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Recruit says, “A lot is through word of mouth, and we do advertise on some of the job boards. You’ll always get the dross, but we picked up five good CVs today on job boards.” Buzz Recruit also uses print media, but
rather than advertising regularly in each issue of a particular magazine, Paul Connaughton says “We tend to trial different things in fits and starts. It’s about having the right advert in at the right time, rather than always using any one publication.” However, he says, Buzz Recruit tends to
search actively to find people, rather than simply depending on candidates applying for a particular job. “You have to be proactive,” he says. And from the sound of it you also have to invest heavily in systems that can handle the amount of applications coming in; Buzz has received 4,500 CVs since mid December 2011, and has over 3,000 live candidates in its database. Other recruiters find that the job boards,
Monster Jobs, Total Jobs, Fish4 or Reed for instance, deliver very few good candidates. Andrew Deverell Smith says “I wouldn’t encourage anybody to waste their money on a job board, full stop. Good people are not on job boards. Good people are in jobs.” He says he might manage to get one or two candidates in a year from job boards, but he’d be surprised if he found more. That may be because Deverell Smith is
looking at the top of the market, but the research team spends its time trawling through referrals, headhunting or even mystery shopping, rather than posting to job boards. At the same time, social media are now becoming important for recruitment. “When I came into the business there wasn’t a Facebook, there wasn’t a LinkedIn, there wasn’t a Twitter,” Andrew Deverell Smith says.
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“It’s a dangerous game, because you can spend all day on it, but with 200-300 live vacancies, we can afford the time.” That might not be the case for an individual estate agency, of course. National print media for him is no longer
a good way to find candidates, with social media becoming much more important. Press advertising “is just not producing for us, I’m sorry to say, in all media now, we’re seeing that the appointments sections are a fraction of what they were,” he admits. Townends finds that the firm’s own website and staff referrals produce quite satisfying results in terms of applications, as well as job boards. Social media has a part to play too, she says; “We are exploring social media with greater depth at the moment, but it’s a long term thing. We’re finding our feet.”
give clients market information, and that’s all free.” Time spent on specifying exactly what type of candidate is needed, and understanding the company’s culture and branding, will help the recruiter find people fast when there’s a real need, whether because of a new branch opening or an experienced member of staff leaving and needing to be replaced. Paul Connaughton takes forethought a step further and talks about “talent pooling”, interviewing candidates in advance so that when a job comes up, an offer can be made. He believes that’s a good way to deal with today’s market, where the best candidates are in employment already and may not be actively looking to move. “Start looking before you need them,” he says. He also believes agencies need to make
“The difficulty is finding the right balance between bums on seats and waiting for the
quality applicant to appear.” Catherine Darbon, TOWNENDS
Recruitment agency Dove & Hawk become
something of an evangelist for social media, claiming that “Social recruiting finally went mainstream in 2011”. LinkedIn, for example, has become a major source of candidates, with over 150 million members (8 million in the UK) and growing at 50 per cent over the past nine months. Social media is now “a required skill for the modern recruiter,” according to the recruiter’s blog, and @ DoveandHawk on Twitter, with a ‘quote of the day’ as well as news of job openings, shows the recruiter is walking the walk as well as talking the talk. “Time to #getittogether recruiters!”
WAYS AND MEANS
Social media is playing an increasingly important role in the recruitment process.
New media and internet has definitely speeded up the recruitment process. Paul Connaughton says, “I had a vacancy in today and it’s already gone out to 162 candidates.” That in its turn brings challenges for estate agencies looking to recruit. You can lose people just by not calling them back as soon as you get the application. That’s one reason that businesses either
appoint a recruitment manager, or use an agency. Too often, the manager in charge of hiring is snowed under with their own workload, and struggles to find enough time to put into the recruitment process. In that case, they’ll miss out on good people. Agents who use a little forethought will also find that it pays dividends. Andrew Deverell Smith says that clients who get the relationship with a recruitment agency working before they actually need to recruit new staff will have a much easier time. He says, “We can add value, getting more productive people and a better fit. A good consultant will give clients options, and will
40 l May 2012 l TheNegotiator
sure they understand the market and average pay rates properly before they start recruiting. “Where agencies let themselves down is where they offer highfalutin OTEs that are not realistic,” he says. Good candidates will make their own assessment of whether that OTE is in fact achievable, they will look at the branch’s inventory and management, not just believe what they’re told at an interview, so recruiters need to make sure they are offering a realistic package. Should agents do their own recruitment
or use a recruitment agency? Andrew is in no doubt, “Ask a professional!” he says. Catherine Darbon says Townends doesn’t
work a lot with recruiters, for purely budgetary reasons, agencies cost money. But the firm does work with “one or two agencies who are specialists in the sector, and where we have a good relationship with them,” she says. They are firms who interview all the candidates before sending them to Townends, and through having a long term relationship, they have developed a good understanding of what the firm wants. Darbon says, “The hit rate is extremely high.” For her, apart from the challenge of finding the time to read all the CVs that come in and interview a good proportion of candidates, the biggest difficulty is finding the right balance “between bums on seats and quality.” She explains that you could go to one extreme and wait for the right candidate to turn up, but end up running an office without enough staff, so that client service would suffer; or you could go to the other extreme, and focus on filling the positions available, but at the risk that you have candidates who don’t quite fit the company or aren’t the best you could hire. It’s a difficult balancing act, and not getting any easier. l
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