Ineptitude of financial recruitment firms

1929 Bentley Speed Six. Photo Credit: Flickr/Anton van Luijk

A few weeks ago I did a little experiment on one of my favourite financial sites efinancialcareers.co.uk. 

Anyone who follows the financial sector will have noticed by now that social media as a communication tool for financial services and banks is taking off in a big way in 2014 (yes, yes I know they are late to the party) so I searched for finance jobs that required social media skills. 

I did the obvious thing and put into the search box the term “Social Media” and lo and behold 24 jobs came up. These types of digital strategy and social media related roles are on the increase, but that isn’t the point of this article.

Now is when it gets interesting, so pay attention.

Out of those 24 jobs 9 were via a recruiting firm. This means that the firm doing the actual hiring (the place where the lucky chosen candidate ends up working) has outsourced the search for the ideal candidate to a recruitment firm.

It is therefore the job of the recruitment firm to sift through the CVs do the initial interviews and basically find out what’s what, who’s who and if all the rivets are attached correctly and sufficiently lubricated.

So with that I looked up the 9 recruiting firms to see how well they are doing on social media. I was in for a bit of a surprise. Only 4 of them where on social media.

I then looked them all up and of those 4 only one actually regularly tweeted and engaged (congratulations Morgan McKinley). One started tweeting only a week ago, one is a spammer just tweeting newsletter links with the default twitter egg logo and one is asleep at the wheel having tweeted sometime last year. 

Here is the full list:

1. Morgan Mckinley                     On Twitter, active and engages
   
2. Randstad Hong Kong              On Twitter
   
3. TFPL                                           On Twitter
   
4. Emerald Group Australia        On Twitter
   
5. EMR                                            Some employees on Twitter
6. Stephen Bell Associates          Not on Twitter
   
7. Mason Blake                             Not on Twitter
   
8. Gresham Search                      Not on Twitter
9. Paragon Executive                   Not on Twitter
   

If you stop to think about this for a minute. Financial services companies are employing recruitment firms who have zero, zilch, nada, bupkis, experience in social media to find them experts on social media. Doesn't really fill you with a sense of confidence, does it?

This is like paying Fred from down the road to find you the perfect mechanic to restore your classic Bentley because Fred knows how to put petrol in his own car.

My mind is going bogglewoggle at the very thought of it.

This brings me to my point. To be ahead of the game at social media takes skill, understanding and experience. If you want to use social media to gain clients and show the world what a jolly wonderful company you are, you need a certain amount of savvy and understanding of social media plumbing to really be successful. That's why you need a recruiter who knows social media, otherwise it's a waste of money.

I can guarantee that most of those jobs I found in my search will end up being filled by an inept candidate, thanks to an inept management, employing an inept recruiting firm. If you need any examples of the damage an inept social media team can do, just go #AskJPM



(If you're interested in a career in private banking and wealth management you'll want to read my previous article on getting your first job in private banking. Click here).