Why recruiters can add more than just sourcing candidates?

Many organisations view recruiters as just databases of candidate CVs that they search using keywords and then send them an invoice when they hire the person. I thought it might be useful to demonstrate how I worked with one client that hopefully changed this perception.

A legal company in Bristol asked me to talk to them about their recruitment for paralegals as they were having problems in the department with people not working out and the managers were continuously hiring but struggling to see enough good candidates.

While the initial conversation was focused around how we could source better candidates for them, on further investigation we formed the view that their issue was not around sourcing candidates, they actually had a very strong pipeline and a great employment brand in the market with plenty of applicants.

Speaking to the hiring manager, it became apparent that their issue was selection of candidates, both in how they managed their time and assessed candidates, we advised adding a number of written tests which could be completed earlier in the process thereby allowing managers to only interview successful candidates. We also advised on having a much more rigorous process around performance management in the first six months to raise the overall quality of the team.

We formed the view that these changes alone would have a significant impact on their recruitment, firstly in reducing the time managers spent interviewing poor candidates and secondly by changing the impact of bad hires through faster managing.

Early indications are this is having a good impact on their hiring processes.