Angry Md

As a company MD I feel I should share my thoughts about recruitment consultancies with you, as I'm sure many of you will have experienced similar situations and the resulting frustrations.

Firstly we're a relatively small company and, if possible, we like to avoid going down the route of using recruitment agencies due to the costs involved. This, however, is becoming increasingly difficult as the avenues through which you can advertise a position are becoming fewer and further between. We've experimented with job boards and specialist publications with varying degrees of success, but unfortunately these methods can be time consuming. It seems that if you want to recruit someone quickly the only means available to you is using a recruitment consultancy.

This doesn't sit particularly well with me because I don't like the way in which many of these agencies work. Firstly there's the fact that many of the larger agencies will employ headhunting methods in an attempt to prise your best people away or at least unsettle them, in much the same way as a rival football club will tap-up a player from another team. In that situation the approach is illegal, and rightly so, but it seems to have become accepted in the business world. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that my staff are suitably well trained as to be considered attractive to larger, more lucrative organizations but it is a bitter pill to swallow.

The other thing I dislike about recruitment consultancies is the constant harassment. I accept that as the owner of a company I'm likely to be subjected to a plethora of sales calls. It's certainly not something I enjoy but I will do my best to be as pleasant as possible to these people despite them eating away at my precious time, after all they're only doing their jobs. It does become very tiresome though when 6-7 different recruitment consultancies contact me on a weekly basis, either trying to sell me their services having spotted my job advert in a newspaper or attempting to form a relationship with me so that I will use them for all my future recruitment needs. If there was some way of stopping these calls getting through, much like a firewall keeps the spam emails from reaching your inbox, I would happily invest, as I'm sure would many other companies.

Now for my final gripe: I operate in a pretty specialized industry - Supplying Laboratory equipment, generally used in scientific research laboratories. As such the people I employ are trained scientific professionals and experienced Science Sales Executives. Now, many of the recruitment companies who contact me on a weekly basis are broad-spectrum recruitment agencies who do not have this sort of candidate on their books. When I put it to them that it is pointless them phoning me if they cannot offer me suitably trained or qualified candidates, their response is usually along the lines of "as one of the UK's biggest recruitment consultancies we have the resources to source candidates from all professions". Well, I've yet to see any evidence of this.

If you are a scientific recruitment agency specializing in my area of work, by all means give me a call. Otherwise please appreciate that my time is precious and I have more important things to do than field your call.

Thank you!