A mobility consultant within Coca-Cola has attacked the performance of recruitment consultants and compared them unfavourably with in-house recruiters.

Tim Morris, Coca-Cola mobility consultant for Eurasia and Africa, told a London Networking Event of the Forum for Expatriate Management at the US Embassy earlier this month: “It is such a pain in the neck sometimes to get those [recruitment] industry people educated in what we are looking for.”

Morris went on to criticise the quality of job adverts written by recruitment agencies. On occasions, he said they looked as if they had been “written by a complete idiot”.

In contrast, Morris praised Coca-Cola’s own in-house recruiters. “The bottom line is dedication to the company,” he said. “They are more dedicated and focused because it is their lives and their client. They know Coca-Cola inside out.”

In-house recruiters also have the advantage of having access to Coca-Cola’s existing employees, who are “a huge pool of talent”, said Morris.

Whereas Coca-Cola previously used recruitment consultants to supplement the efforts of it own staff, Morris said that following a major transformation of the global HR function within Coca-Cola last year, the company hardly used recruitment consultants at all.

Morris said that following its HR transformation, Coca-Cola now had a global recruiting team “with deep sourcing experience” that used a common global process and a single global technology.

There was also much better integration and closer synergies between talent acquisition, talent management, compensation and benefits and global mobility, said Morris.