In this personal and insightful video about the recruitment industry, the founder of Caissa Global Konstanty Sliwowski explains his path into recruitment. The transcript of his video is below.
Full disclosure. When I got into recruitment what I actually had in mind was executive search. Little did I know the difference. It all seemed the same to me. I had been exposed to Executive Search through a close friend of my fathers who was a Partner at one of the big exec search firms and what he did seemed really cool. He literally knew all the top executives in my native city of Warsaw and they all came to talk to him. It seemed like a great career path where you have influence and respect.
So...I joined an IT recruitment firm in London thinking that it will be the same. Oh how wrong I was. I very quickly discovered the difference between executive search and the most common form of “English” style IT recruitment. I did not like it. It was extremely transactional. It was about getting CV’s out and getting “butts on seats” in the words of one of my first managers. Recruitment was not like executive search. It was volume driven and based on churn. It was opportunistic and not strategic. Send CV, push for interviews, place people. Hardly any quality control along the way.
This is not what I had signed up for and I doubt clients would either. No surprise then that recruitment had little respect as an industry and was not seen as a strategic partner by businesses. It brought little value aside from CV’s that were keyword matched. I found this hugely disappointing as I truly believe that people are the essence of a successful business and coming face to face with CV selling was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.
So I quit.
In fact, ever since, I have spent my career redesigning and rolling out a recruitment process that delivers real value and focuses on a companies biggest asset. The people. Both acquiring them and retaining them.
When you are hiring you need a hiring partner that will go out into the market and represent you as a business and engage the right talent on your behalf. You want a company that has deep experience in one area. The area that you are hiring in. You want a brain surgeon not a GP. And you want the best brain surgeon at that. You want to be provided with market insights, salary bechmarks and an up to date view of what the competition is hiring for. You don’t want to receive bucketloads of CV’s in the hope that something sticks. You don’t have time for that. You want to talk to the top 3-5 people locally who can do the job. You want someone to find them, attract them to your business and get them in to speak to you so that you can hire them. You want to be interested in every candidate you are presented with.
I know that when I am hiring for my team that is what I want. Don’t you want the same?
