There is one word you will always find in any analysis or even casual discussion about the recruitment industry.

Competition

Get two recruiters or more together, in any setting, and I bet that 90 % of the conversation will be about how competitive its all become and how to beat the competition.

A few years ago my office was at 275 George Street in Sydney. That building has 12 floors, and at that time it housed 14 recruitment companies! Seriously. We used to loose candidates on the way up in the elevator!

But what does competitive really mean?  And if we competed effectively in the past, will the same tactics work for us going forward?

Well I first started to compete as a recruiter in Australia in January 1980. Since then I have been able to get first hand experience of what the very best our industry has had to offer in terms of competition here and all over the world. And many of those recruiters have built superior businesses through quality service, innovation and exceeding customer expectations

…but the vast majority have not!

For almost all my recruitment life in Australia in New Zealand, as well as my exposure to the industry in the UK, Europe and Asia, “competition” for most recruiters has meant one or more of these things…

Speed: Urgency is good. It’s what clients want. But for many recruiters what “speed’ means is how quickly we can respond to requests for help from clients. And that usually leads to competition based on how fast we can work – not on the quality of what we do. So “competition” in that case leads to shortcuts, sloppy process and often results in unseemly resume races and squabbles over who represented candidates first. Ugly, unproductive and damaging to our reputations

Volume: This is the form of “competition “ where recruiters are being exhorted by desperate managers, totally bereft of new ideas, to do more sales calls, send out more spam, make more unwelcome visits. And yes, activity is crucial to recruiting success, but it needs to be quality, targeted activities, not volume of intrusive approaches which means we actually end up competing on who can annoy our clients the most!

Price:  The final competitive weapon of he or she who has nothing else to offer, resulting in the very essence of what we do as an industry being devalued in the eyes of our clients. And of course selling on price alone means our own margins are relentlessly squeezed to the point where we are all working harder and harder for less and less return – and how smart is that when you really think about it? Competitive pricing is key, sure. But value is the issue we should be competing on.  No matter what you charge you will always find someone who will charge less. And that is a slippery slope none of us want to risk.

Aggression: Truthfully, I like the word “aggression” when it comes to business, just as I encourage my sons to be aggressive on the rugby field. But my type of aggression is the healthy type. Passionate, committed, loving to win more than loose.  Always within the rules and never malicious. But too often recruiters think aggression means rubbishing your competition to clients and candidates, and bullying customers into decisions they don’t really want or need to make, all for the sake of closing the deal at all costs. And that is exactly the type of behavior that perpetuates the poor image our industry currently suffers with many of our customers using us begrudgingly  – and in some cases with undisguised resentment.

Dishonesty: And here I am using the softest word I can think of for competition based on lying, manipulation, and withholding of information. And it’s rife in our industry and I have commented on it more than once before (Integrity. It’s a bit like virginity. Either you have it…or you don’t!)

I can write fifty blogs highlighting outrageously deceitful behavior I have encountered from recruiters over the years, and maybe one day I will tell those tales.

But for now I guess the point is that it’s this kind of activity, that plenty of people in our industry believe “competitive” means.

Many of us in recruitment today are like pin-balls in a pin-ball machine. We bounce around without pattern desperately trying to hit the jackpot.

We are not sure we have the tools to compete, so we live in fear of every new development and then we try to copy it or do it faster or do it cheaper. But those old tactics are no longer working. In fact they are sending many of us out of business. Please note, “competing” does not mean copying.

So how do we thrive in a competitive world?

Well, stay tuned to next week’s blog entry where I will try and pin some of that down.

I have been in business a long time. And all of that time has been in the rough and tumble world of recruitment and staffing. Having worked as a recruiter, manager, and owner of recruitment businesses all over the world, I have seen my share of dubious business practices. Indeed I have, sadly, been witness to many instances of outrageously deceitful and unethical behavior. We have all seen it no doubt.

In business, as in life generally, we expect to confront people who are dishonest. We know they are there, and we become better at identifying them before too much harm is done. But what really gets me is that category of person in business who preaches ethical behavior, even believes they are whiter than white, but when put to the mildest of tests, will collapse in a heap of moral compromise at best, and resort to outright duplicity at worst.

In a strange way I have even come to prefer dealing with crooks who knows they are crooks, rather then those people who believe there are degrees of honesty. People who somehow feel you can leverage acting decently against the amount of money involved. You cannot. Honesty is like being a virgin. You are, or you are not. You can’t be a virgin when it suits you.

I remember a conversation with a manager a long time ago that sticks with me as an example. I had recently taken over a business, and inherited some of the middle-management. The situation was that we had billed a client a large fee. The placement was made in Asia and the fee was in Singapore dollars. The client, based in the US, paid the invoice with US dollars, a value that was almost double the original, correct amount. I asked the manager of the office handling the deal “what do you propose to do”? The reply was along the lines of, “well normally I would tell the client about the error, but this is a large fee and we are having a poor month in my office, so I feel we should let it slide”. Of course I quickly smothered that idea, but I knew I had a serious problem. What is the mindset of a person who will effectively steal from our clients? What is the moral fortitude of someone who will compromise any standard of honesty “because they are having a poor month”.

In recent years I have seen so many examples of this “rubber-band morality”. Clients, candidates and others closer to home, have managed to surprise even me with how tenuous is their grasp of what is right, and what is wrong. Yes, times are tough and money is tight. But what we have to understand is that it’s in exactly these circumstances that honesty and moral strength counts. Anyone can be ‘ethical’ if there is no temptation to test your ethical fibre. It’s very easy to see yourself as ‘honest’ if there is nothing financial at stake to give you pause for thought.

I love the competitive nature of the recruitment business. Anyone I have worked with or against will attest that I ask nor give any quarter in the commercial battle. Winning is important. Success is what we strive for.

But not at any cost.

To me its obvious that in business, or indeed any commercial interaction, you play it as hard as you can, but stick by the rules, retain your humanity and ensure that you will always be able to look every person you deal with in the eye.

Don’t be like a client who said to me once, as he lied his way out of paying a bill , “Greg, I am an honest man, but business is business”

Sad and pathetic