Like many other PR recruiters, I received an email recently from PR Week about a disgruntled customer who complained that ‘when I have been contacted by the agency - usually after chasing them up - I found that while they were happy to discuss the merits of my substantial experience, the positions I had applied for were no longer available’. I must admit I was surprised to read this – we always have between 200 and 500 live jobs but only advertise 20 or so a week with PR Week, so the chances are that the advertised ones will still be open. That’s unless agencies are inventing them, but why would they need to do that? It would be too expensive and there is not a shortage of candidates at the moment.
The job ad is a summary of what we’re looking for, written with a limited amount of words and often do not include many specifics that clients are looking for. So although a candidate may think ‘I can do that’ and give us a call, we need to talk to them about their experience and skills to make sure they really can and that they’re right for the job. There’s no point in stringing the candidate along and no point in wasting the client’s time by putting forward an unsuitable candidate.
He or she also says that ‘there appears to be a very cavalier attitude among some agencies in the way they handle applications, more often than not there is little or no follow-up and a string of lame excuses for not returning calls or emails.’ The truth is that there are less jobs out there than there were a year ago and clients have raised the bar. This means spending more time talking to clients about their needs and searching for their ideal candidates which leaves us less time for returning candidates’ calls. In this client led market we have to be client focussed, be as professional as we can be and deliver what we’re supposed to – the matching of the right person to the right job.
So, apologies to the author of the email, but we hope this clears a few things up. We hope that you have better experiences with recruiters in the future!
Kayode Dauda
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