Recruitment agencies still suffering a bad name

Engineering employers are the latest to criticise the services of recruitment agencies in a report by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE). The report highlights high fees and poaching staff as common complaints and believes that recruitment agencies could be doing more to fill some current vacancies thought to around 20, 000.

Quality issues have dogged recruitment agencies on all sectors since recruitment services began to be offered. The problems lie with discrepancies in the objectives of recruitment consultants and recruiting managers. Firstly, a recruitment consultant may only need a small number of placements monthly to meet there target, hence, when there are an abundance of vacancies they can cherry pick the easiest to fill, without concern for the rest. Meanwhile, a recruiting manager must focus on trying to fill 'all' of their vacancies and hence are often left short by a recruitment consultant happy with filling only a couple of positions.

The next issues stems from the turnover of recruitment consultants, which is high. Very few recruitment consultants stay on the same position for any length of time. This coupled with high bonuses available means their motivation to make placements make overtake any desire to build long term client relationships.

Many of the engineering recruitment agencies surveyed felt that recruitment consultants would ratchet up salaries falsely to increase their own fees. The issue of poaching is a serious problem.
This is the scenario where a recruitment consultant takes staff from a client they are also trying to find people for. In some cases, they end up 'recycling' the same people and indeed the same vacancies, for example, poaching someone and making a fee, then approaching the manager who has lost his member of staff to gain the new vacancy, before anyone else knows about it.