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The recent retirement from test cricket of Ricky
Ponting set off another round of those periodic debates about where
Ponting ranks in Australia’s list of ‘best ever’ batsmen. Ponting’s test
batting average (51.85) certainly qualifies him to be among the elite
but is he the ‘next best after Bradman’ as some have speculated?

 

Comparing sportspeople across eras is a very
difficult and subjective issue. Modern sportspeople have access to much
higher levels of coaching, money and knowledge about opponents than
their past century peers had. On the other hand the rise in the standard
of living within previously-labelled second and third world countries
has given many more people from many more countries the opportunity to
compete against the traditional first world sports powers like Germany,
UK, USA and Australia (to name just four) and succeed.

 

The same argument can equally be applied to
recruitment and trying to make some sort of judgement about who might be
the ‘best’ recruiter in Australia.

 

Until now we have only had the Fairfax Employment
Marketing Awards   (seemingly now permanently retired, an apparent
victim of Fairfax cost cutting, as the

FEMA website
is no longer active) attempt to make this judgement
with their Recruiter of the Year   award (the most recent winner,
Launch Recruitment’s

Katie Borton
who left the industry in May last year).

 

With the demise of the FEMAs Brisbane recruitment
agency owner, Shaun McCambridge has decided to step into the breach and
launch

Australia’s Best Recruiter Competition 2013
.
Nominations are currently open until 8 February.

 

Up for grabs is $15,000 in cash and an opportunity to
spend time with coffee entrepreneur, Phillip DiBella.

 

The criteria that applicants will be judged on are as
follows:

  • Values as a recruiter
  • Greatest achievement as a recruiter
  • Prior awards and/or recognition and promotions of
    note
  • Overview of your style as a recruiter and
    highlights of your career thus far
  • Be prepared to provide references from one
    jobseeker and client (line managers for internal recruiters) 
I spoke to Shaun last week and amongst other things,
I suggested that as much as I admired his attempt to highlight
excellence in our industry there were some hurdles in having the
competition gain traction, namely: 

  1. Both internal and external (agency) recruiters
    are competing for the same prize:  
     It is very difficult to compare the
    accomplishments of the two different types of recruiters given both
    groups are assessed differently by their respective employers. A
    vast majority of agency recruiters are primarily judged on fee
    income (billings or margin) whereas internal recruiters are more
    likely to have a broader criteria to fulfil (eg volume, quality,
    tenure, performance own-sourced hires versus agency sourced hires).  
     
  2. The applications for the award need to be
    submitted via the website of Shaun’s business, Stellar Recruitment  :
     
    I would imagine not too many recruitment agency owners would be
    willing to allow one of their very best recruiters to

    submit a detailed application
    to another recruitment agency
    no matter how far Stellar Recruitment is
    from being a real competitor to that aspiring Best Recruiter’s
    employer.  
     
  3. Shaun is a member of the judging panel  :
     
    The same concerns about confidentiality apply as per the previous
    point.  
     
  4. Getting the word out  :
     
    Unless you have a media or association partner (eg ShortList,
    Recruitment Extra, RCSAA, AHRI etc) to help promote the competition
    it is tough to reach the majority of the people who would be the
    target audience for applications. 
Here are some further points that I would regard as
important in attempting to compare recruiters against one another to
determine who is the best: 

