Seems everyone is recruiting at the moment. This is of course great news for the industry as a whole and also for the various 'hangers-on' like yours truly who feed (or is it feed off?) the sector.
Way back in the mists of time (May 2009's Recruiter magazine 'Soapbox') I questioned the long term wisdom of cutting loose the rec-to-rec sector completely as short-termist and uneconomical.
It seems I may have been right. I've lost count of the number of middle-to-senior-managers I've spoken to recently who have over recent years been forced to personally trawl the job boards looking for recruitment candidates when they should have been running their divisions. What did that all cost, not only in terms of their impressive real-terms hourly rate but also the opportunity cost of what they weren't doing at the same time?
One summed it up like this, "I'm in charge of fifteen offices, and I spent a week's 'project' trawling job boards to find bottom-of-the-barrel candidates, whereas had I spent that week helping each branch get five extra temps out that would have increased GP across the business by £5,000 every week the numbers were maintained."
Interesting.
Now it seems that whilst sanity may be returning to a certain extent, we seem to be back in the position we were four or five years ago with a sector not so much expanding, but re-inflating like a sagging balloon, all at the same time, with daily requests coming in to us for "CVs." That by the way is entirely another article...
Anyway, one point I made was to keep suppliers in the loop so they will recognise your business for what it is, post-recession. Many did, but many did not. Guess who are getting the better people from rec-to-recs now?
I have no problem with the Rec to Rec - I am aware of Senior management that have a massive bee in their bonnet with Rec to Rec's.
ReplyDeleteThese are the same recruitment managers by the way that tell us to explain to the HR managers the true cost fo recruitment, and the reason to use agencies. Yet they forget Rec to Rec's are a mirror of ourselves - but supplying to the Recruitment world.
To me recruitment agencies are a logical processes and when you break down the true figures and cost to a business of trawling the internet boards and building a short list - 3 days have gone by.