Abacus Recruitment Solutions

How To Find A Job Through Recruitment Agencies?

2008-01-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

There are several ways where your can find a job for yourself, like newspapers ads, online recruitment agencies etc. But most of them prefer to find a job through recruitment agencies as it is very convenient for them. These organizations are very helpful for most of the people in finding a right job. A good certified recruiting agency will frequently been approached by large firms, because they will be in need of staffs.

These agencies provide a great advantage to both the jobseeker and the company. Because they help in finding the right candidate for the company who suits their business needs and at the same time the job seeker also gets the right job which he/she needs. This eradicates the tiring job hunting and interviews. So in you want to find good employees for your firm recruitment agencies are the best place to search for.

One major benefit from R-agencies for both the employer and the company is, employees will be inspected by the agency to judge how appropriate they are for the positions. Companies can provide a job description to the recruitment agency so that the agency can sort out throughout the data bases of job finders to seek the ideal candidate who suits your company.

Recruitment firms only have access to a small percentage of the available jobs out there; in fact many are not advertised or are ‘hidden’. It is estimated that up to 80% of jobs are hidden as only 10% of positions ever make their way into the hands of recruitment companies. And given the proliferation of agencies vying for a share of the lucrative commissions, at best even the largest, most well-resourced recruitment firm has only 2% of the job market in a job seekers sector. But herein lays the bigger problem. As the job seeker is not the one paying the recruiters, they are not the recruiter’s number one priority.

So, there are few things you must keep in mind when you are finding a job through a recruitment agency. You must not pay them for their services, as the employers will already pay them off to find them an ideal candidate. And the second thing is to design a perfect CV (Curriculum Vitae) to find you a right job, and another thing is to maintain a good relationship with some of the recruitment agencies, because this will ensure you get selected for interviews.

Therefore if you are trying to find a job through a recruitment agencies, you must have a healthy relationship with them by phone, e-mail or directly. So if you are trying to get in to the golden opportunity be in contact and pass on your needs to the agent anyway, make sure they recognize your future desires and plans. Get a top recruitment agent to find you your dream job.

www.abacusrecruit.com.au

The Truth About Recruitment Firms: How they Get Away With Putting All the Risk onto their Clients - the Employers.

2007-12-05T04:12:00.000-08:00

"The current commission-based recruitment model where the full fee is paid when the new employee starts is fundamentally flawed. It should be changed to a staggered fee-for-service model. Where the recruiter shares the risk. The lucrative commission systems used in many recruitment companies encourage consultants to take a very short-term view and make quick placements regardless of the suitability of the candidate.”

Toby Marshall is the author of the Amazon best seller, Get Great People and he presents globally on the Future of Recruitment. He is the founder of Abacus Recruitment and has 18 years experience recruiting for 100’s of companies in the Asia Pacific region.

"Recruiters haste to fill the most number of posts in the shortest time to make big commissions means the real winners are the recruitment companies alone.”

Toby argues that a better outcome for both parties can be achieved with a "Risk Sharing" model for permanent appointments that shares the risk of hiring between recruitment companies and their clients.

This involves a three-stage staggered payment system, with 20% paid at the briefing stage, 40% on appointment and 40% at three months. He said Abacus has based its business on this risk sharing model for many years. Apart from one other firm in England, he is the only firm to have introduced it.

This fee-for-service model is superior to traditional guarantee periods, which are (rightly) viewed sceptically by most HR managers. The replacement guarantee is largely worthless once the recruiter has been paid their commission, and they get nothing more for finding a replacement – most just put in a token effort, preferring to work on other roles where they will get paid.

“Most recruiters would see this as treason but that’s nonsense,” he said. "It's about making recruitment consultants work in partnership with their clients and not persisting with a ‘dollars for bodies’ approach”.

ABACUS RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONS

Why the recruitment process isn’t working?

2007-11-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

The structure of the Australian recruitment industry is fundamentally flawed, argues Abacus Recruitment’s Toby Marshall, and both clients and job seekers are losing out.

