Selling the middleman?

I had one of those eye openers earlier this year when I was invited to do a presentation at ProMatch. It seemed easy enough. Speak to the members about “How to work with a staffing firm.” I knew there were going to be plenty of questions so I came with just four Keynote slides on the basics of working with recruiters.

I was introduced to a full auditorium of maybe 75 job seekers ranging from financial analysts to project managers to HR managers. I didn’t really have a fear of public speaking, but when your introduction goes something like “please go easy on her,” I say brace for impact. They don’t want to know how to work with a staffing firm. My gut feeling was they they’ve all had some sort of interaction with one or several staffing firms and judging from my introduction, their experience with staffing staffing firms weren’t positive.

So I scrapped my presentation and felt my way around, asking the audience to share their experience with staffing firms. A majority of the stories that were shared fell under one category. Lack of feedback from recruiters who initally call and promise to submit their resumes for a requisition they were working on, never to be heard from again.

I can vouch for a handful of recruiters I personally know and have worked with and honestly say they give their candidates the courtesy of a follow up call, but I must say this is also a widespread issue. I bet some of you will even scoff at this post and tell me to post about more interesting things like VMS or better margins. But I found it fitting to post about this first before anything else, because let’s face it. First things first. The candidates are our bread and butter. There will be no VMS or margins to speak of if the candidate refuses to work with us.

Aside from not getting follow up calls, the job seekers that I spoke with also felt that staffing firms are just middle-people taking a huge chunk of what the company is actually paying for their services. Sure we can talk about overhead and fringe benefits and statutory costs but that’s not the point. Staffing firms are seen as unnecessary middlemen. In their eyes, we are just a barrier between the employee and the employer. There is no value to working with a staffing firm.

But there IS value. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a market for our services and the staffing industry wouldn’t exist. And even more perplexing, why isn’t that value communicated anywhere? Wouldn’t our jobs be much easier if the publics we served (the job seeker community and our clients alike) understood why we exist? Why we are relevant? Let’s face it. It’s hard to sell from the position of a middleman.

This blog will attempt to answer that question, one post at a time. But in case you wandered into my blog, please feel free to answer this question in the comments section.