Love them or hate them – e-auctions are here to stay, a strategic purchasing expert has warned IT recruiters.

The prospect of lowered margins that are often synonymous with e-auctions for recruitment contracts, clearly makes them unappealing to recruiters.

However, recruiters can benefit by participating through learning where they sit in the market, and by exposing themselves to more tender opportunities, e-consultant Tim Peacock told nearly 200 IT recruiters at the annual ATSCo conference in London.
But preparing for an e-auction is essential. He advised recruiters to study specifications carefully, and to not focus their energies entirely on price. “People forget there are other criteria. If you’ve got other things to offer, see how you can fit your offerings into the other criteria,” he said.

He also warned recruiters to be wary of post-auction negotiations when the lowest bidders are called in to see if the price can be lowered even further.

However, he acknowledged that his only examples of such negotiations were “anecdotal; no one will admit to doing it”.
Peacock confided that buyers hate e-auctions as much as recruiters do.
The transparency of e-auctions reveals how much money buyers have failed to save in face-to-face negotiations, he said.