The Level of Service and Basic Business Model of Contingency Recruiting
The contingency recruiting process is geared toward identifying candidates quickly, but not necessarily toward finding the most qualified candidates that could be discovered if a systemized retained executive search process were employed.
Contingency recruiters rely heavily on searching and advertising on LinkedIn, posting ads on job boards, searching existing databases for potential candidates, and blasting out emails. They learn the basic facts about the job vacancy, scan known candidates and submit their resumes as quickly as possible. This creates an enormous workload for the client who has to sort through all those resumes to find ones that are a close fit and then schedule a screening interview.
The problem with all this contingency activity is that most passive candidates, such as the top 15%, don’t spend much time on LinkedIn, don’t visit job boards, and typically ignore unsolicited emails. In some cases, those unsolicited emails from recruiters are blocked by their company and emails from the recruiter’s company may be blacklisted thereby never landing in any potential candidate’s inbox in that company. Company email servers routinely tag emails that appear to be spam and relegate them to a spam folder or simply bounce them.
Additionally, the top 15% passive candidates usually are normally satisfied with their present position and aren’t thinking about making a move. We have had many clients tell us that both internal recruiters and external contingency recruiters do not do a good job of finding passive candidates, leaving them to question who else is out there in the market and contemplate what they’re missing out on.
Consequently, the candidates that contingency recruiters find and present are usually not the top 15%. They may be those who have been terminated by their firm perhaps for a good reason. Sometimes they bring baggage with them that you do not want to add to your company culture. They may not have the level of skills or experience that augments your company’s skill set. They may be a retention problem because they were either terminated from their last position or became dissatisfied with that former role or had a conflict with management.
While the contingency recruiter sends many resumes over to the client in hopes that one will be acceptable and land a successful interview, they usually aren’t thoroughly vetted. The candidate may lack the skills called for in the job description. As mentioned, they take valuable company time for HR and the hiring manager to go through – often wasting time the client could be using on revenue-generating activities.
All this is happening while the client is experiencing daily difficulty meeting their client’s deadlines. Their own staff may be overworked by having to cover the role of the missing talent. Burnout looms. Managers become more stressed and frustrated with lack of necessary talent. The search goes on for months, sometimes even longer looking for the perfect fit for their many open positions.
Also, because contingency recruiters usually have many open job requisitions, the amount of time spent on each search is limited. If success isn’t realized fairly quickly, often the search is abandoned, leaving the client without any candidates. Sometimes the recruiter goes dark on the client as they move on to the next search pursuing low hanging fruit and a quick payday. Some contingency recruiters do not last long in their position because they cannot close enough searches to earn a living. They then move on to some other job, abandoning the searches they were working on.
Does this match what you as a hiring authority have been experiencing? This is not HR’s fault. Nor is it the contingency recruiter’s fault. They just don’t have the system in place to find the top 15% of passive candidates, get them interested in looking at the opportunity, thoroughly vet them to make sure they are qualified and willing to make a move and likely to accept a reasonable offer letter.
I my next blog, I will discuss your option of the retained executive search firm and how they operate.