Why is the recruitment support I get from recruitment agencies so rubbish?

Everyone loves a service where you pay nothing up front right? In principle yep but reality can be different.

This model of working is called Contingency recruitment and Contingency recruitment is basically a numbers game!

Let me explain…………………..

As a recruiter for a traditional recruitment agency it’s most common to be targeted on placements.

So let’s assume your monthly target is set at £20,000 sales per month

We’d need to know your average deal size and for this let’s assume £5000 a month
From this then we know that you would need to close 4 deals in that month to meet target.
We’d now need to work backwards to understand conversion ratios , we will consider this in differing ways. For this example we will assume a 2 stage interview process.
Final Interviews to Placements – Assume a ratio of 2:1. So this means that for every 2 candidates you get to final stage , you will place 1.
Based on this the consultant would need to have 8 final interviews to place 4 people. (This is quite generous and a number of consultants numbers won’t be this good!)
1st Interviews to Finals Interviews – Assume a ratio of 3:1. So this means that for every 3 candidates at 1^st stage , you average one being taken through to final stage, so
Following this logic you need to have 24 1st Interviews in a month to meet your target.
Shortlisted candidates sent to 1st Interviews – 3:1. In this example every 3 candidates sent to client results in 1 being taken to first stage interview.

So a recruitment consultant needs to send out 72 qualified CVs a month to meet target

If we take In a typical month that there are 20 working days this means a consultant will need to send 4 CV’s out a day to stand a chance of hitting target.

So what does that mean for you the client?

You are a client that pays more than the average deal size

You might get lucky and be prioritised

You are a client that pays less than the average deal size?

You’ll likely be the bottom of the pile and not prioritised

You have more than 2 interview stages

The longer the process, the less likelihood of a contingency recruiter placing so unfortunately you are lower down the pecking order of priorities

You are likely one of a large number of clients an agency is working with

There’s no guarantee much is actually happening with your account

Consultants are under pressure to deliver

This can result in less than good practices (being polite here) ranging from sending CV’s on mass, question marks over candidate ownership, poorly qualified candidates, lack of communication with clients and general feeling of unsatisfactory performance

So what can you do?

Try an approach that is different, that can actually give you a better experience and a better ROI.

Interested to learn more?