Secrets uncovered from the other side
By Tina Iantorno
Are you an agency recruiter who becomes frustrated at times with the corporate recruiting process? Do you sometimes wonder why when you have the right candidate for an open job order, the client takes longer than anticipated to close the deal? Do you question why the process is cumbersome?
Many agency recruiters have expressed this frustration, sensing that their style to ‘get it done’ is met with bureaucracy, organizational politics, and corporate HR/recruitment practices. Contrary to popular belief, most corporate recruiters and hiring managers also focus their work efforts on ‘getting it done’. So why is there a lack of understanding and/or frustration?
Well, it stems not from the common goal that recruiters, whether agency or corporate, share in meeting hiring needs, but from the ‘how’. Let me explain.
Agencies view candidates as a commodity therefore viewing recruitment as the process of buying and selling ‘goods’. Their focus is on achieving high sales by making placements. The overall process in sourcing, screening, interviewing, and presenting candidates can look similar in both worlds. However, with corporate recruiting the process involves many more steps. This is just one critical difference. Corporate recruiting also involves working with more than one process given they are focused not only on external talent, but also internal candidates.
Corporate recruiters view candidates not as a commodity but as talent. Talent that needs to be sourced, screened, interviewed and hired. All while adhering to strategies, policies, and processes and doing so in a timely and cost effective way.
Agency recruiters can perform an important sourcing tactic which is headhunting. On the corporate side, policies usually prohibits this form of direct recruiting, so the internal recruiters utilize many sources which equates to more processes, reporting, administrative tasks, and managing client/candidate relationships.
Most corporate recruiting is full-lifecycle versus the full-desk agency recruiter duties. As such, the sourcing strategy is not just focused on receiving top candidates from preferred agencies, but instead from a variety of sources both internal and external to the organization. Typically within corporate recruiting departments, requisition loads are heavy, as each recruiter can be responsible for up to 60 open positions at any given time. This high volume spreads a recruiter’s time over a number of tasks and due to priorities for roles changing and hiring manager’s time constraints, the corporate environment to close jobs can be challenging. Furthermore, corporate recruiters face changing budgets, hiring needs, internal employee movement, etc that agency recruiters never face, but may feel.
All of these factors impact the process, time to hire, frustration levels with recruiting, and which candidate is offered the job. With this in mind, I hope agency recruiters gained a better understanding and appreciation of the other side and continue to provide a valuable service in helping corporate recruiters meet hiring needs.
About the Author
Tina Iantorno is founder and President of TKA Consulting, a recruitment and talent management consultancy firm, and who has worked in both agency and corporate environments. She can be reached at tinaitm@yahoo.ca
Reposted with written permission from the Author
Precision Recruiting
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