Most hiring managers and human resources have at some point used the services of recruitment agents to fill open roles. Whilst agencies can be great at finding matching talent quickly, it is often overlooked that the primary responsibility and focus of a recruitment consultant is sales. Does this detract from their role on the recruitment and selection process?
Both candidates and hiring managers tend to think of recruitment agents as key people in the recruitment sector because they have an ability to find great talent and dig out interesting opportunities thanks to their tenacious networking and relationship building skills. However, ask any recruitment agent what it’s like to work for an agency and they’ll soon tell you that they work in organisations where the primarily focus is sales and hitting revenue targets. After all agencies only get paid commission when an open role is successfully filled.
Can this high-pressure sales environment detract from a professional recruitment and selection process? In most cases recruitment agencies do have high standards of customer care in dealing with both candidates and employers but there are still many agents that will do just about anything to close the deal. This can include selling unsuitable candidates to employers in desperation to achieve interviews and fill the position quickly. Equally agents can be guilty of over selling an open role that is clearly unsuitable for a particular candidate. This ends up wasting the hiring company’s and the candidate’s time and is a practise that hopefully will disappear one day. This over selling behaviour is often driven by the pressure to achieve sales commission targets but will have a long-term detrimental effect and is not in the interests of the recruitment agency anyway. A tell-tale sign of this over selling can be a failure of agents to communicate with candidates after an interview for example.
Recruitment agencies will always have sales targets as key drivers of their business but it’s in their long-term interests to have well trained agents that have great networking and relationship building skills. In addition, they should be able to fully understand the hiring company’s requirements and provide advice on current trends in their industry sector. Equally they should fully understand the complete profile of skills and experience of potential candidates to increase their chances of getting a perfect match.
For resource stretched organisations that do not have the people or time to do their own recruitment or the budgets to employ the services of a recruitment agency they can look at using automated hiring tools that can provide great position and candidate matching services.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to ensure more efficient recruitment using any channel is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.