Big ad campaign to attract recruiters

Sunday Business Post - Recruitment - June 24 2007

Recruitment agency HRM has launched a €100,000 advertising campaign to source 30 new recruitment consultants for its HRM Executive Recruitment and Top People divisions.

The 'Standing Out' campaign will include the website www.StandingOut.ie, press advertisements and ads placed on commuter boards on the DART and LUAS lines in Dublin. It will run for an initial four-week period and will be repeated at intervals over the next year.

"Really good recruiters are extremely difficult to find,” said HRM managing director Michael O’Leary. “They are highly skilled people, and they do not always know that. Wherever they are working right know they are not necessarily in a position to apply the inherent traits that they have.”

O’Leary said that in the recruitment world professional qualifications and experience were not always the most relevant requirements.

"One of the assumptions that people have is that you have to come from a HR background to work in recruitment and that is not the case at all,” he said. “Recruitment is a very different type of career than HR. Wherever possible, we look for people from the sectors in which they are going to be recruiting. For example we like our accountancy recruiters to be coming from accountancy backgrounds, our IT people to be qualified or have worked in IT."



O’Leary said that relationship building is now key to business success in the recruitment sector.

"If you look back at the late nineties the recruitment industry in Ireland grew on the back of an extremely rapid job creation period, largely but not exclusively in ICT,” he said.

“When those jobs began to disappear the industry went through quite a shakeout. Today the dynamic of growth is very different, and at its core it is a change in behaviour in the customer. Companies are far more likely to look to a supplier with whom they have a relationship when they are looking to recruit talent."

The recruitment environment in Ireland is now very similar to that in Britain.

"It is becoming much more like the UK market where virtually everybody works in some form of partnership with a recruitment company," said O'Leary.

"Most of the larger organisations annually put out bids for their recruitment and the recruiters work far more up the food chain than ten years ago. Right from when the vacancy has been identified they help to shape what the role can be, agree a path to get that filled and work right through the process."

"We are working on understanding the needs of our customers, in terms of additional support post the placement, providing the client with data on the marketplace and their competitors, predicting likely vacancies in the future and making the recruitment process much smoother for the client."

O'Leary founded HRM in 1992. It employs 80 people at its offices in Dublin and it operates across two distinct brands, HRM Executive Recruitment and and Top People.

"HRM is very much an executive recruiter," said O'Leary. "We try and build relationships with companies so we can fill all of their mid to senior management needs. Top People is a business that we bought a couple of years ago and re-branded. It is an office and commercial support business that also works in retail and hospitality.”

O’Leary said that HRM generally works in the salary band from €40,000 up to €200,000 and Top People fills positions with annual salaries in the €25,000 to €60,000 range.

O’Leary said the career development of HRM staff was a key business objective for the company.

"We have a formal career planning path, which is fairly unique in class," said O'Leary. "New people coming into the business initially learn lifelong value skills in negotiating, influencing, judgement and customer relationship building. We are rolling out specific career development paths in people management, account customer management and high end search and selection and supporting each vein with specific training modules."

O’Leary said a strategic review of HRM’s business was undertaken in 2003, which led the company to re-evaluate its internal processes and prepare for the expansion which is currently under way.

"We worked out that if we were to grow in a truly differentiated way we needed to behave like a big business,” he said. “In the last 12 months we have restructured the business into functional support areas and are now putting the business managers at the centre of everything we do. Every functional resource supports the business managers, whether in customer acquisition, marketing, finance, business systems, customer relationship building or HR."

HRM operates in all sectors of the Irish labour market. It has eleven selection teams, each concentrating on a particular area.

"We would be very interested in taking HRM as a brand to Scotland and maybe some of the smaller cities within England,” said O’Leary. “We think Top People is the business to look towards Eastern Europe."

Plans are already in place to expand the Top People brand in Ireland.

“We are now opening up Dublin North in three months time and Dublin South in the new year,” he said. “We have appointed a separate MD, Raelene Pugh, whose target is to take it to a seven branch network by end of 2009."