Scientific Employers Criticise Recruitment Companies

Scientific employers are the latest in a long line of top level managers to criticise the services of recruitment agencies in a report generated by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE).

Scientific employers and a number of senior managers in prominent science sales jobs levelled a number of criticisms at scientific recruitment agencies and the services they offer, in a report by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE). The report highlights high fees (in some cases as much as 20% of the successful candidates first year salary) and poaching staff (known in the industry as headhunting) 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 their 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.

Most scientific employers, when questioned, said that they would be happy to do without the services of recruitment agencies if they could afford the time to manage the recruitment process. The recruitment industry has, in the past 15 years or so, become very reliant on the use of recruitment professionals. Although many companies would prefer to handle the recruitment of new staff in-house, the means to do so are limited. The majority of good candidates are already registered with one, or in some cases many, recruitment agencies and there are very few websites that allow for direct recruitment. The human resources manager of one such company said “we feel like we’re backed into a corner. We’ve made efforts to bring our recruitment process in-house but inevitably we’ve ended up having to use the services of recruitment professionals because we couldn’t attract enough suitable candidates directly. It’s a shame because we’re willing to try and take it on ourselves but the recruitment agencies have such a hold over the whole of the recruitment market”.

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.