Why Recruitment Consultants Exist?

They are also known as the agency, they hate to be called that, as they’d like to consider themselves more sophisticated.

Typically, the Recruitment Consultant exists to fill the jobs of their client’s.

What will normally happen is that recruitment consultant will call companies asking if they have any jobs that he/she can fill. They finally get one and then the set the wheels in motion to finding the candidate.

Normally they’ll advertise the job and search through their database. This is why you get calls out of the blue.

The sole factor for the agent to exist is simply the agency acts as a forum for employer / employees in much the same way as a dating agency works.

Although the recruitment consultant never gives any guarantees that:

a.       You will find a job or

b.      The company will find the employee.

Candidates get the raw deal

Candidates tend to get the worst of the service as they are perceived as the customer as they don’t pay for the service

If you have ever looked for a job you will know, unless you work in a very specialised field, that it is very difficult to think of, say, 100 companies would be able to employ you.

Recruitment consultants do know this, good ones read news papers, keep themselves up to date with what’s happening in their local area or specialist field.

If you are currently working you will find out how time consuming finding a job is. Firstly you need to identify the companies you wish to target, and then you need to find the person you need to speak to. Then the hard part, you need to speak to that person and find out if they are looking for someone like you, 9 times out of 10 the answer will be "no".

Speculative CV's

Posted speculative CVs are rarely filled for viewing later when they are there is usually no mechanism for a company to retrieve that CV. I.E. a database.

Once they have said "yes", then no doubt want you to sell yourself a little, most people feel a little nervous about this.  Hence the recruitment consultant steps in, as it is easier for a third party to do the "selling". Everyone hates talking about themselves, there are even recruitment consultancies that recruitment consultants can use - these are called Rec to Recs.

The reason companies use them is purely for convenience since they charge anything between 15% to 20%; so they are expensive but as any employer knows placing a job in the paper is a costly affair.

Not simply the actual cost of the advert but managing the response, writing the ad copy and spending time getting the advert just right to portray the company in the best light etc. It is far easier to give the job to an agency and then look at 3 or 4 CVs rather than 100-200 inappropriate ones.

This is for permanent employees -  for temporary or contract employees it is a totally different kettle of fish, in that it would be time consuming and expensive to advertise a job that was only going to last a few weeks anyway. Also if it’s urgent, you may need to get some one who can start tomorrow, in comes the Recruitment Consultant.

So until Jobseekers have either the time or the confidence to get jobs for themselves and until employers stop using Recruitment Consultants for convenience, the Recruitment Consultant is here to stay.

Written by - Rich Wooten

Effective Tips for Social Recruiting

You have already heard this many times before: social media websites are great tools for recruiting and sourcing potential job candidates. Identified, which is a well-known social scoring analytics firm, adds fuel to the fire by estimating that companies that have put social media into use for recruiting have 25% lower hiring costs per year. This estimation sounds too good for you to neglect it.

What happens if your company still hasn’t established its presence in the social media? How can you start recruiting and sourcing effectively? These simple tips will get you started in no time:

1. You already have existing contacts. Import them!
Launching social tools and getting connected to the contacts you already have is the easiest thing. Twitter and Facebook enable you to import your list of contacts, which will help you find people you know on these social tools. These imported contacts will be your foundation that will help you build your recruiting campaign – they will guide you towards people you would like to know and hire.

2. Use the employees that are well-connected on social media
Among your current employees, there are social media “stars” whose contacts you can use to manage and build your network. Make them advocates for your company and you will notice how they attract potential job candidates easily. However, you need to be careful with your approach; you cannot just ask your employees to connect you with every single contact they have. Instead of imposing that demand, you should learn from the way they use social networks. If they managed to create a successful social media presence, you can use their techniques for your own approach.

3. Promote your company through your employees
Most of your employees are already active members of social media communities, so they can help you enhance your recruiting efforts. If the company culture you have established is great, it won’t be a problem for them to promote you. Although the participation of all your employees is welcomed, you should first focus on the “best” ones (the ones who are well-accepted on social media websites and use them actively).

4. Pay attention to the public profile
Your company’s public profile will represent its values and success. Make sure to provide contact information and create a well-written profile with usage of keywords relevant to your business. If you make it easy for potential candidates to reach you, social recruiting will become much easier.

5. Don’t focus your social media presence on sales
If the main purpose of your social media presence is recruiting, you should promote your company as a great place to work. Your presence should be focused on building that brand perception instead of sales.

6. Add a personal approach to your profile
The profile of your company should definitely look professional, but you still need to add a touch of human presence in it without compromising the image of professionalism. Your profile is the first thing potential candidates will look at, so it has to create a strong impression if you want to get their interest.

7. Listen and learn!
Even if creating a social media presence seems easy and you think you know everything, you should still pay attention to the social media monitoring applications and learn from them. This information will give you knowledge about where you can find potential candidates, what topics interest them, and who else is trying to attract them.

8. Stay connected and contribute to the community
If you managed to connect with people from your industry, well done! Now you need to work on building and maintaining your reputation. The key to that is staying connected and hanging out where these people can be found. In order to find the niche network where people from your industry hang out online, you should ask and listen to the social media stars in your company.

9. Focus on one social media website at a time
If you want this campaign to be successful, you should choose one social media site and stick to it until you achieve strong presence. If you try to be successful on all of these websites at once, you will find them overwhelming and you won’t be able to devote your time to all profiles.

10. Share content that will be helpful to others
The right approach towards social recruiting is all about helping people. If you have a genuine wish to help more people with the content you share, your visibility will be improved and you will build your network more easily. You don’t have to develop unique content, although that’s advisable from time to time. Take your time to find and share useful videos and articles that are relevant to your industry and helpful for your followers, and you will soon attract many people that are worth recruiting.