Don't bash agencies before you put your own house in order!

Here we go again, recruitment agency bashing.....

1. "Agencies will lie about candidates receiving better offers to ratchet up their salaries and their own potential fees"
2. "There is a lack of customer service, lack of professionalism and lack of focus on filling more difficult posts"
3. "They need to meet our needs and listen to what we want,but they don't. They phone constantly and get quite rude with staff when we won't take their calls"
4. 80% of the companies believed agencies offered a poor or average service!
5. 60% of the companies said that agencies poached staff from each other.
6. 60% thought agencies fees were excessive.

Source: A recent report by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE).

Yet the spokesman for ACE said that recruiting through agencies is still the preferred route to fill (or not as the case may be!) their vacancies.
One simple question....ARE THEY MAD OR JUST SIMPLY ALL HYPOCRITICAL? 

ACE believe there to be in excess of 20,000 vacancies across construction and engineering in the UK, with large projects already suffering (not including the Olympics 2012 projects yet to start). So if as a company you are having such a bad time with using recruitment agencies that are not performing in any way (and you can take any of the above as an example), then there are some possible reasons why that is not the case and here are ten reasons to get you started:

1. You have selected the wrong agencies to work with.
2. You are not paying them enough - yes this might sound strange, but with a candidate driven market, cheap PSL agreed rates will not get you the best candidates!
3. You have no working relationship with the agencies / consultants, just a transactional one.
4. You are happy just to send out a job spec and then seem to expect correctly matched cv's.
5. Your HR team don't fully understand the roles, so how are they going to make the agencies understand.
6. Your recruitment process reward speeds not quality - don't use your ATS as a convenient first come first served cv weapon.
7. Spend time searching out good consultants - there are still many of us out there (contrary to popular opinion!!!)
8. Involve the individual consultants at an early stage of the recruitment process, and get their 'buy-in'.
9. Consider engaging a recruitment company on retainers for projects, it is amazing how much motivation that provides!
10. Please don't assume that all recruitment agencies are the same  - they are not!!

Of course it goes without saying that there are some companies who are quick to moan about using recruitment agencies. And I bet that these companies do not have:

1. Good career sites that are easy to find (if at all)
2. Well written and appealing adverts on these sites
3. Well optimised job pages
4. Good enticing career opportunities
5. A website that is appealing to prospective employees
6. An internal referral scheme
7. An industry networking scheme
8. Staff that actually know what a good applicant looks like
9. A good robust recruitment process
10. An understanding of what the word fast means