Businesses are shooting themselves in the foot by choosing recruitment agencies that treat job seekers poorly - a new survey shows widespread anger among candidates.
The OCG Consulting survey of 11,000 candidates over the last six months examined the treatment the job seekers received from recruitment agencies compared to when they dealt with employers directly.
Respondents were asked to rate their level of satisfaction in four categories on a five-point scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’. Recruitment agencies were rated poor more often than employers in every category.
In ‘overall standard of care’ a whopping 23% of recruitment agencies were rated poor, compared to 16% of employers. The ‘communication skills’ (19%/14%), ‘follow-up’ (23%/20%) and ‘level of understanding’ (17%/11%) categories continued this trend. At the other end of the scale, only 5% of employers and recruiters were rated as excellent for overall standard of care.
OCG general manager Carol Dallimore describes the results of the survey as “horrific” for recruiters. “The anecdotal feedback we’ve received from candidates recently is that their treatment has been pretty abysmal, both at the hands of employers and recruitment agencies – but as the survey shows, recruitment agencies have been worse.”
She warns that if shabby treatment puts a candidate off dealing with a recruitment agency, this harms not only the agency but also the businesses that deal with that agency that could potentially miss out on talent. Although the flood of candidates has overwhelmed the systems of some agencies, she blames the lack of follow-up from many of them on what she calls a “lack of common courtesy”.
She still recommends employers use a recruiter in most cases, particularly now due to the current glut of CVs, but she advises them to look for agencies that are good at candidate selection, which has suddenly leap-frogged candidate sourcing in importance.
There is an “upsurge of frustrated candidates”, as evidenced by some angry responses to the survey. One respondent opined, “I get the impression that many (recruitment consultants) have no ability to assess the quality of my background and experience nor do they recognise from my CV how I have been able to change and adapt to roles. “In short, I wonder if the monkeys at Auckland Zoo are given piles of CVs to stick pins in.”
