And the moral of the story is…

Now here’s an interesting one.

At the end of last week one of my colleagues was approached by a firm that we know of but have never managed to win work from. A year ago they retained a generalist search firm that knows little about their market sector to recruit a senior department manager for them. One of the reasons that they won the assignment was that they agreed a significantly reduced fee; naturally attractive to the recruiting company.

Six months later the client cancelled the project as the initial shortlist that had been submitted was rejected along with a couple of interviewed candidates and there appeared little chance of the search firm unearthing anyone else who matched their brief. So, they resorted to Plan B. The MD then placed the role with a number of mainstream recruitment companies across the country for a database search and on a success only fee of 15%.

Six months on, or twelve months since this whole process started, the client is no nearer recruiting this key role and the position is still vacant adding extra pressure on their existing personnel.

Which is where we came in. My colleague was asked to join the merry throng of recruitment firms already working on the assignment, but to search the role at an agreed fee of 15%. Not too surprisingly he very politely declined.

The problem here is two fold. Those recruitment firms that agreed to look at filling the position on a success only basis will have lost interest as newer roles at better fees will have dropped into their in-trays and now be the focus of their attention whilst the other role drops further and further down the pile. More importantly the brief to the original search firm handed the recruitment of a key position to a firm that had little or no expertise or knowledge of the client’s business streams, whilst focusing only on the perceived up front cost.

And the moral of the story is that whilst we understand that every single business in the UK has a duty to focus upon its costs in these difficult times, the need to find and retain the search firm that has the right expertise is increasingly important in the current economy and that process will in the mid to longer term almost certainly save the recruiting company money.