I've been recruiting since 2005, and in that time I've worked with some businesses that are genuinely very good at recruitment.

I've also worked with plenty of very good businesses that aren't particularly good at recruiting people.

There's a difference.

Usually it isn't because they're doing anything deliberately wrong. They're busy. Recruitment becomes a priority when somebody resigns, a project gets awarded, the pipeline improves or someone suddenly realises they needed another Senior CA about three weeks ago.

So the phone call goes out to a recruiter.

"Who have you got?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question, but it's probably the wrong place to start.

If finding the best person for every vacancy was simply a case of checking which candidates happened to be "on the books" that week, recruitment would be considerably easier than it is.

And there's another part employers sometimes overlook. I might have five outstanding candidates in my network who could technically do your job. That doesn't mean any of them want to work for you.

They might not know your business particularly well. They may have heard something they don't like. They might perceive your projects, culture, pipeline or leadership as being below the level of opportunity they're looking for. Their perception might even be completely wrong, but until somebody changes it, it's still their perception.

Recruitment isn't just finding somebody who can do the job. With the better candidates, quite often the harder part is getting them interested in doing it for you.

Sometimes timing works beautifully and I already know exactly the right person. Lovely when it happens. Most of the time, good recruitment requires an actual recruitment process.

So, if I was sitting on the employer side of the table, here's how I'd approach it.

For an important hire, don't just send the vacancy to whichever recruiters happen to email you that morning. Meet them and qualify them in much the same way you'd qualify any other professional adviser representing your business.

Ask which employers they genuinely recruit for in your market.

Then ask an even better question:

"Which of those businesses won't you recruit people from for me?"

If they tell you they recruit heavily for three of your main competitors but they'll happily headhunt their employees for you, I'd be asking myself what they'll eventually do to your business once you become a client.

Alternatively, if those companies are genuinely off limits, can the recruiter still access enough of the remaining market to deliver what you need?

That's a strategic decision worth understanding before you engage them.

Ask how they'll actually find the person too. If the answer is "our database", keep asking.

How large is it? How is it searched? How current is the information? How do they identify the relevant people? What happens when the obvious candidates aren't interested? Do they actively headhunt?

Then test their knowledge.

If you're recruiting a Senior CA, ask what they think differentiates a good Senior CA from a Project Manager. Ask what $130k gets you compared with $170k. Ask about moving somebody from head contracting into client-side PM. Ask what they'd expect a Construction Manager to be responsible for versus a Project Director.

They don't need to know how to build the hospital themselves. That would be asking a bit much.

They do need to understand the person who can.

Experience matters here too. There's nothing wrong with a recruiter who's been doing the job for 12 months. They might have fantastic energy and work incredibly hard. But don't expect them to have the network, pattern recognition and market knowledge of somebody who's successfully recruited the same industry for 10, 15 or 20 years.

Recruitment has a fairly brutal attrition rate because, despite appearances, it's hard work. (There's plenty of talk across the recruitment industry suggesting that as many as 80% of new recruiters leave within their first two years, so it can't be that easy.) The people who've stayed in the industry and remained successful for a long time have normally done so for a reason.

Contingent recruitment, or no placement, no fee, absolutely has its place. I do plenty of it myself.

But understand the economics.

Give the same vacancy to four recruiters and each starts with, theoretically, a one-in-four chance of being paid.

They'll initially call the obvious candidates. People who've recently applied for jobs, contacted them, updated their Seek profile or told them they're open to moving. Then they'll move into their database, LinkedIn network and black book of contacts.

Interestingly, I've deliberately moved away from some of the tools that make those "obvious" candidates easier to identify. I stopped using LinkedIn Recruiter around six months ago. One of its major benefits is being able to identify people who've indicated they're open to opportunities, but that's also available to every other recruiter paying for the same tool. Inevitably, everyone starts fishing in the same pond.

I'm also becoming much more selective about when I advertise on Seek. I still advertise some vacancies, particularly at the junior and intermediate end or when I deliberately want to expand my network within a particular discipline, but for senior appointments I increasingly prefer to search the market directly.

Because having access to 58,000 people in a database, or identifying 100 CAs on LinkedIn who could theoretically do a job, isn't particularly useful on its own.

The recruitment skill is working out which 20 or 30 genuinely warrant approaching, who else should be included that doesn't immediately appear obvious, and then having the conversations that eventually identify the four or five people who can do the job, suit the business and actually want the opportunity.

That's the bit I think sometimes gets lost when people talk about recruitment technology.

Finding a name is increasingly easy. Understanding whether the person behind that name is right for your particular business, then questioning, persuading and influencing them sufficiently to consider leaving a job they may be perfectly happy in, is considerably harder.

And once three or four recruiters are working the same vacancy, those obvious candidates quickly start hearing:

"You're the third person to call me about this."

That's normally when enthusiasm for the assignment begins to disappear.

The recruiter can spend another twenty hours mapping and headhunting the market, knowing three other businesses are doing something similar and only one gets paid, or invest those twenty hours somewhere they've got a much better chance of generating a return.

