We took a survey of over 100 plus people including developers and most who were actively looking look this way. The article did not contend that all top performers look this way. In our pool most didn’t use agents, but they do use referrals and they would take a call from a recruiter. Remember that we’re talking about top performers so this narrows the channel they use. We’re also looking at trends and changes in processes used, so this also skews the data.

Lou

This statement: ‘Find out how top people look for jobs. Most use Yahoo or Google ? not job boards’ this is ridiculous, maybe a SEO expert would claim this. I would say top people find jobs in this order a) referral b) an agent c) niche job boards.

Might be different for your industry but if my candidates search google ‘.net developer job mclean virginia’ they get 824,000 hits! The best candidates don’t waste their time searching they have someone else do it for them.

I find after two decades of racking my brains with some of these large corporate clientele … that the adult version of 5th Grade ‘Bullying’ exists only in a different form.

Many managers, in their quest to bolster their own ego and self-image of grandeur, will find fault after fault with what I know are stellar candidates doing the same job or better at a competing company.

Call it the Stockholm Syndrome, or other form of psychosis … but a Clique mentality exists making hiring almost impossible.

I can often hear what the thought process must be in their heads:

‘Look at us … we’re so-o-o-o-o good and so perfect examples of corporate management … that it takes 98 candidates to even come close to someone as good as us. Aren’t we something!?’

I know one company that is on 8 months of recruiting and wants to know why its taking so long. I keep telling them its their problem.

On what grounds can you make this claim? First of all, consumer agencies are used to budgets that are significantly higher (I’m making a big generalization here, but so did Lou with this statistic he’s quoted in his article) so if they were to take on a recruitment client, you’d be likely to get their smallest and least experienced team. To a big consumer agency, a 2 million dollar account (huge by Recruitment Advertising standards) is a drop in the bucket.

Second their process is different. Recruitment Advertising agencies (at least the ones I have worked for) are constantly recommending research, planning and statistical analysis to our clients and most of the time these recommendations are not approved because HR didn’t have the budget, didn’t think it was necessary, or simply need resumes NOW. No consumer agency worth anything would even take your account on if you’re not willing to do research. The best marketing comes from the research. In fact, many of them expect you to deliver research to them, because they are used to working with Marketing Departments who often commission their own research and then give it to the agency to come up with the creative and campaign strategy. Then there’s the fact that you have to pay for media planning, and sometimes to a completely different company than the one doing your creative.

I would argue that unless you’re willing to change your process, you’d end up spending 300-400 percent more money to get the same result. I have worked at 2 of the major US recruitment agencies in my career and found that in both cases, they had all of the skills and tools necessary to deliver great work as any consumer agency I’ve been exposed to.

Your whole article is great Lou, except this one point, especially the unquantified statistic could set many HR departments down an expensive and unsatisfying. I don’t mind saying that if your recruitment advertising agency isn’t delivering, fire them… but the blanket claim that a consumer agency will automatically deliver 3-4 times better results is ludicrous.

Choose the agency that understands your brand, that understands why people choose to work for you and why people stay. That are excited to have your business and whose personnel fit with your organizations. If that all feels right and they ask you to try things that are beyond your comfort zone, try it. Take a risk. The companies that do make themselves (and their agencies) look really good.