Last month’s article finished by saying

… There is one test that will tell you every time whether someone is a professional recruitment specialist… they will be the ones who are prepared to walk away from work. A professional recruitment specialist is judged by their results and if they are not confident of getting a result they will walk away… next month we will discuss the why, this is so important…

Well here we are and it is next month….

Now I know this is going to sound bad and maybe politically incorrect for a recruiter to admit…but the perfect candidate does not exist… there is no such thing…or maybe there is in some cases… but is it really worth finding them…because if we go looking for the “perfect candidate” our journey may be so long, so costly and so frustrating that it will make no commercial sense.

Companies are entities filled with people who are in a constant state of development and change… matching the recruitment needs of a company to the candidate marketplace at any given time is an inexact science… it requires a willingness on the part of the company to act quickly, be flexible and clearly understand the consequences of any compromises they are making.

So if the perfect candidate is that elusive to us… what do we do? Like any dynamic organisation we improvise… we make up our mind on just how much we are willing to compromise, and what we are willing to negotiate and then we search for the best available candidates in the marketplace at the point in time, or the period given in which the position is to be filled.

So a consultant that promises the perfect candidate is taking a big risk…. If we brief a consultant by describing the perfect candidate and the consultant takes our brief on face value without exploring the flexibility of our criteria… we know immediately that the consultant does not know what they are talking about… why?

Well because they are accepting an assignment from us that they have very little and most probably no chance of filling. What this means is that the consultant after promising they can find us the perfect candidate, either knows they have lied to us in the briefing or very quickly realises they made an unfulfillable promise… in which case they should call us and tell us.

What typically happens however is that the consultant starts emailing resumes that are outside the criteria we have given, hoping that we will agree to see these candidates because they are “close”? The problem is, when qualifying happens at this stage it is the client who is doing the culling of unsuitable candidates not the consultant… so in effect the client is paying for a service they are not getting… this more than anything else is a clear indicator of whether the consultant knows their stuff!

Now it takes a while for any consultant to develop trust with a client… but good consultants will do this faster because they will take a detailed job brief… they will actually consult with their client (weird eh!) on the flexibility around the criteria and they will only put candidates forward that fit into this agreed criteria. The fastest way a consultant can undermine trust is to present candidates outside agreed criteria, without having a very good reason for it.

The recruitment industry earns a bad reputation when consultants “flick unsuitable resumes“ without acknowledging and explaining why… this can be avoided up front by the consultant getting a detailed brief.

It is a funny thing… but it is true… professional consultants walk away from assignments from clients because they know, with an unrealistic criteria and the current state of the candidate market they are in, they cannot fill that role within the given time period… and they do not want to harm their reputation by trying… Because after all, a specialist is judged by their results.

Next month we will take this a step further by explaining

Please feel free to contact us at Frontline Health with any recruitment requirements - we are here to help.