Step Away from the Dark Side

I’ve got a friend who is a very good recruiter.  He puts 100% into every assignment, spending a long time probing the client need and culture, ensuring he has the best possible candidate pool and REALLY understanding his candidates (90 minutes per face to face interview!).  He’s great at client relationship building but not so great at business development.  And he earns over £100k a year.

He’d like to focus more on the stuff he loves (getting the right person for the job) and less on the stuff he doesn’t like (yucky financial targets and new business) so he’s thinking of moving inhouse.

This chap thought his biggest barrier would be his salary and not knowing quite where to start.  Well, he was partly right.  Andrew Mountney of Apen In-house was by coincidence running a survey on “Moving in‐house from the external recruitment market” and the findings in his report make really interesting reading.  Agency recruiters looking to move inhouse typically struggle for a number of reasons:

* Lack of awareness of where opportunities were
* Concern over undermining their existing role by directly engaging with opportunities or applying directly
* A preference for hiring organisations to recruit experienced in-house professionals

Salary is in there (scroll down to page 14 of the report to see the graph) but the bottom line is that corporate HR departments want home grown talent.   In house recruitment and its challenges is a far cry from that conducted within an agency environment.  It’s a tricky one to overcome.

In terms of the “lack of awareness of where opportunities were” problem – I’d suggest (and Andy does too – even though he is a rather fabulous HR recruiter) you look within your existing client relationships to see if  any with internal recruitment functions might be able to offer you an opportunity. Andy also talks about the often dismissed opportunities available with RPOs in the report.

For my friend, on £100,000, I’m advising he look at contract and interim roles to stand the slightest chance of meeting his salary needs and to gain some inhouse experience!