Tying in clients for the long term is our way forward

I could not agree more with the sentiments expressed by Sean O’Donoghue in Bloggers with Bite (Recruiter, 27 July). I suspect that whoever started out in recruitment first got the idea of contingency fees from estate agents…

In our company we got tired of sending out CV after CV with just about the same response lots of applicants, firms using some cheap job board or trade magazine because they did not want to pay thousands of pounds to an agency, eight to 10 agencies competing on the same vacancy, HR and partners changing their minds on the job spec or the whole process, and all with a limited candidate pool to choose from.

We operate in the legal market and things have been tight for law firms for more than three years.

Instead of continually banging our heads against a wall we came up with a new solution to satisfy both the clients and the candidates.

We have got rid of contingency fees completely and instead charge membership fees.

We are no longer solely a recruitment agency but instead an integrated job board, CV bank and recruitment agency, all rolled into one and at a price which is less than the fee charged elsewhere by each component of our service.

Our clients now join our agency for £60 a month and get all their recruitment for five years included in the price. “Are you completely insane?” is one query from a friendly competitor. Possibly, but we now get a relationship with every one of our clients who joins up that lasts for a considerable time.

That is the catch enabling us to offer this price our clients have to be with us for five years.

As each client in the legal profession is fairly small, it is likely that most of our members will only recruit two to four times a year and I appreciate that this model will not assist anyone with large clients sending hundreds of vacancies!

However, we have got rid of a large amount of unproductive work and can instead concentrate on actually recruiting for genuine clients and adding extra value.

Jonathan Fagan, Director, Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Happy to offer advice

I, like most taxpayers, am outraged at this month’s news that the government is reportedly squandering up to 10 times more than the standard commercial rate on IT projects.

The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) revealed that the government has become “overly reliant” on an “oligopoly” of large suppliers resulting in a “recipe for rip offs”.

Committee chairman Bernard Jenkin stated that the ineffective system, which some witnesses labeled as a “cartel,” has “led to an inexcusable situation that sees the government waste an obscene amount of public money.”

The PASC report called for the coalition to “break out” of its relationship with its current pool of large suppliers and engage with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

As the global sales director of an international IT services provider and SME, FDM Group, I couldn’t agree more.
By dealing with smaller IT service providers such as FDM directly, the government could cut out the middleman and ascertain what the best prices for IT services really are.

With more than 20 years worth of IT industry experience under its belt, FDM Group would certainly be a suitable choice to offer this advice.

Andrew Brown, global sales director, FDM Group

Room for both methods

In response to ’Just let them retain you’ (Bloggers with bit, July 27), I agree with Sean O’Donoghue in that the retained model even a goodwill negotiated retainer rather than the traditional three-way fee split offers the client a focused high-quality result and allows us to spend quality time understanding the brief, meeting all candidates personally and really investing time in a shortlist.

We find working on a contingency model is a very different concept it usually requires high CV volume and clients do not seem to even expect the recruiter will have met all the candidates and validated them against the brief.

There is room for both models in the recruitment sector, but I firmly believe that a recruiter is either one or the other and trying to deliver both methods dilutes our offer, even if in this challenging market its tempting to try.

Denise Matthews, Diem Consultancy