Recruitment Agencies & Web Firms
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006We get on a weekly basis at least two enquiries from recruitment agencies hoping to sell us personnel. Last week was no exception and we received a call from an agency telling us they had two candidates that would be perfect for roles at Southbourne Internet.
Firstly, as a rule we don’t use recruitment agencies, we have no need for the service as we are small firm with that specialise in SEO and design we are not yet at the stage of handling extra staff. We do however get some very large projects occasionally and where we have to bring in contractors. Generally, we find these contractors ourselves knowing who is who in this business.
Recruitment agencies to the web sector tend to take a large cut from the project spend, on top of this the person they send needs to be paid and is not always happy that they have come from agencies. Or they have the attitude that they don’t work for us but for the agency instead and should be abiding by the recruitment agencies rules. This I have a problem with! What large web project does not require extra time in build or for discovery and scope. Sometimes, it calls for extra hours with this more money is spent and as a small firm we require flexibility. I tried explaining this to the agency who called us last week and he was having none of it. He told me that we should seriously consider his client who was coming from Italy and one of the top SEO’s in her business and she wanted to relocate to the UK. I relented and said I would meet her, after all it would be refreshing to have another women on the team for individual projects as we do seem to be in a business that is still widely male dominated. This did not sit well with the ‘man at the agency’ as he suddenly changed subject and got to the real point of trying to sell us two male individuals from the UK with not as much experience as he made out. By this time I had already wasted a precious hour on the phone with this guy and was getting seriously annoyed.
I did not want to hang the phone up on the guy and be rude and sensing this he drove on with the sales patter, I agreed the only person who I would meet would be the Italian and I would look at the CV when I got a spare moment at the weekend. This did not please him at all and he actually got slightly annoyed and literally told me I was to view within the hour and he would call me back with the appointment! There you have it, I don’t use recruitment agencies, and certainly will not use ones that tell us our business and how we are going to do it and when we should.
He never sent the CV and I never received the phone call… I wonder how many other firms or small businesses get this hassle and if they use the staff at what price to the firm and the clients project?
