It’s time for another rant, and it’s high time I had a good moan about recruitment companies. No doubt this won’t win me any friends, particularly in the current economic climate, so I should just clarify that I’m talking about IT recruitment companies specifically.

I am a busy guy, and as much as I hate to be rude, I simply don’t have the time to sit and listen to endless telephone sales pitches. Of all the cold callers that end up being put through to my desk, the majority are from IT recruitment companies, who having dredged up an advert we posted for new staff almost a year ago, call to see if we are still looking to recruit. Usually, they fill my inbox with CVs before getting on the phone to “follow it up”.

I’ve done a bit of cold calling in my time, and I know it’s a thankless and soul destroying task, which is why I do endeavour to be polite and friendly on the few occasions that the calls aren’t successfully screened out. But, I really can’t stand it when some person you’ve never met (and are never likely to) greets you like an old pal. “How are you today?”. What do you care? I am nothing to you but a potential few quid extra on your commission statement. Any cold caller opening with that nonsense line receives short shrift from me. I know he doesn’t care how I am. He knows he doesn’t care how I am. I know that he knows he doesn’t care how I am, and he knows that too. So, why waste our time discussing it?

My experience with recruitment consultants has never been good. Assuming they can get past the initial telephone pitch, I am then invariably promised a stream of high calibre, thoroughly vetted candidate CVs, with each company or consultant claiming that they have worked in my industry, know exactly what I need and are therefore uniquely placed to deliver results. I only have to pay if I hire someone, and if it doesn’t work out, I don’t pay at all. So, I’ll relent and wait to be proved wrong. But, here’s the thing: I never have been proved wrong.

Immediately, I will be barraged by CVs that have absolutely no relevance to me whatsoever. Here I am running a web company that relies solely on open source technologies and thus requiring skills in PHP, MySQL and Linux, and what do I get from the “experienced” IT recruitment specialist? A whole bunch of mediocre CVs from people who only have experience in Microsoft .NET. Now, for those of you that don’t know the difference, this would be something like applying for a job as an English teacher when you can only speak Spanish. Sure, both are languages, and both languages can be used for communication, but if you want to speak English, do you hire Paco the Spaniard who only speaks Spanish? Whilst someone not directly involved with the web and IT industry might not understand that difference, I expect an experienced IT recruitment consultant to understand it.

Then, on the few occasions where I have actually received a CV from someone with (apparently) the right skills, they are almost always foreign. Nothing wrong with that of course, but when you speak to them on the phone it becomes immediately clear that their English is not at the required standard. The job of translating a customer’s business and ideas into a website is challenging enough, without adding a language barrier into the bargain.

And suppose I actually found the perfect candidate in amongst the plethora of CVs that the recruitment companies send me? It hasn’t happened yet, but just suppose it does? If I take that person on, I end up paying thousands of pounds in a fee to the recruitment company – the fee usually being significantly higher than what it actually costs as a company to advertise a vacancy. That’s money that I would have been otherwise able to apply to the new employee’s salary. Of course, the prospective employee won’t for a moment expect to take a lower salary because I have to pay a huge fee to their recruitment consultant.

What good do recruitment consultants actually do? I’m happy to be proved wrong here, but my experience of multiple companies over many years has always been the same. Now when they call me, I simply say that we don’t use recruitment companies. The caller asks why, I tell him, and then of course he describes (at great length) how their outfit is different. So, I’ll relent and wait to be proven wrong, and before I know it, yep, another load of .NET and ASP CVs in my inbox.

For the candidates, I would ask this question: by using a recruitment company, do you look proactive and resourceful, or do you look just a bit lazy?

How difficult is it to send out a letter to the local web agencies with a CV and some samples of your work? It’s just a few hours of your time and the cost of a few stamps. I guarantee it will make a far better impression. And if that seems too much like hard work, why not at least do it yourself by email? Frankly, when I get a CV in from a recruitment company in Bristol for someone who lives local to our office, I have to question the candidate’s sanity. When hiring programming staff, I particularly look for resourceful problem solvers. The kind of person that gets off his or her arse and puts in a bit of personal effort to find their new career.

I’ve never been the sort of person that sits around and waits for handouts. I speak to some young people today and listen to them moan about not having a job, and when you ask them what they’re doing about it the answer is often: nothing at all. In this age of being able to buy anything you want from the comfort of your sofa, and getting it fast, are people actually becoming less capable of doing things for themselves? Using a recruitment company would seem to me a little bit like abdicating responsibility for my own future, giving that responsibility instead to some commission driven sales person who will never be capable of selling me as well as I can.