Recruitment Agencies: Navigating Company Challenges

The Data Predicament

A humongous amount of candidates’ data is handled by the recruitment agencies, which are either collected from the job seekers approaching them or from nationwide job websites such as Indeed and Naukri.com, which requires a high amount of expenditure in acquiring valuable data. These recruitment agencies are then approached by companies to find the right candidate according to their need and exigency. The recruitment agencies then need to forward the details of the suitable candidates to the companies, and herein is where the complications commence. The data provided by the agency helps the company to procure the contact details of the candidates. Most of the time, the company, after procuring this contact information, tends to dump and circumvent the recruitment agency, striving to approach the appropriate candidate independently. Also, another ploy by the companies is to ignore a particular candidate and reject him if he applies for the job through a recruitment agency but later approaches him independently. This results in recruitment companies running into huge losses.

To curb this injustice inflicted upon the recruitment agencies, the most simple solution is to hide the contact details of the candidate while sharing the resume with the company. But in most of the cases, the company may need the candidate’s contact information for telephonic interviews. Thus, a more subtle and feasible solution will be to design a proxy system, wherein the company is provided with a proxy number by the recruitment agency to contact the candidate, which  binds the company to relay through the recruitment agency, thus preventing bypassing the hired recruitment agency. Also, the data remains exclusively with the recruitment agency.

Also Read: Role of Recruitment Industry Post Covid-19

No Platform for reviewing

There exists no platform wherein recruitment agencies can review the companies which hire them in order to filter out the suitable job candidates. It thus presents boundless problems when companies employ the aforementioned unethical practices of illegitimately acquiring data from recruitment agencies for free. Also, recruitment agencies do not have any forum or circle of discussion, which leads to multiple recruitment agencies being duped by the same company. Thus, a platform for recruitment agencies needs to be conjured on the lines of Glassdoor and Vault (Sites where employees can post their workplace experiences). A platform ensures that the circle of recruitment agencies gets to study and know the behavior of the companies, and deal with them accordingly. A company which provides due credit to the recruitment agency will be welcomed in the recruitment agency market, whereas a company which has a bad reputation of skirting around the recruitment agency after utilizing the desired services will be given a cold shoulder by other recruitment agencies too.

Also Read: Ever-growing demand for interview-as-a-service market post pandemic

The Post-Payment system

The conventional system in case of hiring recruitment agencies that the companies pay the fee to the recruitment agency only after their services are dispensed with. This may be the most significant cause of why a large number of recruitment agencies tend to be loss-making. Candidates juggle through their choices and tend to accept the job offering the highest salary. A candidate may not accept the job offer through the recruitment agency but joins a different company altogether. This leads to the waste of efforts of the recruitment agency, and the company declines from paying money for that particular candidate, although the company availed the services of the recruitment agency in hunting for that particular candidate. A straightforward solution to this problem is that the recruitment agencies charge an advance from the company for using their services.

Thus a particular percentage of the fee is to be paid before the commencement of the services, and the remaining fee will be paid if the candidate accepts the job offer from the company. Through this construct, the losses incurred by the company are averted and they are paid for their efforts.

Also Read: How AI Interviews Are Shaping Recruitment in the BFSI Industry?