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Recruiting the right person can be a real challenge, says Andrea Kirkby.
ou might think recruiting in the property sector would be easy right now, compared to the glory days of the boom. There surely must
the top end of the market, it’s a bit of a scrap.” Catherine Darbon, recruitment manager at
be plenty of negotiators and lettings agents out there who want a better job, or just want a job, full stop. But you’d be wrong. Getting bums on seats is easy, but getting the right candidate is still hard. Paul Connaughton at Buzz Recruitment
says “Good candidates are like gold dust.” He believes that while many firms have got rid of dead wood, there are few good, experienced people on the market. Andrew Deverell Smith concurs. He says “the best people are generally in the best places, they’ve got their heads down and they’re doing well.” That, of course, makes it difficult to find them, they may not be looking for a job, which of course is where a headhunter like Deverell Smith Recruitment comes in, and just as difficult to motivate them to jump ship. He says that in interviews, it’s now the case
that “they’re assessing you the employer as much as you’re assessing them, and they have tons of options.” While offering the right salary is obviously important, he says, candidates also want to see “a good plan and a clear business focus, and a clear career progression route.” That is a place where smaller firms, with their greater flexibility, can score over the major corporates, which sometimes “put people in boxes”, he believes. And finding the right people in particular
locations can be difficult. For instance, if you want someone with Chinese or Russian fluency for selling prime London property, you may have a hard task ahead. Residential lettings are always a challenge, according to Andrew Deverell Smith. And “at
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Townends, has seen a number of changes in the recruitment market over the past five or six years. “First the market was flooded with experienced candidates,” she says, “but most of those were dead wood. Then we moved into a period when the good experienced candidates all wanted to stay put. And now we have a huge number of new applicants trying to get into the industry.” But even that has changed. Whereas earlier
Ticking all the boxes Y
intelligent, fantastic people.” The big problem for recruiters is that you
have to trawl through a lot of dross to find the right candidate. At least if you’re a recruitment agency, this is what you get paid to do. Recruiters say they get an average of 120 applications per job, and depending on the job, will send clients 40 CVs that fit what they are looking for, out of which about a third might be interviewed. That could mean just three interviews out of over 100 applications.
“The best people are generally in the best places, they’ve got their heads down
and they’re doing well.” Andrew Deverell Smith, DSR
on, she saw quite a few second or third jobbers wanting to make the switch into estate agency, now it’s mainly under-22s looking for trainee jobs. She also notes that there seem to be fewer women at the moment looking to come into the industry – “which is a real shame.”
THE BEST… AND THE REST The division between ‘the best’ and ‘the rest’ has never been more stark, and that makes the recruiter’s job particularly onerous. Catherine Darbon says “I’m surprised by the number of people who come to interview in such a competitive job market and have done no research about the company. Some don’t even know why they want to be an estate agent. On the other hand you do get some who are just marvellous, really motivated,
A lot of those applications are what are
called “hope CVs” where the applicant has no relevant experience. Job boards make it easy for applicants to apply to up to 100 jobs a day, Maybe some people are just clicking and clicking and hoping that something will come from that scattergun approach. The volume of applications is just as
intense at Townends, where Catherine Darbon says she gets 800 to 1500 job applications a month, and does 25 to 45 interviews every week. “Out of those,” she says, “I would be lucky to get five people that I wanted to put forward to the second interview stage.” So the advertisement’s job is not so much
about attracting candidates as attracting the right candidates. Different recruiters work in different ways. Paul Connaughton of Buzz
TheNegotiator l May 2012 l 39
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