Here
is our guide of what not to do when sending a vacancy to a recruitment
agency in the hope of them finding you someone suitable. I appreciate
from the outset that you may well be reading this thinking why would I
want to instruct a recruitment agency anyway!
1.Do
not send an email to twenty five recruitment agencies and cc. them all
in to the same email. Do not address your email to Dear All, and if my
name is Jonathan, please do not say “Hi Kevin”. We have heard it said
that if you send a generic email to lots of recruitment agents, it makes
them work all the more harder to recruit the right person for you. This
is completely wrong. What actually happens is your email comes into the
office; we read it, groan inwardly and then almost certainly ignore it
unless we have anything better to do. We don’t want to work a vacancy
with twenty four other recruitment agencies. The most desperate of the
bunch will work the vacancy and the rest will have better things to do.
The reason we do not want to compete with twenty four other recruitment
agencies is because everyone has access to the same CV banks, the same
job boards and you can virtually guarantee that even if we were to find
someone on our system that other recruitment agencies didn’t have, then
someone somewhere will have sourced the same CV at some point and sent
it over to the firm in question. In my experience in recruitment we have
never once successfully placed a candidate with a company where they
have given us a list of recruitment agencies they are working with.
2.Do
not include the words 'client following’ anywhere on your job
description. Asking for a solicitor or lawyer with a following (i.e.
their own clients) is like asking for a solicitor who is a qualified
plumber and able to speak fluent Lithuanian whilst standing on her head.
The vast majority of employers have restrictive covenants in place that
expressly prohibit any member of staff from approaching clients and
taking them with them to a new firm. There are a few here and there who
have sources of work that they can tap into and loosely count as a
following, but generally these do not exist. If you send us a vacancy
asking for a conveyancing solicitor with lots of description, and then
add ‘and a client following’ then the chances are you will not get much
of a response.
3.Do
not set us out a list of strict expectations for a vacancy where there
are likely to only be one or two applications. Here is a quick example: a
firm based in Swindon looking for a residential conveyancing solicitor
on a full time basis, starting as soon as possible with specific
experience of a certain case management system - no applications from
anyone who has not. The problem with this is that there are lots of
different case management systems and the chance of finding someone
looking in Swindon at any particular time working on one particular type
of these is very difficult indeed. Try to be as broad as possible to
attract the candidate. After all, you can always reject unsuitable
candidates but if you have restricted the field so much that you don’t
get any candidates to reject, the whole exercise becomes a little bit
pointless.
4.Do
not send us a vacancy and underneath include the amount you are
expecting to pay the agency to work for you. There are certain law firms
out there who are notorious for doing this, and they tend to be based
in the most difficult areas to recruit, and have the most outlandish
expectations when it comes to sourcing staff. Why not wait and see what
applications you get in before you start considering how much it is
going to cost?
5.Don’t
send rude emails. Recruitment consultants are mostly human and some of
us even have a bit of pride in our work. I don’t particularly like
working for clients who email us to say that we are a scourge on
humanity but they are prepared to use us anyway.
Recruitment
consultants (or at least professional ones and not the type who act
like estate agents) want to help you, because that is their job. If you
send me a vacancy and don’t recruit one of our candidates I still take
professional pride in dealing with you and also with the candidates who
get details of your vacancy.
Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals.
Comments