Recruitment cowboys: The rise and fall of 'Band Aid' consultancy
By Wietse Boersma, Recruiter.
This post first appeared on LinkedIn on the 11th of May 2020.
The freelance software engineering mediation and consultancy industry is ridden with insincerity and cloudiness. Please note that by no means is it my intention to besmirch anyone or any organisation. However: I feel that I articulate what a lot of freelance software engineers experience, think and feel on a regular basis. It would be against my nature not to speak my mind. Accordingly, this two-part blog series will address the controversy of present-day ‘Recruitment Cowboys’.
The freelance software engineering mediation and consultancy industry is ridden with insincerity and cloudiness. Please note that by no means is it my intention to besmirch anyone or any organisation. However: I feel that I articulate what a lot of freelance software engineers experience, think and feel on a regular basis. It would be against my nature not to speak my mind. Accordingly, this two-part blog series will address the controversy of present-day ‘Recruitment Cowboys’.
If a business is ripe for disruption, it probably deserves it, and the recruitment consultancy industry could be no different.
The status quo has been, and perhaps will be for some time to come, the mediation of (freelance) IT professionals by hyper-commercial corporates. By no means should we consider commercialism detrimental to IT. After all, the acquisition of a new project is something that many freelance software engineers consider a necessary evil -- so I’ve experienced. However: commercialism can conflict with what the freelancer is trying to effectuate, when he or she enters into a relationship with a recruitment consultancy. After an actual mediation (or ‘placement’), that relationship might become one-sided fast, and only sporadically interesting for the consultancy. Namely: when the freelancers will be open to a new project or when they have a project they’re looking to find a qualified specialist for.
Value For Money
It’s interesting to explore what value the recruitment consultancies actually add to organisations and freelancers alike, by dissecting some of their supposed unique selling points (USPs). After all, consultancies add a considerable margin to a freelancer’s hourly rate when introducing a freelancer to a client.
USP 1: Consultancy
What is the actual consult that recruitment consultancies provide? Do they know more about the IT manager, or buyer, about the client’s tech? I doubt it. Do they understand about (intra- and inter-)departmental dynamics and team dynamics? Maybe. Do they know more about the (freelance job) market than the organisation does? Probably not. Information asymmetry is a phenomenon utilised to advantage in many branches. A client who doesn’t have information (on, say, the availability and skill sets of certain freelancers), does not mean that said client can’t have access to that information.
USP 2: Speed
Consultancies sell prompt deployment of engineering effort, when the client needs it (and often also when the client doesn’t specifically request it). This agility is a result of a consultant workforce that is informed of freelancers’ availability at all times. Consultants share information amongst each other, and track availability in CRM systems. In other words, clients and freelancers alike are paying for networking readiness. Building a network and maintaining it takes a lot of time and effort and is not to be underestimated. I therefore feel that the momentousness of corporate consultancies is a USP that holds up. However: having a large network is not something that is necessarily exclusive to corporates.
USP 3: Quality
I believe that the pledge of delivering quality is the USP that compromises the corporate consultancy most. I’m not saying that quality engineers aren’t (eventually) delivered when requested by the client. I am saying, however, that time is often wasted when considering the wrong candidates for the job. The so called interview-to-placement ratio can be a good indicator of how accurate the profile delivery for the job is. Many candidates interviewed can be an indication of inaccurate delivery, whereas few candidates interviewed prior to placement can be an indication of the consultant being spot-on when it comes to understanding the client’s wishes. A high interview-to-placement ratio can result from faulty technical knowledge thus understanding of the client’s needs. Recruitment consultants very rarely have a technical background. If they’re technically trained at all, consultancies fragment in a niche, though engineer requirements are becoming more cross-disciplinary -- think DevOps.
USP 4: Service
Consultancies provide the service of deploying an engineer to your team when you need it. Additionally, many consultancies allege to provide ‘after-care’ by monitoring the candidate once he or she has been placed. A freelancer is an adult and clearly doesn’t really need any care. But it’s always nice if your business relation checks up on you every once in a while so that you can get to know each other better, in light of future collaborative endeavours. The reality is that many consultancies appear to uphold a ‘band-aid recruitment’ strategy. Once a freelancer has been linked to a client project, both receive a cake (literally) and it’s on to the next one for the recruitment consultant. This short-term thinking is common and has everything to do with the hyper-commercial KPI-driven strategies that corporates have.
Of course it isn’t fundamentally wrong for commercial consultancies to charge a fee for the service that they provide. Organisations and freelancers alike are free to do business with whomever they choose. We should, however, always criticise introspectively. Are we adding the value we want to add for the fee that we charge? If a business is ripe for disruption, it probably deserves it, and the recruitment consultancy industry could be no different.
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