It is one of my strongest held beliefs that the de-regulation of the Recruitment Industry by Michael Heseltine when he was President of the Board of Trade, was probably one of the worst pieces of Government interference to hit a particular sector. I believe this to be particularly so when you consider that by its very nature, we are dealing with people and their livelihoods.You may recall that at one time we had to have a licence to operate as recruitment consultancies from the then Department of Employment. This was very difficult to obtain and the criteria for its provision and retention were incredibly hard. One of the major facets of the licence was how we dealt with candidates. DoE Inspectors could call at your office, unannounced, and ask to see your invoice file and then pick a candidate at random from it and ask to see the complete paper trail of your dealings with the candidate. This would include interview reports, CV/confidential report preparation, briefing documents on the client(s) and any marketing of their skills you had agreed with the candidate. If any of this was missing, you could lose your licence and therefore, your living!Nowadays, we have a situation where Agencies (I prefer to call them agencies rather than recruitment consultancies) sometimes won't even tell the candidate the name of the client! - how can they brief them then?We have had many candidates whose CVs have gone to clients without their permission and then the agency has the nerve to argue with the client that they submitted the CV first and should be entitled to a fee.As far as the Management Consultancies are concerned we are experiencing a degree of box ticking when it comes to the recruiter process with candidates being rejected for the most amazing reasons. One major consultancy wanted to know the grade in GCSE level maths! - clearly had got to that box in the process and couldn't tick it. We also find that much of the initial qualification is being done by people with very little business experience who really don't know what they are looking for and who have very little idea of what their firm actually does. It is then quite worrying when the Directors or Partners of the firms say that recruitment is an on-going problem. Little do they realise that the constraints in place in their recruitment processes are making their growth difficult. We had a candidate rejected by a consultancy specialising in the FS market as he had insufficient FS experience - 14 years! (Maybe the box specified 15 and he just dipped out!)All in all, I believe that our industry needs to re-examine the introduction of some standards and the clients need to understand that continuing to be as picky as they are (and very precious about their reputations), will only serve to make their recruitment drives very hard.Hope this gives a little food for thought.
