Recruitment as Marketing

The staff in our business are critical to its success. Along with our customers, they are our most valuable asset. So finding the right staff is a critical task.

They’re the experts, aren’t they?

For years, I assumed that the reason that everyone used recruitment consultants was that they were experts in their field. They recruit people every day, so they ought to be pretty good at it (right?). Actually, after a bit of thought, this is ridiculous. None that I have ever met has a Master’s Degree in computer science, so why should they be able to better assess the technical abilities of a candidate than us? None of them that I know has ever run a support desk, so how can they identify an outstanding support technician? And the list goes on.

And then the question becomes “What are they actually good at?”. You’ll never guess the title of the next section.

What are they actually good at?

The recruitment agent is simply acting as an intermediary, benefiting from the fact that the job seeker is not aware of the job offerer and vice-versa. They are simply a match-maker (albeit a very expensive one –  they charge outrageous amounts for simply putting two parties in contact with each other). For a highly skilled software developer the commission payable to a recruitment consultant could amount to 4 months salary or more, which explains the fact that the one and only time a recruitment consultant visited me his car was several times more expensive than mine.

Like any good intermediary, they’re really good at keeping the seller (the candidate) and the buyer (the employer) apart until they’re sure they’re going to get paid. And at persuading you that the candidate is about to be snapped up so you’d better move fast or he’ll be working at your competitors tomorrow morning unless you sign on the dotted line now. NOW. No pressure there then.

The Final Straw

A few years ago I was made aware that a recruitment consultant who had placed a member of staff with us a few months earlier, was then contacting them to tempt them with a better offer elsewhere. This is the ultimate inflationary spiral – the employee benefits by increased salary, the agent benefits from another large commission payment, and I imagine they were hoping that should our employee leave, they’d be only too happy to offer us a choice of replacements (at their normal rate, of course). So I wasn’t particularly impressed.

Recruitment as Marketing

Having decided that we didn’t want to use agencies any more, Jon Twigge (our Sales Director) and I developed a home-grown process which mirrors much of the marketing we do.

As with any other form of marketing, the process is about gradually building a relationship with the candidate. At any point on that journey, either party can bail out without loss of face and at minimal cost to both sides.

Roughly speaking the stages are as follows:-

1. Identify what role we’re looking to fill (write a job description)
2. Identify the skills a good employee will need in that role
3. Identify where such a candidate is most likely to be looking for opportunities (or where we can find them!)
4. Make them aware that the opening is available (we use CWJobs for software developer jobs and other relevant websites as required)
5. Make the advert interesting. (99% of all job adverts are BORING). As an example, our current advert will read: “Phone-a-holic Required” or something similar
6. Make it easy to apply online, but hard to do it automatically (see the next sections!)
7. Put in place filters to ensure that “grapeshot” applications are rejected immediately (a “grapeshot” application is where a candidate emails their CV to a list of 1000 businesses who might be interested in them). If someone can’t be bothered to apply for a post explicitly then that doesn’t bode well for the future. To force the issue they have to write an application specifically for our job explaining why they are well-suited to it
8. Make sure the candidate has good communication skills: Any promising applications are followed up by a phone call. This can be used to identify how good a communicator the candidate is, as well as removing any bias from a face-to-face interview and acting as an initial screen. The phone call can save both parties time and money.
9. If a candidate sounds good, then we would typically set them a task. For developers, we have a simple (but not too simple!) programming task for them to solve. The fact that a candidate is prepared to do this is an indication of their seriousness to work for us. Again this is usually done by email.
10. Assuming the programming task goes well, then we would invite them in for an initial interview. At this stage, one of us would make a point of not reading their CV to avoid any bias (obviously someone else would have read it by then!)
11. Given the interview goes well, ideally we would ask the candidate to come and work with us for a few hours (this isn’t always possible due to contractual obligations), but it gives both parties a much better idea of how we would work with each other. Better to find out now than in a month’s time!
12. Based on all of the above, we decide on the candidate

Now, if an agency could do that for me, I’d be delighted. In the mean time, I don’t expect to be contacting any in the near future.

PS. Joel Spolsky has written an excellent book: called Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent, Hardback: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent , which I’d highly recommend to anyone looking to employ a software developer.

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