In response to last issue’s article ‘Recruiter bounties posted in online site’ (Recruiter, p11, 24 June), I am concerned that some companies are encouraging prospective clients to purely think about recruitment on a cost basis. In this recession, as in recessions before, it is important for the recruitment industry that we do not go down the route of offering increasingly lower fees to fight after scraps of business. We should be
educating clients that if they focus purely on cost the quality of their suppliers will suffer as a result, dragging down standards in the recruitment industry and encouraging the types of firms that see recruitment consultancy as a commodity business where you farm CVs from job sites, spam them out and hope something comes of it.

It is in all of our interests that clients see the benefit that professionally run recruitment agencies can offer and pay accordingly. When we sell our services to clients we use USPs rather than trying to simply undercut all competition, and I do not see how these sorts of price-matching websites can satisfy this. Only yesterday I met a client who had taken a decision not to use recruitment consultancies offering rates below 15%; the client was fed up with the poor service, high turnover of agency staff (minuscule fees equal minimal commission/pay) and volume of irrelevant CVs. The client far preferred to spend the time meeting a decent consultancy, hearing how they could make a genuine difference and then taking an informed decision on what value they put on the service.

In the end, cost was of minimal concern to the client set against having a supply of quality candidates provided by a recruiter that could save them considerable time and represent them in a professional way. I strongly suggest recruiters steer clear of services that reduce our service to a bun fight over how low we can go with our fees and instead focus on quality business at a price that is realistic and fair both for the client and the recruitment consultancy.

Rupert Wallis, director, Media Contacts, and chairman of the Media, Marketing and Creative Sector Group of the REC