I quite like a bit of folk music. Well, to be clear, I like all music. Country AND western. I was tie-dying some curtains and smoking a reefer last night to Peter, Paul and Mary‘s “Where have all the flowers gone”, thinking about Vietnam, civil rights, and excessive body hair, when I realised I had a blog to write this morning. Frantically scrambling, as my mind does, for a recruitment connection, I was reminded of an internal meeting we had on Wednesday this week. The meeting, in my diary under “Where the f*ck can we find experienced recruiters from” was to discuss where the f*ck can we find experienced recruiters from. Although arranged on Monday, Wednesday’s meeting dovetailed nicely with a meeting Claudia and I had with a client on Tuesday. The above tells you that serendipity has a place in recruitment, and I have too many f*cking meetings. On Tuesday, we were discussing with a client how few agencies had hired someone new to the industry in the last 18 months, and how equally few planned to do so in the next 12 months. These agencies (and it is the overwhelming majority of agencies in Aotearoa) are all looking for the same thing. Sure the desk and culture changes, but what you lot want is proven agency recruiters, with 3-4 years plus of experience, billing well, with good relationships, happy to start from scratch, and who BD like Jordan Belfort. And after the last two years, I don’t blame you.
I don’t blame you for two reasons actually. Firstly, anything less than the above is a risk. When times are good, our appetite for risk becomes engorged. When times are tough, it shrivels like “the duke” as I skinny dip into my spa pool on a winter’s evening. The current climate is definitely “grower not show-er” territory. Secondly, there’s history behind this. Traditionally, Kiwi-owned recruitment boutiques have had no need to bring in juniors or those new to the industry. This risk was instead carried by others. May I re-introduce you to Messrs. Hays, Walters, Page, Hudson, and Randstad et al? Not so long ago, these altruistic bastards kindly provided a training academy for gobby backpackers, car salesmen, and failed accountants so that the rest of us didn’t have to. They’d kindly spend millions on sourcing, selecting, and training recruiters for us to headhunt in year three or four. And, get this, all the time the rest of us would claim “They have an awful culture“, “you’re just a number working there“, and “they’re too quick to performance manage these youngsters”. We were clearly happy for them to do the dirty work so we didn’t have to.
Now, things have changed. This blog is frequently full of stories about all of the above. Big firms are not big firms any more – at least not here in New Zealand. I can’t tell you the numbers, but I can’t remember a time with fewer recruiters actively recruiting in the market. No wonder we’re having meetings about it. Large firms who once employed hundreds now barely employ tens. Some don’t even operate in New Zealand any more. And this means a few things. Firstly, fewer experienced recruiters to headhunt out of environments where they might just agree that they’re “just a number“. Secondly, who do we have hiring and training people in this industry? Eventually, most of us will die. Will agency recruitment go the way of the name “Gary”? The strategy for most firms now seems to be to suck up the lost opportunity cost as they hold out for a senior recruiter to join them. In the meantime, we all frantically tit around on Claude claiming that an AI agent that can message a candidate on LinkedIn is an “app”, and that Candidate Managers are a thing of the past. Logic dictates however that this strategy gets increasingly difficult with every OE, death, retirement, and lottery win. It cannot be sustainable.
We do not blame recruitment firms who only want experienced Consultants. Running a recruitment firm is a responsibility that is often bigger than anticipated. Employed recruiters often don’t appreciate how much they cost. Spending money on high-risk hires could leave everyone “wastin’ time in the unemployment lines” and none of us “sittin’ around waiting for a promotion” (Tracy Chapman on the playlist now). However, the problem remains, and collectively we probably all need to do something. So here’s our something.
We run an excellent (well I think so), new-to-recruitment speed interviewing event called Access. Many of you have attended, some of you have hired, and some of you broke into the industry because of it. Well done all of you! Access events are cyclical and economy dependent however. In between events, we sometimes come across sales people who would make absolutely fantastic recruiters. Now nothing is a given in this world, but we have honed our recruiter senses over nearly 17 years – multiples of this if you do that gay thing where you talk about “combined years experience” (Jon once recruited an ivory-carver), so we should know what innate skills and competencies work in this industry. We do however recognise the risk our clients take in hiring these newbies. So how about this: If you hire someone with no recruitment experience via Rice & Co, we’ll send the invoice once they’ve completed their 90 day trial period, and not before. Obviously there’s no free replacement from this point (c’mon guys!), but this hopefully removes the risk in taking a chance (f*cking Abba now. Skip this one).
So there we go. A small step to getting some newbies into the industry. How long will we do it for? Not forever. I’ll wake up one day, remember my Xero password, and realise it’s destroyed our cash flow. But until then, let’s see what we can do.
^SW
