A Guide to Working with Recruitment Companies

We get asked a lot of questions from both job seekers and hiring companies about what recruitment companies and recruitment consultants do and what the best way is to work with them so we hope this goes some way to answering those questions. If you want to know anything else, please drop us a line and we’ll try to address it in a future blog.

Basically, recruitment consultants earn money by placing candidates with companies who need them and if they are successful the hiring companies pay them a fee – often a percentage of the annual wage or an agreed monthly fee if the candidate is on a contract.

If you come across a recruitment consultancy that says you’ve got to pay a fee to register, avoid them like the plague. In the U.K. this is highly unusual as the law states that recruitment consultancies can only generate their income by charging a fee to the clients (the hiring company), whether that’s a permanent placement fee, or a fee on top of your contracting hours.

For a lot of recruitment consultants, the clients are the priority because they are paying. They can therefore feel pressured to send candidates to interview, often without spending the sizeable amount of time it takes to get to know them and their skills. This is hugely frustrating for hiring companies who spend time and money on interviewing, or are coerced into hiring the wrong person. It can also be deeply demoralising for the candidate to either feel out of their depth at interview, or worse, in their new job.

Here at Ex-Mil we know that good recruitment takes time. We work hard to build a deep understanding of our clients’ companies and what they really need and we work hard to get to know our candidates really well so we aren’t wasting anybody’s time and we can make really good matches. Our military background makes us less prone to faffing around and we are always up front and honest about what we – and our candidates – can deliver.

In short, there are thousands of recruitment consultants out there and a lot of really good ones but if you are having conversations and something doesn’t seem right – question it.