to discover that your potential victims are working with competitors, couldn’t do the hours without relocating – oh and actually don’t want to move!
So you think – hell here we go again, give 15% to a Recruitment company or: Day 1: make the announcement on your Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook on the off chance that someone will know someone.
Day 2: Balls, I want an immediate reaction and no sod has got in touch, right now it’s advertise the position ‘old school’ – wait, I do bugger all advertising, they’ve got me by the short and curlies on the rates.
Day 3: The Big Brother house is getting restless because if we don’t get someone soon it will start to show up in the work and the client will get antsy – can’t allow that to happen. (I know, we’ll go to a recruiter, if they’ve got anyone we like we’ll say we’ve been in touch with this person a while back through Emma’s brother’s mate on Facebook – because they were at the same party together in 2003 – relief, no fee and we did it using social media – bonus!)
Day 4: Bigger Balls – the recruitment company is wise to this tactic and ask their prospective candidates whether they had ever spoken to us about this or any job in the last 3 months…
Day 5: Bite the bullet and leave it to the professionals.
Day 6: They have a couple of possibles, now it’s all about the personality fit – 2 days ago, you would almost have taken anyone – not now. The success of this project is down to weakest member of the team and if they don’t gel it could go all a bit Manchester City…
I used to think that recruiters sat in their ivory towers buying and selling people.