your staffing companies talk to each other
Late this afternoon, nearly at closing time, we got a call from a professional contact of a recently-departed manager. It’s a manager at one of our competitors, calling to ask an awkward question and hoping we could help her out.
A client that she has been working with, a client who also works with us, has been trying to convince her that all the other agencies they worked with were letting talent convert for free with them after 90 days. “Well, [National Creative Staffing Firm] and [Major International Staffing Firm] let us have people for free after 90 days,” they said.
So this colleague was calling around to see if that was really true, and of course it is not. There’s no reason we should have to give away business like that in this market.
Let me be absolutely clear- there is a lot of competition in staffing, and a lot of rivalry between competing firms. But even with all that, any recruiter with half a brain knows better than to stand by while a client, ANY client, tries to devalue staffing services that way. If you bully my competitor into a free conversion, it makes it that much harder for me to stand up for my fee when I’m in that position, and I’m surely not going to cooperate with you in making my job harder.
What’s more? Creative/Interactive staffing in particular is a reeeeeally networked business, and chances are, if the person you’re dealing with has been in this field for any length of time, she knows people at all the similar agencies in town. It’s a very small community, and recruiters generally like to maintain cordial relationships with other recruiters. So while you might get away with that crap for a receptionist or an office manager, you’ll never get away with it on an art director. We WILL band together to protect our collective business.
So this colleague is heading back to the client for another meeting this week, at which she will say, “That’s so interesting, because I spoke with my friends at [NCSF] and [MISF], and I know that you were charged X for this person, and Y for this other person. So I think my fee is really quite reasonable, actually.”
Silly, silly client.