No Agencies Please

You must have seen the job adverts, looking for someone specific -  a certain set of skills. It’s a difficult position but the hirer is extremely confident of filling it because at the bottom of the page they have expressly requested “No Agencies Please”.

Locum Recruitment Consultant Steven Baylis delves into why “No Agencies Please” has the potential to do more harm than good.

You’ve posted an advertisement. You’re looking for someone specific -  a certain set of skills. It’s a difficult position but you’re extremely confident of filling it. At the bottom of the advertisement you’ve expressed this in one line “No Agencies Please”.

Agencies are an extremely valuable resource in the hiring process. Agencies have been round as early as 1873 when John Gabbitas recruited schoolmasters. Since then, agencies have thrived, sprouted up almost everywhere for all manner of professions. If you have a vacancy, no matter how obscure the role is, you can be sure there is a recruitment agency out there who can help you. I’m going to tell you why agencies are both undervalued and yet so important in the world of employment.

A certain stigma exists when it comes to agencies. They’re greedy, they don’t care about their clients or their candidates, they’re only out there to make money. These, along with many other assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s said recruitment consultants are detached from the process, we don’t get to know our candidates, or meet our clients. I can say with certainty, I’ve met candidates who I would now consider friends, I’ve gotten to know them, I know exactly what they want from their next career move. It’s because of doing this that I can better place them in a position where I know that they will not only thrive but succeed. The days of faceless consultants has come to an end and it’s with these advantages that I can better serve my client base.

What’s most important about using an agency is you have full access to the resources at our disposal. We have a huge database of over 70,000 pre-qualified, skilled and experienced candidates which is being added to constantly. We can also perform very specific searches on this database saving the client time in sourcing these for themselves. Our consultants are experts and have up to date market knowledge as well as access to a bank of knowledge from our annual Salary and Benefits Benchmarker. From this we can produce bespoke analysis and reports in line with your criteria and needs.

As part of our commitment to you we take the job specification and ask every question we can to ensure to gain as much information as possible. While this may seem tedious, it means we can find the perfect match for your position. Once we’ve taken the job specification, we begin to match it against a list of candidates. We then contact these candidates, have a full and frank discussion with them, pre-screen them, them we send them over to you, the end user.

Should we not find what you’re looking for on our database (a rarity in itself), we advertise the vacancy, across all job boards and our marketing team is on hand to promote these across our social media channels.

With the candidates who apply, we again pre-screen them, and then send them to you. Should you like what you see, we arrange the interview for you. This is standard process and what’s most remarkable of all is that this costs you absolutely nothing as recruitment fees are only charged on successful placements. Why would you not want to take advantage of such a service?

Recruitment is a long process (for the most part) and what agencies do is remove those pain points. We streamline things and make it easier for you, the firm, to better engage with the candidates you decide to interview. You gain time to focus on other things, while we work diligently in the background to ensure you receive quality candidates, to provide an excellent service to you.

Yes, recruitment does eventually come at a cost but consider everything you get up to offer stage.

What happens if you no longer have the requirement and we have still done all that for you? Again, it’s cost you nothing. Yet we would happily do it again.

Now imagine writing that advertisement again, would you still end it with “No Agencies Please”?