There are consultancies that specialise in certain industries, there are some that focus on conducting direct approach searches, there are some that mainly place advertisements in newspapers, and others have launched onto the internet. While employers may scratch their heads about the plethora of services on offer, some recruitment professionals worry about the recruitment business’s poor public image and about the lack of barriers to entering the industry.

The managing director of Abacus Financial Recruitment Solutions, Mr Toby Marshall said all that was needed to become a recruitment consultant was a business suit and a mobile phone. He said the lack of entry barriers had helped give the industry “a reputation shared with politicians and second-hand car salespeople. Mr Marshall said the sooner there were recognised industry standards, the better it would be for employers and recruitment professionals.

While not an advocate of government regulation, he said there was a strong case for more active industry self-regulation. He said neither the Australian Human Resources Institute nor the Recruitment and Consulting Services Association (RCSA) adequately represented the executive-level con-professional development standards.

There should be a strong executive-level industry association that we all belong to,” Mr Marshall said. “The fact is that recruitment is a very difficult profession, you need to understand client needs and understand people’s career needs, and match the two.” He said the rise of a sales culture had led to some firms placing more value on a consultant’s sales skills than on the consulting skills necessary to carry out the work of matching candidates to jobs.

The RCSA’s executive director, Ms Karen Clifton, agreed that the issue of whether or not to regulate business practices was an industry concern. But she said that the association’s members, who accounted for 85 per cent of code of ethics that had recently been rewritten and strengthened. “Our members have a self-policing mechanism to raise the standards of the industry,” she said. Ms Clifton said RCSA and ACTU officials held industry discussions in December, but industry regulation had not been on this meeting’s agenda.  ”There has certainly been no deal done with the unions.”

According to the managing director of Hamilton James & Bruce, Mr Michael Markiewics, recruitment is an inexact science and therefore difficult to regulate. Mr Markiewics, whose 70 staff company specialises in finance, IT and marketing recruitment, said if a firm had a good reputation and did a good job, it would naturally do well.

“It’s very difficult to regulate an industry where a large amount of business is relationship development and trust,” he said. These are the intangibles that make up the good recruitment company and which differentiate one company from the other. “If you have a consistent volume of business from a high-profile company, you must be doing something right. But you’ve got to keep working to keep business in place: the market place will dictate that you do that.” Mr Markiewic’s said successful firms provided employment market intelligence to clients and worked “to identify the best person in the market, not just the best available person”.

For large employers, a close relationship with one or more recruitment firms is critical. The competency development and assessment manager of Sydney’s Star City casino and hotel complex, Ms Judy Hurd, said she worked closely with several firms. These firms had played an important role when Star City doubled its staff – from 2,000 to 4,000, when the casino moved to permanent premises in Pyrmont in late 1997. Ms Hurd said using external firms was time-saving and labour-saving. But an employer needed to go into negotiations with a recruitment consultant knowing what it wanted and expecting responsiveness, attention to detail and delivery to its brief. “We go into the negotiation knowing exactly what we want, when we want it and what the components of competency required are,” she said.

Abacus’s Mr Marshall said the internet was playing an increasing role in executive recruitment. IT and other “skills-based” professionals, he said, had embraced the concept of downloading their resumes into a recruitment firm’s website and received e-mails when positions matching their experience were found.