Ok, so picture this. You need your end of year accounts completing. You aren’t sure whom best to use, so you decide to call 10 accounting firms. Your aim is for all 10 to have a go at preparing your accounts, and whoever can get your tax bill as low as possible will be the one you allow to submit your accounts and who ultimately will get paid. Everyone will need to spend many man-hours working for you, all competing with each other, knowing that they only have a 1-in-10 chance of getting paid. They will each work as hard as they are willing to, but for nine of them, it will all be a total waste of time.

Taking that further not only do you want all 10 of them to show you what they can do, letting them all use up valuable time and resources, but you will still reserve the right to not use any of their accounts, instead completing the accounts yourself. This would mean that all 10 accounting firms would have wasted their time completely.

What do you think any right minded accounting firm would say to you if you presented them with such a scenario? I know my accountant would personally ask if I needed my brain examining; such a suggestion to any professional accountant would surely be taken as a sign of madness!

As recruiters, we perceive our service to equally be professional, as it should be. Why then do we allow ourselves to work in a scenario that is near identical to the one that accountants would roll about laughing at?

As recruiters, we perceive our service to equally be professional, as it should be. Why then do we allow ourselves to work in a scenario that is near identical to the one that accountants would roll about laughing at?

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to start operating on a contingency basis as a recruiter, but right now there are far more contingency recruiters than retained. It’s become an accepted ’norm’ in our industry, by recruiters and clients. In fact, the whole ’preferred supplier list’ (PSL) has only arisen off the back of our failure to show clients we are professional and reliable enough to handle their roles on a retained basis.

Large clients love this because they have no commitment at all if one of us gets lucky and provides them with the best candidate, only then will they pay our fee. Until then, they are quite happy to let agencies fight among themselves to get their best candidates across in the quickest time possible. Even if we all give great candidates, they can still change their mind and go with someone internally. Clients have nothing to lose, no financial commitment at all and then they wonder why the PSLs aren’t delivering the results they hoped for?!? We know that the corporate firms will work on contingency roles all day long because they can swallow the risks, and look at it all as a numbers game. For the rest of us ’little guys’, who prefer to give 110% to every role we work on, it’s quite simply a huge risk to ask us to work on a contingency basis. Up until now, we’ve had no choice but to accept these risks, because if we don’t take up the work with those clients, then there are plenty of bigger firms who will.

What’s the answer to this? We’ll have to wait and see; but all I’ll say is that us independent agency owners are beginning to make ourselves heard, and there most certainly is strength in numbers…