R's about face

I visited over 1000 recruitment firms across the UK, Europe and the USA during my time at the REC and since leaving, in late 2006, I have worked with a handful of the best; all ambitious, targeted and successful businesses in their sector. I now think I have fathomed why so many recruiters fail to achieve their true potential and the professional recognition they rightfully deserve.

One thing always hits me when I start to get inside the mind and culture of a recruitment business; in most cases the best recruiter in the business is in the wrong job.

I sit around with business leaders listening to them bemoaning the lack of good consultants these days; ‘Oh they aren’t as committed as we were, they don’t do the hours, don’t build the relationships and they never take time to understand the clients (or the candidates) and the benefits they want!’ It all starts to sound rather Pythonesque and only gets worse when I ask ‘So who is the best recruiter then’ and they point surreptitiously at each other (or themselves). So I ask myself, if the best recruiters are playing at being MD, Ops Director and other posts with meaningless titles, why aren’t they still Recruiters? I say that the great recruiters should become even greater recruiters rather than shifting uncomfortably sideways and becoming less than adequate business managers, leaders and directors.

My solution would be to scrap the traditional model of a recruitment agency where consultants become team leaders, become branch managers, become area managers or directors and then find themselves so far away from the coal face that they simply shuffle paperwork, calculate the PAYE and make themselves, operationally, redundant. After all, we all know that most sales people make appallingly bad managers, so why do we persist in letting the blind lead the ill-informed.

Now, please don’t think this observation is a slight on recruiters; in fact, there is nothing I rate more highly than a top performing Consultant. I genuinely regard them as an artist; as good as any Ronaldo, Amy Winehouse or Tracey Emin, but let’s face it they aren’t great business leaders or administrators and rarely get to grips with the ‘back office’. Even Richard Branson considers his success attributable to his ability to put the right people around him to do the things he can’t (and doesn’t want to) do himself.

Therefore the answer is surprisingly simple and you only have to look to those two others business outsourced professions for a clue; Lawyers and Accountants, to learn how it should be done. When you enter the Accountancy Profession you train, you qualify and you become a junior accountant, you eventually progress and become a senior accountant. This leads to you becoming a Department Head (still a lawyers) or even a world-renowned specialist, and you eventually make Partner; still practising the law, and with ever increasing rates charged for your time and knowledge. Now I know senior lawyers don’t do the donkey work, they have juniors, but they do lead teams in support of major clients and they remain client facing. Oh, and most importantly, the business management and administration is performed by a team of business managers, maybe even a General Manger, who works for the Lawyers and are bought in for their expertise in that field and run the business around and for the owners.

So I say let’s adopt the same style of structural governance as the professions and keep recruiters doing what they are great at; recruiting. How knows some of the professional status may also rub off.

Gareth


I refer to this as the “Boon Gatherers” model for the significant advantages I believe it brings to the business. For more details contact me directly.