Recruiters have a great and varied job; meeting candidates and clients, helping crew with their careers, advising clients on the state of the market, being the mediator between candidates and clients and closing deals.
Knowing we placed the right candidates in top jobs and following their career as they goes up through the ranks is very satisfying for all of us in the business.
But, apart from us, the recruiters, who actually enjoys recruiting? Not many people, that's for sure — most clients see it as a chore. This is then where we naturally come into the picture. The question is, "how best to work with us and how best to utilise our resources"?
I would like to bring you back to Basics: You are paying for a service to save you time and money.
As a Client, you don't want to be wading through CVs that are not applicable to the job specified or spending time sitting through interviews with candidates who are clearly not suitable.
Your crew agency should specialise in the ability to provide clients with "job-suitable candidates" so that you can concentrate on the more productive tasks on board.
Your chosen recruitment company should interview, choose and qualify the proper candidates for you and provide you with a shortlist of a few candidates who are available, interested, suitable, reference and certificate checked and most of all, match your brief. The idea is that We relieve you of this burden, going through a mix of relevant and irrelevant CVs. This is why you pay a fee; If you don't get that service, change agency!
On the subject of "how best to utilise your agency" my advice is; give your recruiter time to do a good job.
Most of the job orders we receive are for vacancies which need to be filled 3 weeks or more after the initial contact has been made with the office. Creating a shortlist of candidates is an involving and time consuming job; the recruiter may of course have a few ideas of candidates straight away, but will want to do a thorough database search and social media check in order to ensure no good candidates are forgotten. All this explains why a few days are often required to put together a workable shortlist, especially for senior level crew.
Putting many agencies in competition is not in your best interest as you short change yourself on the quality of service you will get. Some recruiters will feel to pressure to quickly send multiple CVs just to cover themselves, hoping that the "good" CV, the CV of the candidate who will eventually get the job, is somewhere in there, allowing them to claim the placement.
In the process You are doing all the work of short listing and are therefore wasting your time… does that seem right to you? This is frustrating for you, and equally, frustrating for the other recruiters, those who took the trouble of working on your behalf to create a shortlist and are told. "We already received the CV — it is amongst a big pile which were sent through by "Excellent Yacht Crew Ltd"…
So, much time is wasted on all sides and it's unnecessary,
My advice is streamline your recruitment procedure and get some real value service.
Find out how the recruitment agencies work; who will spearhead the candidate search, how do the recruiters work, do they have a good track record, how long have they been in the industry / in the Company, are they specialists, how well do they know the market and their segment, what is their mission statement, what happens when things go wrong?
Good recruiters want to help you; allow us to do our job well and eventually, a long lasting relationship will be built with benefits to all involved.
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