Does the Recruitment Industry Deserve Its Reputation?

Do your clients trust you?

Or do they consider you to be on a par with a sleazy car salesperson who sells you unnecessary upgrades and tricks you into unfavourable financial terms?

“Of course not!” I hear you cry. “I pride myself on my transparent, ethical recruitment practices.”

Well, here’s the part you’re not going to like…

The view that your prospects and clients have of you and your recruitment firm is, in all likelihood, much worse than you think.

And it’s out of your control.

Unless you can clearly demonstrate to your clients two things…

A Stained Reputation Doesn’t Wash

Have you ever interacted with a car salesperson (used or new) and NOT been on your guard?

Even if it’s someone who seems friendly, helpful and 100% above board, experience and cliché has hardwired into your brain the thought that this salesperson MIGHT try to con you.

Maybe only in a small way. A little white lie here or an exaggeration there. But you still feel the need to be on your guard.

The recruitment industry is, maybe (and that’s a big maybe) not on that level of reputational decrepitude, but it’s not far off. An industry can’t engage, for years, in price-gouging, client/candidate manipulation, double-dipping and outright lies without doing long-term damage to its reputation.

It’s easy to think of those practices as being in the distant past, when recruitment was some kind of Wild West, but a bad reputation takes a very long time to wash out.

And the sad fact is that there are still some recruiters out there who are clinging on to their dubious practices.

This is a frustrating reality for all recruiters today.

You can be as pure as the driven snow, but because of the dodgy practices of recruiters in the past (and even some today), your prospects, and even your loyal clients, will treat their interactions with you cautiously.

They’ll be on guard.

I’m not saying they’ll outright mistrust you. But in the same way that you would never negotiate with a car salesperson without keeping an eye out for something untoward, employers will always treat recruiters with a certain amount of circumspection.

Can you blame them?

Finding a new recruit is expensive and if they hire someone with a recruiter’s help, only to discover later that they’ve been sold a lemon, this can be catastrophic for their business.

Seeing Through Your Client’s Eyes

When you have a strong moral and ethical focus, it’s hard to imagine other people treating you with suspicion. It feels like your position as an upstanding, trustworthy recruiter should be obvious to all.

But it isn’t.

A clean website with lots of white space, gushing testimonials, and a clear code of conduct might look, to you, like a clear signal of your virtue, but clients and prospects won’t view this in the same way.

Any more than meeting a sharply-dressed car salesperson with a shiny business card and an “employee of the month” badge would totally set your mind at ease.

In fact, when someone tries too hard to convince you that they are trustworthy, we perversely tend to become even more suspicious.

This is a real challenge for recruiters and it’s something that you must address. If you ignore it, this WILL have an impact on your ability to win new business and keep long-term clients.

Transparency and Accountability

The only way to shake off the suspicion that might be lurking in the minds of your clients and prospects is to marry transparency of practice with a willingness to take responsibility for the outcomes.

This might sound like an obvious, uncontroversial position to take, but almost every time I write about this issue, I get messages from angry recruiters telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Judge for yourself…

1)   Transparency

It used to be common practice for recruiters to avoid settling on a price until the employer had fallen in love with the candidate and had no choice but to pay an inflated fee.

I’m sure you would never dream of doing something so underhanded, but you need to go as far as possible in the opposite direction by ensuring that terms of agreement are clear, easy to understand and established before you start work.

This is much easier to accomplish with consultative recruitment, but even transactional recruitment can be carried out with a transparent disclosure of fees so there are no nasty surprises for the client further down the line.

But transparency should go beyond what is in black and white. It should also extend to what is said in private.

This means not telling a client that an indifferent candidate is “really excited” about the role, and not telling a candidate that an unimpressed client has described them as a “front runner”.

Recruiters are salespeople and it’s part of their job to find ways to move the deal along and get everyone onboard. But it’s entirely possible to do this without massaging the truth. So-called white lies, when uncovered, never seem quite so innocent to the person who was deceived.

Transparency can’t just be a bullet-point in your marketing pitch. It must be an aspiration across every stage of your work.

2)   Accountability

This is the one that gets me into trouble.

It’s long been held, even by highly-skilled, ethical recruiters, that they can’t be held responsible when a candidate they place leaves the role.

I hear excuses like…

“What if they get sick?”

“What if they don’t get along with their colleagues?”

“What if they exaggerated their level of experience?”

“What if the employer fires them without giving them a chance?”

And they ARE just excuses.

Because, for a start, some of those things can be figured out beforehand through competency questionnaires, references and behavioural assessments.

And somebody leaving a role for reasons that no one could have foreseen…

Well, those instances are rare.

As a recruiter it’s our job to find the right candidate for the right client. And if we are as good at our job as we claim to be, we should be willing to stand by our results.

This means money-back guarantees and free replacement policies. This means, on those few occasions when a new hire doesn’t work out, honouring those guarantees.

Not only does this level of accountability give your clients and prospects a reason to trust you. But when you honour those guarantees, your level of trustworthiness deepens.

***

It’s the easiest thing in the world to hold your hands up and say, “I’m an honest recruiter. If people don’t trust me because of what other recruiters have done, I can’t help that.”

It’s much harder to acknowledge the reputation we’ve all inherited and go that extra mile to help set our clients’ minds at ease.

But anything worthwhile takes effort. And, in this case, adding transparency and accountability to your recruitment practices pays in the ability to win new business and develop loyalty in your clients.