In-house IT talent acquisition teams and not recruitment agencies are now the ‘gate keepers’ to jobs, according to Martin Dangerfield, director of mckinley|resourceand interim talent acquisition manager of EMEA sales at Symantec.

“Hiring is done on a mixture of quality, cost and speed of hire,” says Dangerfield. When speed is the priority, firms may approach recruitment agencies, but when it is quality and keeping costs to a minimum that they are after, in-house is preferred: ‘”Using agencies means you lose money and control,” he adds.

At a CW Jobs breakfast briefing which took place in London last Wednesday (13 July), Dangerfield told an audience of IT industry recruiters and recruitment agencies of the reasons behind a growing trend for IT security firms to carry out there own direct, in-house recruitment rather than using recruitment agencies. 

“The model has changed since the recession. The vast majority of IT recruiters are still broad-brush; they need to become more niche and start to specialise and focus on particular skills, or else they need to change their customer base and focus, for example, on mid-level and not corporate organisations,” he says.

In the hunt for these ‘niche skills’ companies such as Symantec do continue to approach recruitment agencies but Dangerfield emphasises that the relationship between a firm and a recruitment agency is rarely a ‘partnership’, but rather a ‘supplier relationship’.

According to Dangerfield, Symantec and a growing number of IT security companies are choosing to develop a more direct and personal relationship with their candidates: “Candidates often say that they have a better experience from direct contact [with companies] than through an agency. If the candidate comes straight to Symantec [and not to an agency] it means they are interested in us, and us alone,” he says.