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I
love my job...as an MR Recruitment Consultant A recruiter’s lot is not a happy one!? Well maybe it isn’t some of the time but what job is? Certainly it can be a bit de-pressing when there are few vacancies or not enough really good candidates, frustrating when clients don’t provide feedback and really annoying when your candidates are inter-viewed once, even twice – and then clients announce that everything is ‘on hold’. Worse – you have the right candidate, the job offer – and then it is declined! Why do it? Well, it’s challenging. The requirement to find a needle in a haystack without a clearly written spec. Wrestling with a database that never searches in exactly the way you would like! The need to fathom what candidates really know and do from overblown CVs and ‘wriggling’ interviews. And there is always the ‘fun of the chase’ Lurking in the background all the time is a certain ‘frisson’ – an element of pressure – the need to act fast while following every procedure correctly – and getting the best candidates to the right jobs before the competition. But, on the whole, my maxim is ‘more haste, less speed’. But where’s the glamour? Well, glamorous it is not. Recruitment consultants are definitely not A-list. And maybe a bit of glamour did matter to me earlier in my working life. Marketing, advertising and qualitative research always prompted interested enquiry from others. ‘Recruitment’ makes people think of temp agencies! Does that bother me? – Not a bit. Years of debriefing clients on consumers’ views of advertising campaigns or new ideas in food, retail, media or leisure never gave me quite the same buzz as helping someone to find a job that he or she really wants. Right now I have candidates who simply want more excitement, some who want to climb the career ladder very quickly, one who wishes to escape a bully, others so keen to make the UK home, disillusioned graduates, anxious victims of redundancy ... some future top dogs and others who never will be. Who couldn’t find a huge amount of satisfaction in guiding at least some of them into a happier or more successful life?
I
hate my job...as an MR Recruitment Consultant The hours and the pay are OK, so researchers may not believe it, but sometimes this job really bugs me. In theory you should be a people person in order to do it, but maybe it would be better to be heartless and calculating. Inevitably, for starters, all the most obviously good candidates get placed relatively quickly and you are left with a long – and ever-growing – tail of the difficult-to-place. Not that everyone who’s good is recognised as such, but there are certain people you know are going to have no trouble and others you expect still to be calling in a year’s time asking if anything’s new. If you are too nice and spend a lot of your time working hard at the long shots, it’s not economic and your more ruthless competitors will clean up. Then there is the business of writing copy for an endless procession of jobs which probably do have unique features but are unfortunately provided by clients who don’t give you enough detail /don’t let you get close enough to the business to see them – and given deadlines and many other demands on your time you sometimes fall back on the old stand-by wordings. If a job is very, very boring or has something else major wrong with it, it may not be filled despite a lot of advertising and your best efforts to interest candidates, but it’s quite difficult to explain it to the client in those terms. ‘People just don’t want to work for you’. The failure to fill it is, of course, blamed squarely on you. This ‘stuck-in-the- middle’ feeling, researchers should understand. They are themselves stuck between demanding clients, often with not-too- hot subjects to research, and bored or busy respondents, and they can’t play one off against the other. Sometimes there’s a moment of real satisfaction and a little light bulb connects a new candidate with that perfect opportunity – and sometimes I know that the client would never have found, or thought of them without me – but at present I have a whole box of square pegs and a wall of round holes and in this business you can’t just hammer things in regardless – it’s not what we’re here for. I persevere – better than most I know it’s a tough job market out there! It will take something extraordinary to tip me over the edge and send me looking for a different career. Like the fact that the CV of the candidate I have just submitted for a good, appropriate job after more than an hour discussing his requirements, has already been seen by the client I sent it to, courtesy of a competitor who sent it without a meeting and without permission. Now there’s someone I’d like to see out of a job. |
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