Why recruitment consultants are hated
- Alex Booth
- Aug 8, 2023
- 2 min read
Many of us love to hate politicians, lawyers and fat-cat bankers and it’s perhaps understandable given the associations with lying, greed and self-interest.
So why do so many people also seem to hate recruitment consultants? Given our role on the one hand is to help companies to succeed and grow by enabling them to hire talented people and, on the other, to find roles for people seeking work, you’d think we’d be everyone’s best friends.
But we’re not and, I’m afraid, it’s with good reason.
Every industry has a number of people working in it who are not very good at what they do but, frankly, the proportion in the recruitment sector is higher than most.
Perhaps it’s because the barrier to entry is low – you don’t need a masters from a top university, there’s no truly recognised professional qualifications and the graduate training schemes that do exist are nothing like as comprehensive as in other sectors. If you fancy setting up a recruitment agency, just get a mobile phone and an email address and away you go – it doesn’t matter what you did before or, indeed, whether you were even vaguely successful.
However, I think the real reason is that, on the face of it, recruitment looks easy. You just sit in your office, wait for a job description to arrive from a client, place an advert somewhere, send the best CVs over and keep your fingers crossed, right?
Recruitment requires a depth of commercial understanding, strong communications skills, the ability to sell concepts both verbally and in written form, a highly organised approach and the ability to consult and advise. And, above all, integrity, professionalism and a commitment to delivering on promises, be it presenting results to a client on time, letting applicants to an advert know they were unsuccessful or simply returning someone’s call.
Complicated? Perhaps not. But if more recruitment consultants did it better, maybe we’d all be better liked.
www.abaexecutive.com
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