DO YOU GAMBLE WITH YOUR RECRUITMENT PROCESS?

Regardless of your age, chances are that you’ve played on one of those 2p machines at some point in your life. You’ll recall the bright lights; the overbearing, slightly crackly, cheesy music; your heart thumping in your chest as you drop your coin and watch it skitter down the various channels.

It’s good, clean fun, and the sense of euphoria and accomplishment when you get a coin to drop is incomparable. It doesn’t seem to matter that you’ve pumped £5-worth of 2ps in to get that one 2p coin back – you earned that 2p with your tactile guile, and that’s what counts.

I want you to take a leap of faith for a moment and imagine that every coin in the picture above is a CV.

That’s a lot of CVs. A veritable sea of CVs. A sea V if you will. These CVs are from every walk of life. We’ve got fighter pilots, warehouse workers, bus drivers, and international CEOs, all stacked on top of one another, all teetering precariously over the edge.

But, what’s this? A snot-nosed kid comes along and ‘encourages’ the CVs to drop by ‘accidentally falling into the machine.’ (We’ve all done it; don’t pretend you’ve not.) Suddenly, a tidal wave of CVs hurtles towards the winning’s trough.

Now imagine that the trough is a vacancy (still with me on this?). The person responsible for making this hire would be overjoyed, right? I mean, just look at all those CVs they’ve got to choose from!

The problem is that the vacancy in question is for driving an ice cream van.

You can imagine the fighter pilot is used to something a little faster-paced, so they’re out. The International CEO is unlikely to want to take the £120,000 pay drop, so they’re out. That leaves us with the warehouse worker and the bus driver. It turns out that the warehouse worker can’t actually drive anything other than a forklift so that just leaves us with the bus driver as a candidate. The tsunami of CVs and candidates has rapidly turned into a drought.

HIT THE JACKPOT

It’s a bit of a convoluted metaphor, but you get the point. This is how contingency recruitment operates. Just because a vacancy has stacks of CVs side-lined for it doesn’t mean that they’re a) relevant, or b) any good. If anything, it draws out the process and makes it unnecessarily complicated.

Contingency recruitment is a gamble. Even if it’s a 2p gamble, it’s still a wager against the odds of success. You might get lucky and all the CVs that drop are A* candidates for your vacancy, but how often does that happen in reality? Better to rely on something other than luck for your recruitment process.

Mercury Hampton is not a contingency recruiter. We don’t wait for a tidal wave of CVs to drop – we go and headhunt our own candidates. Once we’ve found them, we weed out the also-rans – the fake 2p’s – before we send them on to interview stage.

When it comes to successful recruitment, Mercury Hampton is the security guard that drags the snot-nosed kid out of the arcade by the earhole. We are the keeper of the keys to the machine, and the 10p mixed up with all the 2ps. Get in touch when you’re ready to stop gambling with your recruitment process.