Recruiters have mortgages too, unfortunately.

This doesn't excuse poor recruitment. Sending CVs without permission, failing to properly qualify candidates or deliberately cutting corners isn't acceptable.

But the recruitment model absolutely influences behaviour.

For me, contingent recruitment remains perfectly sensible for many junior and intermediate appointments, particularly where the candidate pool is reasonably broad.

As the salary, scarcity or strategic importance increases, I'd increasingly look at exclusivity. Once you're making a $200k-plus leadership appointment, I'd struggle to understand why you wouldn't at least consider retained search with a recruiter you've properly qualified.

The last bit is important.

Retaining the wrong recruiter doesn't magically turn them into a good recruiter. You've simply committed yourself to the wrong person.

Pick somebody tried and tested who understands the market, role and candidate audience, then give them the time to do the job properly.

Retained search doesn't magically create better candidates either. What it creates is commitment and time.

Time to map the market properly, interview people, undertake background checks, understand motivations and compare candidates rather than racing to submit the first credible CV.

It allows the recruiter to meet somebody and think, "They're good, but before I present them, I'm going to see if I can find somebody better."

It also gives them room to introduce somebody who perhaps doesn't exactly match your original specification but, once assessed properly, could offer something even more valuable to your business.

We're recruiting human beings, after all. Not cars with fixed horsepower, boot space, safety ratings and a specification sheet.

The same person can perform very differently depending on the manager, team, project, culture and environment around them.

That's why judgement matters.

This might be slightly controversial, but if I was recruiting an important person into my own business, this is what I'd do.

I'd choose the recruiter I thought was best equipped to fill it, agree the process and say:

"It's yours. You've got four weeks. Show me what you can do."

Agree communication, expected shortlist and timescales beforehand. If they don't perform against what you've agreed, move on.

We do this everywhere else in the built environment.

You don't appoint three architects to independently design different sections of the same building and hope everything joins together nicely at the end. You don't appoint three builders to simultaneously build different parts of the same tower.

Yet employers routinely give one vacancy to three or four recruitment businesses and inadvertently create something remarkably similar.

I've recently seen a Senior PM vacancy where several recruiters have been approaching largely the same candidate market. Each has been given slightly different information by different people within the employer. Nothing wildly inaccurate, just subtle differences.

Candidates hear about the same opportunity several times, with slightly different stories, and suddenly start wondering why everyone is recruiting it.

Instead of creating more interest, you've potentially made a perfectly good opportunity look problematic.

This is the other problem with "Who have you got?"

It assumes recruitment is largely about availability.

It isn't.

I could have an excellent Project Manager who's delivered exactly the projects you're building, lives twenty minutes from your office, has the right salary expectations and is somebody I'd happily recommend.

Perfect.

Except they don't want to work for you.

That's not me being rude about your business. It's simply the reality of a candidate market. Every employer has a reputation and every candidate has a perception of that reputation.

Sometimes the perception is accurate. Sometimes it's five years out of date. Sometimes it's based on one former employee they know. Sometimes they simply know very little about you.

That's where a good recruiter should earn their money.

Why should this person meet you? What's changed in the business? Who will they work for? What projects are coming? Where could their career go? Why might something they've heard previously no longer be relevant?

The recruiter needs to understand your story well enough to credibly tell it, without simply saying whatever they think will get the candidate through the door.

This is one of the simplest things in the entire recruitment process to fix, and it can genuinely save days.

I'll send a candidate across and quite often receive an email back saying:

"Looks good, let's arrange an interview."

Excellent. I'm awesome. Everyone's excited.

There's just one fairly important piece of information missing.

When?

So I'll email back asking when you're available. Maybe I'll call. By then you've run into a meeting, gone to site, been dragged into another problem or simply got on with your day. Completely understandable.

I don't hear back until tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've called the candidate. They tell me they can do tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday morning. I send those options back to the employer.

No response.

Eventually the employer replies:

"Can't do either of those. What about Thursday or Friday?"

Back to the candidate we go.

Something that should have taken one phone call has now become three or four days of emails, calls and diary tennis.

Candidates are generally more flexible around interviews than senior hiring managers are, particularly when they want the opportunity. So if you want to meet somebody, make your first response:

"Looks good. I'd like to meet them. I can do tomorrow between 2pm and 4pm, Wednesday before 10am or Thursday afternoon."

Now I can call the candidate once and, in many cases, have the interview confirmed within minutes.

Why does that matter?

Because every unnecessary day creates recruitment risk.

That candidate might have been completely passive when I first approached them. But once they've decided they're prepared to consider leaving, their mindset changes. They're more likely to return another recruiter's call, consider another employer or start looking at what else is available.

Three or four days spent organising your diary is three or four days in which somebody else can appear, interview them and potentially even offer them a job before you've met them.

Even in a quieter employment market, the best people usually have options.

Playing hard to get might occasionally work in dating. I'm less convinced it's a great talent strategy.

If I'm trying to find five candidates genuinely capable of doing your job, I might need to personally interview ten and speak with considerably more.

