Human capital
HR and business managers need to ditch the 'free' lunches and get-rich-quick schemes if they are going to secure high-calibre candidates, says Nick Rayner
Extraordinarily, even the most intelligent business managers, who are abundantly aware of the enormous odds against winning the lottery, continue to invest money in the futile hope of an easy route to wealth. But, if it helps perpetuate a dream, why not?
Given the current state of the UK job market - we have virtually full employment - recruitment within finance and accounting is equally as unpredictable. As any HR or business manager will confirm, the problems for these sectors are especially challenging because of the difficulty in locating and recruiting viable applicants with specialist skills.
Regardless, many employers still cling to the hope that phone calls to the usual agencies and an advert in the Sunday press will produce at least one good CV hidden among the mixed response. Presumably, these are the same people who also hope they are about to win the lottery, or believe that their 'free lunch' paid for by a recruitment agency came with no strings attached.
The value of human capital
Generally, the cost and effort invested in locating candidates is directly proportionate to the choice and quality of applicants that emerge. Yes, occasionally a miracle happens, but nobody in their right mind would risk the growth of their business on a prayer.
My time in marketing management in the 70s and 80s proved that the quality of the information upon which we based our judgement would be severely impaired unless our starting point was a large volume of carefully gathered data or market research. We therefore spent considerable time and effort planning each stage, acquiringand extracting viable, reliable
By implication, no one is going to secure quality finance and accounting professionals without significant effort and investment; the old, traditional methods of finding relevant, no-compromise applicants are now redundant. Indeed, any HR manager who continues to rely on traditional agencies and newspaper ad space to fill key finance vacancies puts their employer's recruitment budget (and perhaps their own job) at risk - especially if they are measured by the quality and the quantity of the people they hire.
Market tactics
Consequently, in 1989 when I moved from marketing into recruitment, I saw considerable merit in merging a few proven marketing fundamentals with the recruitment process. I adopted the following guiding principle: 'The way to virtually guarantee a positive outcome is to start by identifying a high volume of potential candidates, and to carefully condense the resulting long-list against uncompromising selection criteria.'
This enabled us to produce a short-list of applicants with flawless quality and relevance, without wasting our time on an unproductive wild goose chase. Our key objective is to only accept a small number of clients and form longstanding relationships. That way we can deliver positive outcomes from every assignment, covering a broad range of disciplines.
With massive skills shortages in specialist employment sectors, such as accountancy and finance, every employer must accept this reality: it is now virtually impossible to recruit good people within any specialised sector 'on the cheap' and without creative effort
Nick Rayner is founder-director of Head-Hunt Ltd. Established in 1989, the UK-based recruitment company provides high-level recruitment services to a select group of major organisations and recruitment agencies