Scan the employment classifieds in any newspaper and it appears that recruitment companies have a pretty tight stranglehold on the talent on offer. Correct? Not so. Australian organisations have long been persuaded by recruiters that engaging a recruitment firm is the only effective way to find the talent they need in a market that is suffering from a (perceived) skill shortage and shrinking labour pool. What they are failing to identify, however, are two huge pools of talent that continue to go largely unnoticed: mothers with young children and older, semi-retired workers.

As a recruitment specialist with over 16 years of experience and analysis of the employment market, I continually find myself coming to the same conclusion: that the structure and dynamics of the recruitment industry in Australia are so fundamentally flawed that business is wasting millions in fees and failing to connect effectively with their ideal candidates. The issue of under utilised talent is a big issue and in my opinion only one of the by-products of this very ineffective recruitment system.

In an era where employee retention has become such an issue for so many organizations, a quick-fix mentality driven by short-term results and measured purely by commissions earned and classified advertising space sold offers, in my opinion, no framework for optimal long-term results.

Consider this: Recruitment firms only have access to a small percentage of the available jobs out there. In fact, many are not advertised or are ‘hidden’. It is estimated that up to 80% of hobs are hidden as only 10% of positions ever make their way into the hands of recruitment companies. And given the proliferation of agencies vying for a share of the lucrative commission, at best even the largest, most well-resourced recruitment firm
has only 2% of the job market in a job seekers sector.

But herein lies the bigger problem. As the job seeker is not the one paying the recruiters they are not the recruiter’s number one priority. Recruiters, rather than looking to get maximum employee/employer math are focused solely on grabbing the closest fit in the shortest possible time and scooping up the commissions. Ultimately they are being rewarded for short-term success – not long-term employee retention.

Turning towards change or going round in circle?

2007-11-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

Here’s some food for thought this coming holiday; the recruitment industry is inefficient, it is fundamentally flawed and cannot cope with the complexities of the current labour market. And if that weren’t enough, our consummation with the being ‘first’ in the war for talent has blinkers us from a potential available workforce of approximately one million plus Australians, who cannot currently find work.

It all starts with how you remunerate your consultants. Virtually all recruitment consultants are paid commission, even those people who appear to be on salaries; the reality is that the only thing they are judged on is revenue. So if each quarter the only thing that determines whether you keep your job or not is how many placements you’ve made, well that’s commission.

We must undergo a fundamental change to the way we incentivise our people, as did the
insurance industry, we will enjoy better success for our clients, candidates and ultimately the reputation of the industry.

The most important thing the industry needs is for clients and candidates to have the perception that the more expensive candidate will get a bigger shove from the recruiter – and why wouldn’t they? If you have one candidate who wants $100K and another who wants $120K and the fee you charge rises according to salary level then why wouldn’t you push the higher earner?”

It’s a fair point and one which many recruiters would probably have difficulty arguing against. With the pressure from management to reach targets each quarter – it seems the only incentive for consultants is to bring in as much revenue as possible and all within deadline – is it any wonder many organizations have such a poor opinion of the industry, when we’re actually forcing our people to treat the recruitment process with such
a transactional approach. We call it spray and pray, sending bodies out to clients in the hope that they’ll stick – somewhere.

But the problem doesn’t stop there, because it’s absolutely imperative that recruiters insist on working with clients exclusively but who should drive this client or recruiter? We have to educate clients. It’s quite straightforward really, why would you take a brief and do three or four serious days work on it if you didn’t have the role exclusively – you wouldn’t – you’d return to your desk look up your database and the activity would end there.

It’s this industry race to the line that clients drive, which ultimately returns little more than a list of names. On top of that it’s not very satisfying work, churning out short-lists against the click – that’s production line stuff, it’s neither professional nor interesting.

At this point in this article I can almost picture a sea of readers nodding in agreement but how many of you can put your hands up and say you honestly don’t accept this way of working with clients? Not many I bet.

For a familiar and simple solution to online recruitment just visit: http://www.abacusrecruit.com.au