The recruitment field is said by some to be a cut-throat business. Some also say that recruiters don't care who they recruit as long as they recruit. Some might even say recruitment agencies are a waste of time.
I was pondering these things on the day I started my work placement at Jenrick CPI in Walton-on-Thames. I'm a bookish university student and I've been looking for a summer job in 'the real world', so over the next month I'll be working and learning the ropes as a resourcer with the IT recruitment team. As I'm a keen writer I've decided to keep an online diary of sorts, recording my time here week by week, to try to give a frank impression of my day-to-day experiences.
My first day was pretty nerve-wracking. I had no idea what to expect. After a quick whip-round of introductions my colleagues were happy for me to get stuck straight in, and my first task was to call people on our database whose CVs hadn't been updated in a long time and ask for an updated copy. I was initially horrified. Would the people on the other end of the phone think I was pestering them? Might they hang up on me? It was patiently explained to me that it was essential we have up-to-date records on our database or else we can't find all the possible candidates who might be suitable for a job.
But this sort of brief phone contact, which I imagine many people associate with recruitment agencies, was just the tip of the iceberg. What has become increasingly apparent is all the effort that goes on behind the scenes here.
Having an up-to-date database makes our job incalculably smoother. But that's barely the beginning: the first concrete stage of recruitment, which most candidates don't see, is when we receive a job specification from a business looking to recruit. Usually at least ten agencies will receive this same job spec, and it's the consultants' jobs to come up with the goods - often in a limited timeframe (one client I've been working with this week gives us only 24 hours!) and most of the time only three of the best CVs can be submitted by an agency for one role. From here it's a race against time to find the best unique candidates.
The next stage I was taught is how to find these perfect candidates. The first step is looking through our own internal databases. However, sometimes when a client seeks a highly specialised candidate or when we want to open the opportunity to as many others as possible, we widen our search to external sources such as the job boards online. We will post an advert for the role, to which job-seekers can apply, and we manually search (sometimes frantically, given an especially tight deadline!) for suitable applicants on these websites too. I was getting involved almost straight away in the fervour of finding eligible candidates.
From there we have to filter down the CVs to find the most relevant and suitable people for the role, from potentially hundreds down to just a few. I've been shown how to match requirements from the job specification ("Java", "clinical trials") to the content of a person's CV. It's often incredibly difficult to whittle down the candidates, and when matching we consider areas such as level and relevance of experience, as well as the candidates' own demands of salary and location. It can be a long and arduous process searching relentlessly through the job boards, trying different search criteria in an attempt to find candidates of the calibre our clients require.
Once this is completed, we contact our potential candidates. This will be the first they hear of our work in finding them a job, and we have to hope other recruitment agencies haven't contacted them first. Our consultants will describe the role and further assess the candidates' availability and suitability, checking that the candidates would be happy in the position. It can be frustrating if we find that an excellent candidate is no longer available for work, or that the job turns out to be unsuitable for them, but that's the nature of the recruitment industry.
Eventually, after sorting out all the final details, we send over two or three of the final candidates for our clients to consider. The danger is that other recruitment agencies are submitting the same candidates. Sometimes the window for submitting candidates to big clients can be as little as fifteen minutes, so it always gets the adrenaline pumping.
This process takes place all before the candidates are invited for their first interview, and by then it's out of our hands. And far from the negative impression floating around about recruitment, I've been finding that the environment is always productive and energetic. Most of my colleagues have been in the company for years, and I've never seen so many smiling people at 9AM before. Despite having only been here a week I've already found a sense of pride in the consultants here, in the work that they accomplish and in the people that they serve.
Check out here for how does a recruitment agency make money.
No comments:
Post a Comment