As anyone who has followed the Team Prime journey will know, I have been and continue to be against commission based recruiting. I’ve written about it many times over the last few years:
- 26th Jan 2013 Retained vs commission – what’s the difference?
- 1st Oct 2013 An attempt to discourage commission based recruiting
- 18th Feb 2015 Why commission based recruiting is inherently flawed, and two ways you can fix it
- 3rd Jun 2015 Team Prime no longer offering commission based recruitment services
So why am I re-introducing it?
Well, for the same reason I decided to stop. Two years ago, almost to the day I made the decision to stop as we were getting more and more clients wanting one-off hires, not team builds which was always what Team Prime was about from inception: building teams, not working as traditional recruitment agency (putting bums on seats without any strategic input). So stopping commission based work was a way of both differentiating ourselves as non-traditional recruiters and also making sure we were commissioned ourselves for the “right” type of work: team building on retainer, strategic work on day rate, consultancy by the hour.
Over the last two years since making that decision, not much has changed. We’re still approached on a weekly basis to work as a “traditional” recruitment agency by businesses and organisations. I’ve changed our business model a couple of times in that period to try and accommodate that without commission, but the fact is that companies do not see value in paying for recruitment work unless there is “success”: success being a hire. So if we take on work and make a placement, they’re over the moon – our consultancy costs are a fraction of commission fees. If we don’t supply a person who is then hired it doesn’t matter how useful the strategic work was, we didn’t “succeed”.
I have fundamental issues with that as a statement, because often the reasons companies struggle to hire has nothing to do with the people they could hire but is in fact due to their processes or people involved in or running the recruitment process. So for me, success is based on unblocking the problems and fixing the recruitment process, so that recruitment can happen easily and inclusively.
However, as a service led business, we need to offer what’s in demand. Two years into my experiment to see if recruitment business models can be changed I’m now fairly sure they can’t be – at least, not by a micro business like ours. Traditional recruitment expectations serve the business-ego narrative better: the idea that the problem is supply, not that the internal process or offering needs adjusting.
So! We will now accept commission based recruitment requests again alongside our team building work and consultancy. We will not promise to fill your role, or request exclusivity. We will not send you tens of people who don’t fit, just one or two we believe will – if we know them or find them. If we don’t have anyone, we will let you know within a week.
You can apply for us to consider your role on commission using our new form you can find here. We will let you know within 24hrs if we accept your brief and will find people for you.
As always, we only serve companies and organisations making the world a better place, or in the very least, not worse.
You can find all our services: consultancy, and people finding, here on our Services page.