  • For agency recruiters billings, fees or margins
    are important but they don’t tell the whole story  
    (eg inherited a desk, got allocated a PSA, started a new division
    from scratch, tem or perm or mixed desk, has leadership
    responsibilities, capital city market v suburban or regional market
    etc). Context needs to be applied to all financial indicators.
  • Consider performance across the medium term (ie
    three to five years) not the short term (twelve months).  
    To me one of the most important considerations in assessing the
    genuine best against each other is the consistency of results across
    a number of years. This is clearly the case in international sport
    (think how often the comparison of Grand Slam singles wins comes up
    when great tennis players are being compared) and so it should be
    the case in recruitment as well.
  • Quality versus Quantity  :
    In the book
    The Facebook Effect
    (Ross Recommends,
    InSight 171) the author David Kirkpatrick details the impact that
    Silicon Valley recruiter
    Robin Reed) had on bringing in quality staff when Facebook was
    no more than a 20 person business. I am sure Reed doesn’t make a lot
    of placements per year and her annual billings may not be huge (eg
    she accepted slithers of equity in Facebook, circa 2005/2006, rather
    than fees) but look at the value of the company she has played a
    part in creating.
  • Company resources versus self  -generation:
     This relates to a point I made two weeks ago in the lead article

    The grass is not greener: Why star recruits rarely shine,
    InSight 264 when research discovered that many ‘stars’
    underestimated the impact that internal resources such as training,
    leadership and support infrastructure contributed to their success.
    For the purposes of a ‘best’ assessment, how do you realistically
    hope to genuinely compare a recruiter who works for a no-name
    recruitment business with few internal resources generating, say,
    $400k in a year, versus a recruiter who works for a global branded
    business and who bills $500k a year? There is no way that this can
    be a purely objective assessment, you have to subjectively give
    weight to the resources that each recruiter has to draw upon to help
    them do their job. 

Good on Shaun for his initiative in launching the
competition; I really hope it is a success and given that Greg Savage is
one of the members of the judging panel, you can be assured that whoever
wins the award will genuinely be the best of those that have applied
given Greg’s benchmark for ‘recruiter
best
’ is very specific and  public. 

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Mandy

With 30 years’ experience in the recruitment industry (in and out, impossible to successfully stay that long continuously!), I believe the Recruiter of the Year Award is ridiculous.

The variables some of which you highlighted, are way too numerous to mention however, an obvious one is the impossibility of evaluating internal recruiters with the same criteria as external recruiters.

For example, the criteria for external recruiters should be around levels of customer satisfaction (client and candidate), repeat business, longevity of client and candidate relationships, number of retained and exclusive assignments – temp or perm (hello? Focusing outward on the customer or client rather than inward on some outdated internal measures which are still propagated by some of the so called ‘gurus’ of our industry ?)

And of course, the criteria for internal recruiters would be vastly different.

You then have a whole range of other difficulties to contend with that makes the idea just plain silly.

Anyway Ross, I do read your newsletter with interest and appreciate the time and effort you take to bring to the table some interesting and often contentious issues.

All the best for a successful 2013!

Anonymous

I would have to agree Ross with having one of the Directors of the business promoting and hosting the competition as a judge on the judges panel makes it hard to know if nominees put forward will be judges accordingly.

It will also make it very hard for any former work colleagues or employees that perhaps hasn't seen eye to eye with Shaun to be judges fairly if also nominated.

Anyway good luck to those that may be nominated.

Anonymous

Great to see this idea renewed but wrong execution regarding the judging panel. I have to agree with Anonymous above, how can you run an unbiased competition with the Director of a recruitment company involved? I have been in the industry for 10 years and I certainly won't be applying simply due to the association with Stellar. If you ask me it looks like an opportunity for Stellar to build on it's pool of potential internal consultants without having to go to market, the talent comes to them.

Anonymous

I think you have hit the nail on the head! Just a clever way to build Stellar's pool of potential internal consultants. Certainly one way of getting out of a few Rec-to-Rec fee's! I am sure they would have used this so called 'award' as a business development tool as well; a reason to call their cold and dormant clients. The concept is great, but Stellar’s execution, promotion and motive is laughable.

Anonymous

Agreed! Aparently Stellar have lost a large number of their most experienced personnel over the past 12 – 18 months. Make's sense that they would be involved in this in an attempt to try and regain what they have lost. Someone who does not have alterior motives or whom can benefit from the competition needs to take the reigns before the best in the business will actually get involved I feel.

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