Hiring the unexpected

With the benefit of hindsight, now that the shock election result is a week or more in the past, I was reflecting further on our Prime Minister’s recent travails and the obvious, albeit light-hearted, parallels with the recruitment industry – why it’s vital to see your candidates in the round before your customers do and the consequences of not using the best due diligence now available.

Among the unwelcome surprises for the Conservative Party, perhaps the least expected – and arguably the root of all later surprises – was the startling gap between the leader they thought they’d hired and the leader they found they’d got. How could they have prevented it? Why did no one see it coming?

Speculation on this looks set to run, but one reason for the surprise is that they had never really seen her put on the spot before. This was a minster who’d shunned the limelight through a long career, about whom few knew very much. Come the reveal, however, it was plain for them and the electorate to see. By which time it was rather too late.

Fortunately, an exciting new technology provides a simple answer to this most tricky of problems. They need only have asked their candidates to play one of the range of online psychometric games and all their current woes could have been averted. The reason is, of course, that games offer a chance to road-test your new PM before he or she actually moves into No 10.

It’s no good giving them good old psychometric questionnaires; we all know that politicians are famously good at avoiding questions. You’ve got to see them in action. You need real behaviour. Here’s where today’s new psychometric games can really shine and save you all sorts of bother from a bad shop floor hire to the collapse of a national government. Games put your promising candidates through a wide-ranging work simulation, gradually turning up the heat and seeing how they really act.

Had the 1922 committee (yet to make their mark as early adopters, but surely only a matter of time now) put their candidates through such a dry run ahead of appointment, they’d have had a good idea what they were letting themselves in for. 

Although it might have surprised them at the time, surely it’s better a small surprise then than a rather bigger one on polling day.

Charles Martin, CEO at Ipsemet

Umbrella firm QPS directors jailed for payroll fraud

Following the news that the directors of Quality Premier Services (QPS) have been jailed after being found guilty of payroll fraud, FCSA is keen to point out that while there are some cases of bad practice amongst a minority of businesses which have grabbed the headlines, there are also a large number of highly compliant organisations working ethically and correctly to provide a high level of service for its clients and contractors.

The challenge comes in identifying a compliant company you can trust, sound in the knowledge that it continues to work within the rules. In this case, recruitment firms could have requested evidence of VAT returns for this company to confirm that they were indeed paying it appropriately.

I would advise recruiters to never underestimate the importance of doing proper due diligence on their supply chain partners as the reputational damage and financial risk of getting this wrong could be significant.

There are an alarming number of recruitment firms that don’t have time to do even basic checks, but this case highlights the importance of investing the time in compliance.

Companies like QPS have the potential to give all umbrella firms a bad name, so I would like to reassure recruiters that as the trade body that represents umbrella firms we at FCSA are working hard to redress the balance, to drive up standards and rid the industry of such cowboys.

Julia Kermode, CEO, The Freelancer & Contractor Services Association (FCSA)

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