Headhunter putting in his 2 cents, know this is not a recruiter friendly forum
I'm not sure how you come by that opinion. Our gripe is not against competent recruiters, but against incompetent ones. Just as you say you have "clutter" from a variety of non-viable sources
candidate, fake resume by a company, or a foreign firm that posts thousands of resumes and applies to thousands of jobs to try to steal them and undercut American recruiters (I get at least one a week). Also, don't forget that you might go behind our back to the client, we gotta eat too.
we get clutter from non-viable recruiters, most often ones who do not have a firm agreement for a fee from the actual employer.
On numerous occasions throughout the threads I have begun, I discuss the fact that
"a workman worthy of hire is worthy of pay." It seems to me recruiters who NEED to protect themselves
[from candidates learning about the identity of the employer and circumventing the recruiter to apply for the job] have two possible avenues by which they can be circumvented, one which is easily protected, the other having absolutely no protection, regardless of ploys the recruiter may use.
- Candidate learns name of company from recruiter, stops communicating with recruiter and approaches employer directly.
Solution - make the phone interview a two step process - first obtain identity of candidate to "register" with employer for protection of potential fee; second, identify employer and proceed with interview.
- Recruiter goes through everything in step one and candidate betrays recruiter by sending an unregistered candidate directly to employer.
Solution - none! The problem becomes self-defeating for the recruiter because the best candidates are the ones not desperate enough to deal "in the blind" so the recruiter limits himself to less than sterling candidates in an effort to avoid disclosing the employer because of fear of being cut out of the loop.
There is a long term solution, but many recruiters have a number of hangups which prevent them from implementing it. My experience in once owning a large part of a very successful employment agency which had divisions which handled everything from temporary clerks to six-figure executives was that the most effective and monetarily successful recruiters were those who established a close personal rapport with their employer clients and with each candidate they dealt with. This rapport served to limit the "betrayals" by both employer and job candidate who worked to cheat the recruiter out of a fee.
A smart recruiter soon eliminated certain employers who (with or without "exclusive" contracts to the contrary) engaged in such practices. By explaining up front that they needed to "register" a candidate's name, all of our recruiters were able to continuously update a list which our employers honored (good rapport, remember) which gave us a thirty to sixty day (or longer with some employers) window of protection against an individual candidate trying to circumvent the recruiter. [Today, of course, email registration of candidates can be instantaneous and simultaneous with the interview - no lag time as we had 30 years ago.]
I recognize that, in many modern agencies, the recruiter who deals directly with candidates is often NOT the same agency person who deals directly with the employer client. In such cases, the "TEAM" aspect of a recruiting agency is more important than ever, since everyone's best interest (candidate, agency, employer) is best served by doing everything possible to generate the best candidates. Often the employee who deals with the agency on behalf of the employer is completely clueless about the built-in strong prejudice the best candidates have against dealing in the blind. Those representatives of the employer won't play the game with a recruiter without strong trust in the recruiter. Lack of trust is why so many recruiters are unable to obtain exclusive contracts with employers.
I think many recruiters are aware there are a number of inefficiencies and roadblocks built into the agency recruitment system. A little
FMEA (Failure Mode & Effects Analysis) usually shows the primary cause of such to be based in the nature of the contract for services for the employer negotiated by the recruiting agency. Lopsided contracts which establish FEAR on the part of the recruiter run contrary to the Deming precept against removing FEAR from the workplace.
Candidates who have a wide awake understanding of the process involving recruiters are often more open to working WITH recruiters, thus making it advantageous for recruiters to shed sunshine on the process for each of their candidates. Truth goes a long way toward establishing trust between recruiter and candidate and between recruiter and employer.
In other threads, I talk disparagingly of "gate keepers" who bar the way for many candidates who might be viable simply because the gatekeeper is incapable of seeing the total value of a candidate and relegate candidates to the trash heap for imperfect correlation with the predetermined criteria. Often, the predetermined criteria are flawed and needlessly bar good candidates. Gatekeepers can be anywhere in the transaction. Sadly, they wield a power far beyond their true value.
Perhaps the ideal is not "gatekeeper," but "door opener" - the one who opens the door to candidates and makes them welcome while getting to discuss and explore HOW THE CANDIDATE can provide value to the organization, regardless of an arbitrary criterion like "MBA" or "ASQCSSBB."