Recruitment companies that call themselves generalists are doing themselves a disservice, says ManpowerGroup Australia and New Zealand managing director Lincoln Crawley.
Crawley told an RCSA breakfast in Sydney this morning that large recruitment businesses like ManpowerGroup often "allow themselves to be seen in the market as generalists, and the industry has allowed that to happen".
"We've even got awards for 'best generalist recruiter'. What the hell's a generalist recruiter?"
Recruitment firms perceived as generalists would have a hard time hiring talented consultants, he said, but would be attractive to recruiters who lacked niche expertise.
"We get a lot of applications from people and it's very clear that they're not really specialists at anything... It's really important for us to make sure we weed them out and don't let them come into the organisation," Crawley said.
Whether it was recruiting externally or assessing internal talent for its leadership team, he said ManpowerGroup always sought to promote itself to candidates as a portfolio of speciality brands.
"Making that change in our organisation has allowed us to tap into specialists in their field who have brought a lot of knowledge to the business, and enabled us to attract new leaders into our business."
Rudeness is a procurement tactic
Crawley told the breakfast that in the current market, clients were under constant pressure to do more with less, and this was putting more power into the hands of procurement departments.
"You can bet that those smaller-to-medium [client] organisations that haven't been sophisticated in their procurement will become sophisticated, because the procurement profession sees these 'choppy-water' times as an opportunity to grow its profession," he said.
"The procurement arms are going to have a much, much greater say in what [employers] do, and we need to be much better at dealing with it."
Crawley said it was procurement's job to make recruiters feel like "you're standing on one foot... and at the same time [they're] slapping you in the face".
The best response was to get on with the job and not take it personally.
"One of my key managers came back from a meeting with a large multinational, with whom we've done business for years and years, and didn't want to go back because the procurement person had just been so rude - so unaccepting of any product value, or anything we did," he said.
"I said to him, 'It's just a tactic. That's all it is. They absolutely know the value that we're providing but if you give into that, we have a problem.'"
Leaders are an overhead
Crawley said anyone in a recruitment company who was not billing was technically an overhead - including himself.
Senior managers' first priority should always be to help consultants do their jobs well.
Team leaders should eliminate the non-critical, "rubbish" tasks from consultants' workloads, and any other distractions that prevented client-facing staff from working effectively.
"Oftentimes we are far too busy fighting crocodiles to drain the swamp, and it's our job as leaders to drain the swamp... [and make] things simpler and more straightforward for our people to do the job they need to do," he said.