You love your recruitment company. It’s your baby. You remember the dark days of working for someone else and you knew you could do it better. You had ideas and cultivated them in to a business plan. You put your heart and soul in to creating a brand; why you would do differently, what you stood for. Finally you took the plunge and handed in your notice. You didn’t have an office and so you made calls from your bedroom and met candidates at local coffee shops. You remember when your website went live and showed it with pride to family, friends and old colleagues. You loved your business and you were going to ensure it kept core values no matter how successful you were.
And you were.
Clients and candidates liked what you were doing and how you were doing it. You took on your first consultant, then your second, then your third. You hired carefully and made sure that they had the same values as you. You were still running a desk and so they heard you speaking to candidates and clients and they were impressed. You had high standards and they wanted to copy them. You all sat together; you heard them on the phone and you coached them through problem calls and situations. This was your brand, your family, and you would make sure you protected it. Business was booming; you kept recruiting which meant that you had to move away from billing and concentrate on managing and training. You quickly became so busy running the business that you had to create a level of middle management to help you.
That’s when the problems started.
All of a sudden you had to rely on your managers to live and breathe the brand, to ensure that the consultants did the same. But if you are 100% of the brand, then it would be unrealistic to believe that the managers would be more than 90%. But that’s fine, as that’s still a lot and you trust them to pass 10% of their own personality to their reports. They do the same and by the time it reaches everyone in the business there are a lot of people that are only 50% of the brand that you love and created.
But you realise this and do something about it.
You now have the money to bring in a consultant to help to reconfirm the values of the business. Some have changed, but that’s inevitable with the growth you have had. You invest in a new website which reiterates these new values. It’s clear to your clients and candidates what you stand for. You get all of your internal team together and unveil the new mission statement and set of values that you’ve spent many months and many thousands of pounds creating. You even get the walls of your office decorated with copies of these values so that it’s completely clear to everyone in the business what you stand for. Disaster averted. Or is it?
I have been recruiting for recruitment firms for more than 10 years and this is a very common story. I have met a lot of recruitment company owners who are passionate about their brand and are certain that they do everything that they can to protect it. They are certain that there is a consistent message going to the market. But most are wrong. And it only takes a few seconds to find out. Here are some examples of how you can do this.
- Ask every member of your team to sum up in a few words what the core values of the business are. Are they consistent? Are they the values that you expected, or are they what the team perceive them to be? Do they even know them? How can you expect the consultants to be living the values if they don’t even know them?
- You would have had a hand in a lot of the corporate literature (website, brochure etc) but there is a lot of content that you won’t even be aware of that is sent out each day by your consultants; job adverts, direct approach emails, texts etc. Are they the same as you would have sent out when you set up the business, or have they become generic, impersonal, or even worse have they just been copied and pasted from a job spec? Go on to a job board that you use (if you do) and list all your jobs. Are you proud about what they say about your business?
- When researching clients or candidates I often copy a person’s LinkedIn profile picture in to Google images and it lists all of the sites that have the same image (invariably every other social media profile that person has including personal Facebook and Twitter). What do those accounts say about your business? Many linked in profiles have email addresses on them – if you Google them it quite often brings up forums that person has signed up to using that email. How do they conduct themselves on these forums?
- How do your consultants behave outside of work (at award ceremonies, networking events, at a bar after work etc)? I meet quite a few clients (and candidates) after work for drinks, and as a recruiter it’s very easy to spot other groups of recruiters. I have quite often listened in to expletive ridden stories of ‘this’ client and ‘that’ candidate and it’s safe to say that if I was either then I certainly wouldn’t be using that firm again. You might think it’s OK as no one will know where they work, but you’ll be amazed at how many people tell you when asked, even when they don’t know who you are and it’s the first and only thing you say to them. Perhaps you need to review the type of hire you make?
- As an MD or CEO you put a huge amount of time, effort (and money!) to ensure that your brand and message is as strong and consistent as possible but most of the time this isn’t translated consistently throughout the business. The above are only a few ways in which you can try to make sure that it is, there are plenty more, but I would be amazed if companies did even 1 or 2 of them consistently.
Very few recruiters will care as much as the founder does about the business, and the majority won’t even be aware that some of what they are doing can be harmful to the brand but if you don’t stay vigilant and have policy/procedures in place to consistently monitor what is coming out of your business then there is only one person that can be held at fault. And it isn’t the Recruiters.
