Recruitment agencies can damage your hiring plans

Agency recruiters frequently attract a barrage of abuse for unprofessional and unethical behaviour.  Sometimes it is justified.  Other times it is not.  One thing is for sure - not all agency recruiters are good at sourcing, screening and enabling successful hiring of great candidates.

 A big part of achieving successful results, comes down to how agencies go about sourcing.  Some have extensive networks built over time, who have genuine relationships with their candidate populations.  Others have access to vast databases and can count on sheer volume of contact to generate a least a couple of good candidates.  Others again, rely purely on advertising to generate candidate interest - albeit this approach means they’re only ever accessing the small active seeking candidate community, and not giving hiring leaders choices of “hidden” candidates who are not responding to ads right now.

6 basic requirements for a job ad

When relying on advertising to source candidates, the skill of writing a decent ad to actually attract interest and “sell” the role, is vital if any recruiter is to have a hope of giving their hiring leaders some talent choices.  Much has been written on this, over many years. Certainly there are some basic criteria that should be covered inclusive of:

• an accurate description of company culture and the work tasks and challenges to be handled by the successful candidate (and not just a regurgitation of a prescriptive job ad),

• type of employment contract, be it salaried, full time, part time, fixed term contract, ad hoc hours, shift work, etc

• location, and whether the role is to be effected via office attendance or flex or remote work,

• extent of travel expected and whether it is long or short haul, and planned or ad hoc,

• salary or contract rate and benefits, and any relocation support if required,

• any past experience or qualifications that will be essential to be successful in the role.

As a professional courtesy to all applicants, every job ad should have this bare minimum of information shared, so that they can realistically understand if the job has potential for them, or not. Mitch Sullivan and Allyn Bailey are leading advocates of quality advertising and authenticity in every form of communications with candidates when hiring, and have additional useful criteria that all recruiters should be taking note of.

Bad job ads are uncommonly common

Surprisingly, in all the years I’ve been in the business of talent attraction I’ve never had a hiring leader ask me if I would utilise any means of advertising, and NEVER asked to see any of the materials I use to promote their role vacancies, or their organisations.  Given that companies spent gazillions on building and maintaining their brands, I suspect their marketing leaders would freak out upon seeing many of the recruitment agency representations of their carefully crafted and curated brands. And hiring leaders who cannot understand why their agency partners are not delivering as expected, would do well to explore what if sourcing methodologies are being applied and to check the quality of advertising and marketing communications material being used. For sure, many advertised job vacancies may not immediately link to a company brand, but once a candidate learns who the actual employer is after making an application, the ad messaging had better fit the “image” and “reputation” that the hiring company is trying to promote to avoid any disconnection with the candidate.

Take this latest example, currently posted on an assortment of social media sites:

About the job

Interim HR Specialist - 6 months - Remote 

I am currently recruiting for an Interim HR Specialist to work remotely on a 6 month contract to start ASAP.

Key Skills: 

Previous experience of managing and training less senior members of staff

Someone who can 'hit the ground running' 

Reporting, Numbers 

Compensation and Benefits framework 

Rewards 

If this role sounds of interest please apply within!

Seniority Level: Mid-Senior level

Industry: Human Resources

Employment Type: Contract

Job Functions: Human Resources

Pay range unavailable

 

Clearly a job ad by someone who

1. Doesn’t understand the role being hired for and/or

2. Someone who is insanely lazy and doesn’t care too much about results and/or

3. Someone who has heard about the vacancy and hasn’t actually been authorised to work on it but is prepared to collect candidates to send speculatively in the hope that they’ll get a placement and/or

4. Someone who has been foolish enough to promote a job vacancy from a leader who hasn’t bothered to brief them properly on the hiring criteria.

Some candidates might speculatively apply, on the basis of being unemployed and anxious for any kind of work. Maybe they’re at entry level in their careers and don’t know any better, or perhaps they’re already resigned to dealing with humdrum recruitment agencies, and willing to jump through the circus hoops.  However many other professionals, even those anxious to be working, will run for the hills.  Imagine the confusion of candidates who do apply and find out that the job is actually with a reputable corporation. Does this ad fit with the professional image and “employees are our biggest asset” image that the company has been so carefully cultivating? Or does this add actually create “a little red flag” of concern to the candidate. Given how the vagueness of the ad for role content and skills/experience criteria, what can any hiring leader expect from the agency “assessment” of candidates being presented for consideration? 

Who owns the responsibility for bad job vacancy advertising?

Poor job ad content however, isn’t always entirely the fault of the recruitment agency. Bizarrely, this can sometimes be a by product of a company’s PSL - a tool used by Talent Acquisition or HR (or procurement) teams to uniform and control the recruitment process with an intent to improve efficiency and manage or reduce cost.

Rigid SLA’s or KPI’s might stress a need for advertising to be commenced within “x” amount of time of the job vacancy being advised to the PSL recruitment agencies, often without a detailed briefing shared with those suppliers - not an excuse for writing a poor job ad, but at the risk of not meeting a contractual KPI, it could certainly contribute to sloppy advertising content. We also know of many hiring companies who have appointed recruitment agencies for mainstream hiring, who then expect those firms to manage all ad hoc specialist roles as well, despite those agencies having no network or knowledge of the role to be hired for; and when hiring leaders are repeatedly “too busy” to give their agencies a detailed briefing, sloppy job ads can again easily be the by product.

It can be very difficult for a recruiter to say “no” or “we can't help without more context to the role and hiring requirements”. With the fear of risking future business in not achieving prescriptive targets, many recruitment agencies will jump to please, even when it means trying to fill roles outside of their specialist hiring areas, knowing that PSL’s are geared to judge agencies on their delivery of candidates for allocated roles.

How much importance should be placed on quality job ad content?

With the rise of social media usage, and the ability to express opinions to a large audience at the touch of a button, bad practice in the recruitment process is constantly being exposed by job seekers and interested observers. Coincidentally perhaps, we’ve seen an increasing trend for internal Talent Acquisition teams moving towards better addressing both “candidate experience” and “employer of choice” branding through their own advertising channels, with clear alignment to their company’s broader marketing strategies - a great start in attracting the best talent for job vacancies. However this frequently isn’t mirrored by the 3rd party recruitment agencies, appointed by those TA teams.

So when will all recruitment agencies, at all levels of hiring, finally bring their own job vacancy advertising up to a professional standard? There is no shortage of facts, data, and examples that testify to the need for quality content and targeted approaches in advertising (and all other communications) to attract job seekers. There are no shortage of subject matter experts available to train recruiters on this, and some clever agencies have actually employed their own in house experts to manage the responsibility of writing and posting quality job ad content.

If advertising is at all important to the sourcing process, recruitment agencies really need to “up their game” especially as quality of hire is increasingly being measured along with time to hire. And if agencies don’t improve their advertising standards voluntarily, it may only be a matter of time until TA and HR teams start to pay attention and force improvements upon their 3rd party suppliers.