So if I send somebody who's slightly off target, tell me why.

"Not enough hospital experience."

"Technically good, but I need somebody who's managed a larger team."

"Closer, but I think we need stronger front-end experience."

That's useful. I can recalibrate my search.

Silence tells me nothing, and importantly, I still have a candidate waiting for an answer. Eventually I have to tell them:

"I haven't heard back, so I'm assuming they're not progressing."

Whether you intended it or not, that's now part of that candidate's experience of your employer brand.

Feedback should work the other way too.

A good recruiter should tell you what they're hearing. Maybe the salary is light. Perhaps candidates don't understand the progression. Maybe your supposedly brilliant opportunity isn't resonating with the market in the way either of us expected.

That's recruitment intelligence.

Backdoor references happen constantly in construction and property because everybody seems to know everybody.

They can be incredibly useful.

They can also be incredibly misleading.

If somebody tells you a candidate wasn't particularly good when they worked together four years ago, that's information worth considering. It isn't necessarily evidence of who that candidate is today.

People develop. Circumstances change. Sometimes good employees have poor managers. Sometimes two perfectly reasonable people simply don't get along.

There's another element to this that anyone who's recruited construction for long enough will recognise.

Most experienced recruiters could probably name a handful of managers in the industry who seem to give negative feedback on almost everybody who leaves them. I'm certainly not going to name anybody here, obviously, but you learn over time that some references need considerably more context than others.

Some managers have very high opinions of their own capability and considerably lower opinions of anyone who didn't thrive under them. They can be difficult characters, lacking in emotional intelligence or empathy, and sometimes they're simply not particularly good at developing people.

When an employee leaves, their interpretation can become:

"They weren't good enough."

"They couldn't handle the environment."

"They weren't capable."

Maybe.

But perhaps the environment wasn't particularly good either.

That's the bit worth investigating.

I've seen candidates receive fairly damning feedback from a former manager and then go on to build excellent careers with larger, highly regarded organisations. At some point you have to question whether the original assessment of that person was entirely accurate.

Sometimes people give bad references because their ego doesn't easily allow for another possibility:

Maybe the employee didn't fail the manager. Maybe the manager failed the employee.

That doesn't make every disgruntled former employee right either. We're all human, and every story normally has two sides.

But good referencing is about collecting evidence, not finding somebody you know, asking "What do you reckon of him?" and treating the answer as gospel.

If three or four credible people who've worked with somebody across different businesses and different periods of their career independently identify the same problem, now you've got a pattern.

One opinion is a data point. Several consistent opinions are evidence worth taking considerably more seriously.

And there's probably a small management lesson buried in this too. If absolutely everyone who leaves your team was useless, difficult, disloyal or couldn't hack it.....well, eventually there is one common denominator worth considering.

If you're reading that thinking I might be talking about you, I'm probably not.

Probably.

I've heard recruiters described as a "necessary evil" plenty of times over the years.

To be fair, I've also met enough recruiters to understand where the expression came from.

But if you genuinely believe people are one of the most important parts of your business, surely the people you engage to find those people deserve a reasonably diligent selection process too.

Find recruiters who understand your market. Meet them. Question them. Set expectations. Agree how candidates will be represented. Tell them if other recruiters are involved. Give them feedback and expect feedback in return.

Then hold them accountable.

If they send CVs without candidate permission, don't accept it. If they don't understand your vacancy, challenge them. If you've agreed they'll update you weekly and they disappear for three weeks, that's not the service you agreed.

And if they're rubbish, stop using them.

But if they're good, give them enough information, feedback and commitment to actually do a good job for you.

A recruiter is often the first person explaining your business to somebody you desperately want to attract. For that conversation, they're effectively an extension of your employer brand.

Choose accordingly.

After more than 20 years doing this, I keep coming back to that same conclusion.

A good recruitment process doesn't guarantee every candidate will accept, every search will be easy or nobody will ever change their mind. We're dealing with human beings, so that would be a brave promise.

But there is a lot an employer can control.

Choose the right recruiter. Test their knowledge rather than accepting the word "specialist" on their LinkedIn profile. Understand how they're actually going to search your market. Choose a recruitment model appropriate to the importance of the hire. Give them a proper brief. Respond when they find somebody good. Make interviews easy to arrange. Give feedback. Listen to what they're learning from the market and hold them accountable for what they've promised to deliver.

And perhaps most importantly, remember that access to candidate data is becoming easier for everybody. LinkedIn, Seek, databases and increasingly AI can help identify people.

That's not the difficult bit anymore.

The difficult bit is working out who you should actually speak to, understanding whether they're genuinely capable, building enough trust for them to have an honest conversation, getting somebody who wasn't looking yesterday interested in your business today, and then determining whether putting that particular human being into your particular environment is likely to make both sides better.

That's recruitment.

And if your employees genuinely are one of the most important parts of your business, I'd suggest the process used to find them, and the people you entrust to represent you while doing it, probably deserves a bit more consideration than simply asking:

"Who have you got?"