TAKING THE NONSENSE OUT OF RECRUITMENT

As HR professionals, we probably speak the same language when it comes to recruitment.

As we both know, a great deal of nonsense is talked about recruitment - generally with the object of justifying outrageous fee levels.  There is, in fact, no magic or mystique about good recruitment.  It simply means establishing who is most likely to do the best job - in a nutshell: can the candidate do the job?; and will the candidate do the job?  Our task is to establish whether a candidate has the necessary technical and behavioural competences and the tools we use to do this are: interview; structured interview; personality profiling; ability tests; 'reality testing' achievement claims made in CVs; and taking references in a carefully controlled way.  If you want, we also have the in-house expertise to design and set up assessment centres.

We are appalled by the number of search firms who recommend candidates they haven't met and thoroughly checked out. We would never do that.

You will rarely see us advertise in the press, for three reasons:

• Advertising only attracts those who are looking for a new job, often because they are not successful where they are. More often than not, and certainly at the more senior levels, the best candidates are those who are not looking for a new job, and don't know that they want one until we approach them
• Advertising is expensive and what is really being advertised is usually the recruitment firm ("They must be successful - look how many jobs they handle") and not the position. We don't think it very ethical to have you pay for our advertising
• Advertising gets in the way by attracting large numbers of hopelessly unsuitable candidates.

We prefer to identify where the candidates we want are likely to be and go straight to them.

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