Ross Clennett Article

What Clients Want

 

by Ross Clennett

This article originally appeared in my eNewsletter InSight (Issue 9, 21 November 2007)
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In the mid 1990�s I was the Convener of the Professional Development Special Interest Group of the NSW NAPC (the previous version of the RCSA). One of the events that I organised in 1995 was a client panel.

Three clients volunteered (as panel members) to give their opinions on agency recruiters and fielded questions from the floor. It would be fair to say that the general feedback coming from the panel members, was that the recruitment industry had plenty of room for improvement.

Fast forward 12 or so years - it�s August 2007 and I am at Crown in Melbourne for an RCSA monthly breakfast and it's like 1995 all over again. The panel consists of four corporate recruiters/HR Head Honchos representing:

• GE Money

• Primus Telecommunications

• Rio Tinto

• Air International Thermal System

As I sit there and listen to each person give their presentation and answer questions, it�s like I have a 12 year echo bouncing around in my head.

The criciticisms about our industry from the panel members is summarised as follows:
 

• High consultant turnover
  "Why are you so poor at keeping your own staff?"
   

• Dealing with too many consultants on the one account
  "I don�t mind who does the work, I just don�t want to speak to them all!"
   

• Inconsistent quality of recruiters from the same company
  "I want to know that the rest of the company is the same calibre as the star recruiter"
   

• Recruiters don�t research the company prior to visits
  "Why do I frequently get asked questions about the company that are readily available on our company website and should be on your database?"
   

• Recruiters present candidates without understanding what the candidate is really looking for in their next role or what they are passionate about
  "You need to be experts on your candidate pool"
   

• Recruiters are poorly equipped to answer detailed questions about a candidate�s current and desired remuneration
  "This is a basic skill of interviewing"
   

• Recruiters all say the same thing
  "You�re different � alright, prove it"
   

• Recruiters don�t say much of interest
  "A general chat won�t win our hearts and minds"
   

• Recruiters aren�t the experts that they purport to be
  "I�m not convinced that an external recruiter can do better than us in any area"

Linda Coutts from Rio Tinto mentioned that Rio Tinto had gone to the extreme of blacklisting some agencies (no names mentioned) due to ethical or service issues.

The panel summarised what they believed were the critical things for us as agency recruiters to focus on and ensure our continued relevance. These were:

integrity � do what you say you�re going to do

honesty � if you don�t have suitable candidates, just say so

expertise � have a deep understanding of your market niche

advocacy � know how to go into bat for both us (your client) and candidate

relationships � get to know us and our culture (like you work here)

urgency � fill our jobs quickly
 

It�s hard to argue with any of these.  I�m sure if my memory was perfect, I would be telling you that this was more or less, the same feedback that I heard from my first client panel in the old Wynyard Travelodge some time in 1995.

On one hand, our industry is motoring ahead.  Julie Mills CEO of the RCSA said at the November RCSA Vic/Tas breakfast, that the value of the recruitment industry to the economy is now $22 billion per annum (I am unsure whether this is both Aus & NZ data or Australia-only), yet our clients are pointing out the same old issues from when we were a $2 billion industry. How can this be?

My interpretation of this state of affairs is that we continue to be great at delivering outcomes that our clients want while being much less successful at meeting the client's expectations with respect to processes.

So how can we improve our processes to match the outcomes that we are generating? There are a few topics that I will discuss over coming weeks.  Today's topic is "undertaking research to build your credibility".

Listening to the client panel comments and speaking with friends, clients and ex-colleagues in the corporate recruitment/HR side of the fence, it is clear that the level of research undertaken by most recruiters is minimal.
Here are my Top 10 suggestions to improve this:

1. Subscribe to any email newsletter/media release service that your clients and prospects have available on their website
   Set up Google alerts on topics, companies and contacts of interest

2. Search companies and contacts prior to phone calls and visits to discover valuable publicly available information.  Many times, your clients and prospects will be impressed with what you find on the Internet that they haven�t found. The sites I use most often are Google and Zoominfo

3. Read Business Review Weekly (BRW) or other weekly business publications relevant to your market, each week

4. Scan the Australian Financial Review (AFR) daily or at least the recruitment advertising every Friday

5. Read your local paper�s business pages for more locally relevant business news

6. Mine your database for information on contacts contained in resumes.
   Good databases allow you to do a free text search using a company name or a person�s name

7. Attend relevant industry/professional association networking events and conferences to meet people and hear about latest developments and trends

8. Maintain regular contact with your placement �alumni� to find out hard-to-access-in-other-ways coalface information about target organisations

9. Read relevant publications that improve your knowledge about recruitment and talent issues. I especially enjoy BOSS, the free colour magazine that comes with the AFR, the second Friday of each month and from the USA, the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership which is published monthly.

No single strategy will make a huge difference to your credibility when communicating with your clients but ensuring you consistently use at least five or six of the above suggestions, will put you well ahead of your competitors.