"Just pay us 30% of their salary and we'll find you the perfect candidate..." Hrm, no, fuck off...
Preface
Like all senior members of staff at Adaptavist, I'm starting to get really pissed off with recruitment agencies.
Adaptavist has doubled in size over the past 6 months and we're still recruiting for a range of roles. In the company's history, we've only had one success with a recruitment agency so far - everyone else has been recruited directly.
The Myth
One of the big myths is that recruitment agencies are somehow better at finding candidates than employers are. This myth is reinforced by every recruitment agency you'll ever speak to:
- "We have a dedicated team working on this"
- "We are specialists at recruiting people with these skills"
- "We have hundreds of candidates on file and will select the best ones for you"
- "One of our top candidates wants to work for you and asked us to arrange a meeting"
What a load of complete and utter bollocks (wikipedia, urban dictionary).
The Reality
For the average developer role at Adaptavist, an agency will want to charge us something like £6,000 GBP (about $12,000 USD) if we take on a candidate. So what do we get for our money?
Well, despite what an agency will tell you, they all work to the same tune:
- Spam the role out to as many job sites, classified ads and other outlets as possible to harvest possible candidates
- Keyword match the CV's and email a bunch over to the employer
- Repeat step 2 until employer either recruits someone or dismisses the agency
Ok, some agencies do a bit more - they might have a meeting with the candidate, they might even do some psychoanalysis crap - but in a nutshell that's what you get for your £6k.
The Side Effects
Agencies cause a number of unsavoury side effects:
The employer is inundated with agencies cold calling for every job role. They really want that nice easy £6k. Should you take on an agency, you'll usually be inundated with CV's of completely inadequate candidates. This process takes up MUCH more time and effort on the part of the employer than if they'd recruited candidates directly.
If an employer takes on a candidate via an agency, their budget for that candidate is blown straight away - the £6k could have been spent on a computer, training, health insurance, etc.
Candidates are increasingly lazy - why bother looking for a job when you can just email your CV to a bunch of agencies? From an employers perspective, do you really want to hire someone who can't even be arsed to apply for a job?
Agencies focus on the higher salary candidates - more commission. Thus, any lower salary roles (junior roles, apprentices, etc.) suddenly get harder to fill via an agency. So what to employers and agencies do? They boost the salary of the lower roles to make things move more quickly. You can imagine what that results in.
One of the more worrying things is that agencies keep people on file. They don't think twice about sending job offers to that candidate you just recruited from them.
These issues are affecting entire countries!
The Alternative
What most employers don't realise is that it's actually very easy to reach out to potential candidates. And it's vastly quicker and far less costly.
If you're taking on 5 people, the agency fees actually amount to enough money to employ a 6th person. If you're worried about the amount of time it takes to recruit someone, why not employ another full-time member of staff to handle that with the money you're going to save?
When posting your job offers, make sure they are written by people who understand the job role, not HR. No offence, but HR generally don't have a clue what the job entails (just like the recruitment agency). If the job role is written by the person who understands the role most, you might not get as many responses but those you do get will be from good candidates. Also, be sure to clearly state in the advert what sort of people you don't want - save yourself and those candidates time by filtering them out prior to getting their CVs.
After posting the vacancy on your website, advertise it with Google Ads! Make sure the adverts contain "jobs" keywords - both in the keywords section and also in the text ads title. In terms of keywords, use specific technologies or frameworks that you are interested in and remember to filter the advert placement to applicable countries/regions. Also, ask your team for a list of websites that relate to the job role - see if they have google ads and add specific placements for those sites.
Next, get your team to place an advert on LinkedIn and forward to it their LinkedIn contacts. For best results, get the person with the most relevant LinkedIn contacts on the team to do this. You're all on LinkedIn, right?
Post the vacancy in your company's facebook group and get team members to share the links in their personal profiles. You've got a facebook group, right?
You should also try using Twitter to promote the vacancy via TwitHire.com. You've all got twitter accounts, right?
Get your team to publicise the vacancy in their blogs and any other social networks they may be in. You've all got blogs, right?
Finally, post the vacancy to some local or industry-specific job boards.
All of the above will take about 1 hour and in total cost around £300-500 GBP (it's worth spending money on Google and LinkedIn as they are both great ways to promote the vacancy).
Be patient! It can take a week or so before you'll start getting good candidates coming through. However don't be too patient - if it's taking too long examine your job advert and your Google adverts to see if you can refine them.
A note for job seekers
If you're looking for a job, remember that if you directly approach an employer you'll be saving them thousands of pounds - a big incentive for them to employ you.
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