How to choose a consultancy
For HR managers seeking a recruitment firm, being spoilt for choice isn’t necessarily a good thing. Here’s our guide to finding the right one for you
Date:
06 April 2006
Source:
Guide to recruitment consultancies
Page:
31
With a bewildering array of recruitment businesses in the UK – the Recruitment and Employment Confederation counts more than 7,000 offices among its members alone – how can the hard-pressed HR manager choose one above all others?
Consultancies themselves sympathise with this dilemma. Darren Robinson, head of HR recruitment at Badenoch & Clark, acknowledges that the services offered by agencies are generally very similar. “It can be extremely confusing for a client,” he says.
Ruling out niche agencies catering for specialist sectors and those that do not cover the appropriate geographical area will reduce the field dramatically, but Robinson estimates that there are still more than 2,500 consultancies in London alone.
1 Size matters
One way to narrow things down is to choose between large and small firms. Conventional wisdom has it that a large agency will bring economies of scale and a major branded presence to the account. Conversely, it is often said that small consultancies will prize your business more and therefore be more energetic in meeting your needs.
It is a decision that the HR resourcing consultancy at Norwich Union/Aviva is pondering. Paul Awcock, head of HR for recruitment, says the firm wants to reduce its dependency on recruitment consultancies by bringing the function in-house, but he adds that there will always be a need for external partners to conduct specialist tasks such as executive searches.
“We’re having a debate internally about whether to have one national provider – a big brand with great market presence – or several small local suppliers that are willing to go that extra mile for you,” he says.
2 Check their track record
Robinson is unsure whether the small-versus-large debate is helpful. Rather than relying on rules of thumb for choosing agencies, HR managers would be better off using their networking abilities to identify consultancies that have performed consistently well in the past.
“A successful relationship depends more on the individual consultant than it does on the size of the agency,” he argues. “Whether you take a large agency such as ours or a boutique consultancy, the level of service will basically be the same. A multidisciplinary agency may have 600 consultants but the specialist HR team, say, will be the same size as that of a small agency. A large agency is really made up of lots of smaller boutiques.”
A more realistic factor to take into account when considering whether to go with a large or small agency is its corporate culture, according to Jamie Betts, a consultant at Carr-Lyons. Some of the larger agencies are more likely to be “process driven”, he says, which means that consultants are forced to meet arbitrary targets such as a certain number of CVs processed. Likewise, he strongly advises any HR department to beware of agencies that overwork their consultants.
3 Get the local low-down
On the other hand, if a client wants a nationwide campaign, it is better to choose a large agency with regional branches rather than a smaller regional specialist. At Norwich Union/Aviva, for example, Awcock says it can make sense when recruiting in a regional market where the client has little presence to choose a consultancy that is extremely familiar with that market to provide local knowledge.
4 Say ‘no’ to procurement
Regardless of the size of the agency handling the account, consultants agree that a client should expect a fee reduction for providing repeat business. But the idea that the procurement department should be involved in negotiating terms and conditions seems to prompt a collective shudder among them.
“We’re not talking supplies of office furniture or lighting here,” Betts says. “Procuring people and procuring things are very different processes.”
According to Robinson, HR managers are far better qualified than the procurement department to decide on appropriate terms and conditions for recruitment campaigns. If you force down costs unreasonably, “something has to give”, he says.
This can end up affecting the time taken to fill a vacancy – something that will ultimately cost the client more in the long run than the immediate savings negotiated by procurement.
5 Keep ‘em keen
The preferred-supplier lists generally created by larger clients are widely seen as a fact of life by recruitment consultancies, although consultants believe that they sometimes don’t work to the benefit of the client-consultant relationship.
“When you’re working for a large client it tends to become a bit of a CV race, and there’s a real temptation to forward candidates unbriefed because of that,” Betts says. “I’m not sure everyone resists that temptation.”
It’s becoming increasingly common for clients to create a second tier of suppliers to keep the preferred ones on their toes and take over from them if a vacancy cannot be filled. But there have been cases where this has been abused by clients who place a consultancy on their second tier purely to prevent that consultancy from sourcing candidates from within their organisation.
If this is something that infuriates consultancies, HR practitioners also have a long list of bugbears of their own – one of which involves exactly the reverse.
“We get frustrated with search consultancies when we engage them on a project and then two months later we find that they’re poaching our people for another employer,” Awcock says. “It’s an absolute no-no.”
There are, of course, clauses to prevent this kind of behaviour in most contracts, he adds, but it still happens.
6 Nothing impersonal
The advent of internet databases has done much to change the world of recruitment, but not always for the better. In some ways it has made the consultants’ lives harder. Candidates are becoming much less selective in applying for jobs, because they can visit a website, apply many times for many roles and get fairly instant responses without much effort. As a result, the volume of applications has increased while the quality of candidates has decreased.
But Awcock says agencies are often guilty of using the same scatter-gun approach when trying to find new clients. “We’re receiving a lot more speculative approaches from consultants via email, which I don’t appreciate at all,” he says. “Seeing our name on a generic email list with every other company on it doesn’t make me feel very special.”
Alison Hodgson, European HR and resourcing manager at Expedia.com, takes issue with a different practice. “I’ve come across a really unethical practice whereby agencies don’t tell a candidate that they have got a second interview because they can make more money from punting that individual elsewhere.”
She has also seen cases where consultancies have quoted different fees to candidate and client, improving their own margin beyond the agreed figure.
7 Integrity, integrity, integrity
Yet these are isolated incidents and should not be seen as a sign of a general breakdown of relations between clients and consultants. Hodgson recalls a recent case where delicate negotiations to recruit a new employee failed, yet the bond between client and consultant was strengthened.
“There were good reasons why it wouldn’t have been a good move for that person to join us, but the recruitment agency was very good at managing that situation,” she says. Although the consultant failed to net a fee for their efforts and the post went unfilled, Hodgson says she would certainly use the agency again.
Ultimately, she says, she would choose a consultancy not on the basis of its size or geographical reach, but rather on its integrity and willingness to invest time in understanding the nature of the business it represents.
“That varies considerably, particularly in the technology industry,” Hodgson says.
“I want a consultancy that’s prepared to spend time understanding the business, the requirements and the organisational culture, which varies from brand to brand.”
Awcock’s requirements are remarkably similar: integrity and the ability to keep promises. “So often we find that we get a lot of promises that aren’t backed up by delivery,” he says.
Norwich Union/Aviva has been adopting a “try before you buy” approach, giving an agency a small amount of moderately difficult work to prove itself. With a careful selection process, a mutually beneficial relationship can be established.
“We appreciate those organisations that really stretch to understand what we do,” Awcock says. “Our recruitment advertising agency, for example, probably knows our organisation more thoroughly than many in our HR team. It has really got underneath the skin of the business.”