Tips to Help you in Choosing a Good Financial Recruitment Agency

Many companies are increasingly turning to recruitment agencies for their low to medium level – and sometimes even executive staffing needs. Most of the companies turning to recruitment agencies for their staffing needs are doing so in the spirit of outsourcing their non-core functions. The companies that turn to recruitment agencies in the spirit of outsourcing non-core functions normally engage the companies to help them ease the much sorting which is involved in the initial recruitment stages.

Other companies are turning to recruitment agencies in a bid to get the very best professionals in the various fields. In this aspect, employers are acting on the knowledge that recruitment agencies receive more resumes (as they are ever in ‘recruitment mode’), have more time to go through the numerous resumes (since it’s the agencies’ core business), and know what to look for in a particular field (as they are more in touch with the trends and developments in human resource management). In the case of top executives the recruitment agencies have the capacity to go head-hunting, even among competing companies without raising eyebrows and the animosity such head-hunting in a competitor’s backyard can raise if undertaken by the employers themselves.

One of the staffing areas where employers are increasingly turning to recruitment agencies is in finance. This means that people looking for jobs in finance are increasingly having to enlist with finance recruitment agencies to get their dream jobs. And due to increasing relevance of the finance recruitment agencies, many bogus financial recruitment agencies have also sprung up, to take advantage of gullible job seekers. So how is one to tell a good finance recruitment agency from a bogus one?

It is hard to tell for sure, but there are some things that can give you a hint.

1.     The industry reputation of the agency: You need to check out and find out what the industry reputation of the finance recruitment agency in question is. With the freedom of information that has become available through the Internet, this should not really be hard. You can, for example do a web-search with the name of the finance recruitment agency in question as the keyword, and see what information is available about them on the web, preferably in independent websites, that is, websites run by people who are beyond the influence of the recruitment agency in question.

2.     The Fees They Charge: The fees that a finance recruitment agency charges (if any) should compare favorably with the service they provide, rather than just with their (big) name. Many people make the mistake of paying a large fee to an established recruitment agency, without asking themselves what they are getting for their money.  In this respect, a finance recruitment agency that goes out of its way to properly market you to prospective employers who are likely to have some jobs in finance generally merits a higher fee than a recruitment agency which just files your resume – but then this varies from case to case.

3.     The Success Rate of the agency: The success rate of the finance recruitment agency in question is another factor you need to look at. If you are looking at a general recruitment agency, what is their success in finance recruitment? In looking at the success rate of any given recruitment agency in finance recruitment, you might for example go to an online recruitment forum, then go to the  financial recruitment section and see what past users of the particular financial recruitment agency have to say about it and how their general experience with the agency was. Of course opinion in such a forum is likely to vary, and there will inevitably be negative feedback even for the best recruitment agencies. Nevertheless, if all the feedback about a given agency seems to be on the negative, it might be a valid warning not to go in that direction.