Why are so many major recruitment consultants such crap at what they do?

As a freelance consultant who specializes in delivering contracted bespoke, high-level guidance in the areas of financial crime, anti-money laundering, market abuse, broker surveillance, as well as risk management more generally, I always need to develop new clients, as each existing contract expires.

I deliberately choose to work in the short-term contract market, because it fits my business profile most accurately, enabling me to provide my services through my limited company. It also means that I am able to provide the most cost-effective and value-added services to my clients, who are looking for someone willing to accept a short-term project, in order to determine a specific response to an identifiable problem.

Until very recently, my business has run efficiently and my new work has very largely been generated by recommendations from previous clients on a ‘word of mouth’ basis.

However, in the past few months, the general downturn in the financial market, coupled with the degree of uncertainty about the future, has meant that many potential clients have resisted engaging in similar short-term contracts, preferring to cut back on many areas of compliance training and remedial identification in order to save money.

This does not mean that work is not available but it has been getting harder and harder to find the right contacts, and sole consultant practitioners like myself have to travel further and wider for projects. This in itself is not a major problem, many hotels will offer very cost-effective deals if a business-like proposal is made to them.

However, what is becoming increasingly difficult to find is a professional source of work-referral or recruitment provider who appear to be capable of giving even a semblance of effective service and support.

In my search for projects, I have trawled the internet, and I have established that there are a wide variety of opportunities and proposals being advertised on the net, but can I get an interview, an introduction, a referral? Well, with one major and important exception, Enigma Executive Search, of Waterloo, London, the overwhelming answer is no!

It is important that I do identify this company and my contact, Fearghal McGoveran who has been helpful and professional, because they deserve the recognition of being so wholly different from the rest, and to be fair to them so that they are not associated with the critical observations made in this blog-piece.

Almost without exception, the rest of the work-hunting follows the following same, depressing pattern.

Having found a job-spec on the web which meets your criteria, you phone the company. You know the telephone extension and the name of the person managing the project, you know its reference number, these are all on the web page. You introduce yourself and ask if they are the named agent. The answer is almost inevitably, ‘no’, the named person is ‘in a meeting; not at his/her desk; out with clients, can I take a message’! There is no point trying to get any information from this person because they will say it’s not their project.

You immediately know there is no point in bothering to leave a number, they will never make the return call, even if they get the message in the first place, and that is debatable! You just have to keep calling until you eventually get lucky. It can take two or three days before the requisite person gets back to their desk.

Having sent in your cv, they will deign to identify the end-client, which may or may not make a significant difference to you. There are some institutions I simply will not work for on the basis that their internal culture is so criminogenic that there is no point wasting your time with them.

If you can prevail upon the consultants to send you the full job-spec, you will find that in many cases, the skills requirements run to pages of detail. One job I applied for, a three-month, temporary hand-holding assignment, mentoring a newly appointed MLRO who knew absolutely nothing about his new role, provided over 5 pages of closely typed, skills requirements.

But now you now have to go through what I have termed the ‘cv handicap hurdles’.

The recruitment consultant (who in most cases sounds about 22 years old) then proceeds to discuss your cv with you, in the light of the skills requirements document. I am convinced that not one of them ever reads the damned thing before they speak to you, because if they did, they would have done some homework to find out some more about you. (Has no-one ever heard of Google?)

One consultant queried my suitability because I did not possess the ACAMs qualification. When I pointed out that it was an exclusively American qualification and of absolutely no relevance to a European market, she admitted she did not know what it meant anyway, it was just that the client had indicated it as a requirement. Asking her if my legal qualifications and my Masters’ degree in criminology might be thought to be evidence of a tad more advanced knowledge, elicited the comment that she felt unhappy about putting me forward because I clearly did not meet the stated requirements.

Some consultants insist you alter your cv to include a series of buzz-words appearing in the job-spec. Others insist that you prune your cv because it is too long. Others want examples of recent projects, while others want no detail, just the bare facts of the roles you have performed.

In the last 3 months, I have made a great number of such applications. In all that time I doubt whether I have even received above half a dozen responses from the consultants concerned once they have received my completed application. Of those I have heard back from, 1 of them resulted in an interview, the mentoring role above.

When I have chased an answer, as I inevitably do, I am met, almost ubiquitously with the phrase ‘…It was felt you were too qualified…!’

One young man who left his company after about 6 months of working took me into his confidence and shared the inner secrets with me. He had formerly been in the army and had joined a City recruitment agency. He left because he was shocked at the poor level of service his industry provided to their clients and he hated the bonus culture that meant that any fool could get a job as long as he ‘ticked all the boxes’. He admitted to me that;

• Recruiters lived in a revolving door environment, were paid little and relied on commissions, and it was a hire and fire culture which prevailed. The job was just a ‘box-ticking’ exercise, and no real need to make too searching an enquiry about a potential client was necessary. You dealt exclusively with the HR Departments of the client companies, and all they required were candidates that fitted their preconceived model.

• The ambition was to get in as many potential clients as possible, and then fit the ‘right’ ones into a special category, and to ignore the rest. This was why they had to get such a large turn-over of interest because the ‘right’ candidates were only a selected few.

• The ‘right’ candidate would fit a very selected profile, including age (this was very much specified despite being illegal), sex (depending on role), qualifications (very selective, even poor MBA’s are worth more than any other qualification including Ph.Ds). Relevant previous banking experience, (vital for any job in the banking world because all new employers want to ensure that all their employees know the unwritten rules of banking, and they don’t want to have to explain why what looks like a thinly-disguised criminal offence is merely sound banking practice. They also benchmark their own practices against the new employees’ former employer, to ensure they are doing nothing more than usual).

• In the compliance role, anyone with former police experience was looked upon with grave disquiet, indeed, he said that many employers positively instructed that former police officers would not be interviewed.

• Consulting firms only wanted other consulting firm applicants, who knew the ‘Big Four’ culture; the time charging imperative; the rolling job-creation mentality and who would fit in to the mould without the need for re-education.

• Finally, he admitted that it was a cardinal rule in his former role that the consultant should not submit anyone for interview who was more qualified than the client, on the basis that the candidate would pose a threat to the client in his company and should therefore not be considered for interview.

So, there it is. When the majority of companies in the recruitment industry become little more than an institutionalized self-fulfilling prophecy, it is not difficult to see how, in recent years, those recruited to the financial services industry have meant that it has become a ‘clone culture’, and how the recruitment agencies have joined the Big 4 Consultancies, along with the major law firms and the accounting giants, in becoming willing supporters of the culture of greed which has been perpetrated by the major banks, to the detriment of us all!