The quality way to creating new windows of opportunity

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 2, 2002 by Darran Gardner

Companies tend to view them like double-glazing salesmen. However, finds Darran Gardner, Andy Barton hopes his honest approach will help make clients less frosty

RECRUITMENT can be a lottery. Not only can it be difficult to find the best candidate, but it can also be tricky to find a recruitment agency that actually cares about/or understands your business.

It's a situation Andy Barton at Recruitment Zone believes causes many companies to view the sector with the same jaundiced eye more usually reserved for the world of double-glazing - full of aggressive can-do salespeople, selling costly products you don't really need.

In the case of Scotland's sizeable recruitment sector, masses of CVs fill in for expensive windows. Randomly plucked from various databases in the fevered hope that a client will bite, recruitment companies are more concerned about sales than a perfect match of employee and employer.

Of course, admits Barton, whose rapidly-growing company is headquartered in Dalmeny, south of Edinburgh, this is hardly news to most companies.

"The traditional view of recruitment agencies is that they are crap and that's usually the view of the marketplace as a whole. Agencies don't understand what people want - they just deliver volumes of CVs," he says.

"With the internet and the availability of CVs it's too easy to overload clients with information and that's constantly happening. It's all about speed for the agencies, so people's CVs are fired all over the place without them even knowing."

Barton's refreshing honesty, however, has to be backed up by the sort of service which delivers the added-value proposition that justifies Recruitment Zone's fees. In this respect, he hopes that the company's growth since its formation in 1998, proves that it is taking a novel - for the sector, at least - approach to customer service.

Barton and his fellow co-founders, Donald Bedford and Lisa Kwiecinska, had worked at an Edinburgh agency together and believed the marketplace was ready for a different approach. After targeting utility players such as ScottishPower and Scottish & Southern, it recorded a turnover of (pounds) 2.5 million in its first year.

Instead of competing aggressively in the contingency recruitment market, where employers can potentially ask up to six agencies to find and field suitable candidates - forcing agencies to react rapidly so their selected candidate would be selected and win them the finders' fee - Recruitment Zone is keen to develop long-term relationships with retained services.

The company also aims to prove its commitment to finding the right person for each position - contract or permanent - by then applying a three-step approach to fee payment. The first payment is a third up front, the second on delivery of a shortlist and the third once the candidate has been selected. This, says Barton, allows companies to quantify what Recruitment Zones delivers and hopefully appreciate its value.

The company's practices, he adds, help ensure that the all-too- common mismatch of candidate and job, as well as vital issues such as salary expectation, do not create unnecessary problems for clients.

Such problems, Barton argues, blight the entire industry. With some recruitment companies setting themselves targets in relation to the number of CVs they fire off each week, there remains a chasm between the sales pitch (we'll find the right person for that job!') and the final delivery (in effect, a dollop of speculative e-mails culled from online databases).

"In some respects," admits Barton, "technology has not helped the recruitment sector. You could search a big database of CVs and pull out a single word which could be vaguely relevant to the position and then send it off on the back of that.

"You could even set up a small agency tomorrow, access websites and send out tonnes of CVs from them into companies. When people realise they can make money easily then you have a problem. It's a joke and we have to find a way to stop it. But if your principles are good then you should win through at the end of the day."

While Barton and his co-founders remain strong advocates of the creation of an industry standards body, the company is focused on avoiding the mistakes made by other recruiters.

As well as managing campaigns - handling all aspects of a clients campaign including producing job specifications, running opening days and placing press adverts - Recruitment Zone provides an executive search and selection process and standard contingency services.

Where it has innovated is the provision of import recruitment, which involves a European dimension. The company will assist with travel arrangements and accompany hiring staff to their offices in any of the five continents, arrange interviews, offers, work permits and repatriation.

Focusing initially on skills shortage areas such as IT, it has already tapped into the eastern European market setting up a subsidiary operation in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, earlier this year. An office in Bolton, Lancashire, was also opened the previous year.