40% of Sky inhouse recruiters come from an agency background. Emma told me this week that she has noticed a huge increase in the number of recruiters contacting her about moving inhouse. We talked about some of the pros and cons for a third party recruiter thinking of moving over to the other side.
Pros
- You don't have to do business development anymore, there is no pressure of sales targets.
- More of a work life balance than at a typical agency - you don't have to work 8am to 8pm every day.
- Building long term relationships with line managers.
- Get to learn about a particular area and learn it inside and out.
- Gain a better commercial outlook, working closely with allocated business areas and getting a lot of access to senior people.
- All more longer term - you get to see the results of the hire.
- Full recruitment life cycle - start to finish.
- You are far closer to the direction of the business and often know about changes in strategy before a lot of the business does.
- Broader spread of activities on a daily basis.
- Selection process is more sophisticated.
- Chance to get involved in interesting projects such as redeveloping the careers website or devising new selection tools.
Cons
- From a salary perspective you can lose out although your base salary is higher. It's only at the more senior levels that it is on more of a par.
- If you work for a brand which isn't strong it can be a battle to attract candidates (not really a problem with Sky!).
After we spoke Emma sent me an email one of her team, Trishna, had written explaining why she made the move:
"Having worked in an FTSE 250 large recruitment agency, I made the decision after 2 years to make a move in-house. Working as a recruitment consultant within such an agency was a rigorous introduction in to the recruitment world, introducing you to the basics of the recruitment life-cycle, relationship management with both clients and candidates, and to the world of sales sales sales! Its very much target driven, it can be both enjoyable and rewarding, however is an aggressive environment, challenging your ability to develop business for the agency, and fill roles to increase revenue and margins!
In-house recruitment is a completely different ball game. Equally and increasingly challenging from a different angle. The transition isn’t easy, as you have to develop soft skills, and build upon your commercial awareness, thinking bigger picture. Working in-house in a company like Sky, is fast paced and ever changing, you become passionate about your brand, live the values and understand the business needs, as you work for them! This makes for a better recruiter, who can attract the best talent to fit with the business. We’re not just filling roles, and saving money for our organisation, but act as partners to the business to increase our talent pool, raise the profile of our employer brand, and play a pro active role in managing our employee base.
We work with different people every day, from planning with HR, to negotiating with line managers, to managing budgets with finance, and of course the fun bit, dealing with candidates, representing your company! My advice to any one interested in working in an in house recruitment function is to choose a sector/industry they have
a strong interest in working for, mine was Corporate Media, as if you don’t enjoy who you recruit for, the reward just isn’t there. You need to do your research, not only in to the company you wish to apply to work for, but around the team, and what the in house function is responsible for, for example, it is purely re-active, filling roles, or is it more strategic, and business focussed. Depending on what drives you, this should help you in finding that ideal role."
And another from another colleague, Dan, giving a few tips for agency recruiters:
"I think most agency recruiters would need to change their style and approach to work in-house. When you work in an agency your first objective is to make placements and money, so the approach is more aggressive. This style doesn’t work in-house as you need to look at the longer term effects of your actions and style. You cant afford to be aggressive with managers or risk placing bad people. So agency recruiters wanting to work in-house would do well to develop more consultative style, and be more prepared to listen to problems rather than push their candidates as much.."
And finally Emma mentioned that a lot of the CVs she is receiving from agency recruiters looking to move in-house tend to focus on the amounts billed and the number of placements. This is fine when applying for agency roles but for in-house you need to adapt your CV accordingly - focus on the relationship management and any innovative sourcing methods. If you’ve had exposure to competency based selection techniques then mention this too.
Julian Stopps has written an interesting blog post entitled "5 reasons every niche site should have a job board". It's a really good post and totally spot on. For years we resisted adding a job board to UK Recruiter for a variety of reasons which turned out to all be wrong (I may write about them another time). If Julian had written that blog post 18 months ago I'd have been in there like a shot. Luckily Colin at Brainhunter is equally expert in the field which is why we finally gave in and created the UK Recruiter Jobs site (and of course we use the Brainhunter solution to run it!).
Emma at Sky had got the results from this years’ Employment Value Proposition Survey when we spoke earlier in the week (you can read about the Corporate Leadership Council and what they do here: 
A while back we asked for your help (
This is from a press release I was sent earlier this week. Now the 
Back in April
I got sent this email the other day: "I have a friend who works as a recruiter who has a client that owes her a substantial fee but is not coughing up. Can you point her in the right direction for legal advice please"
I mentioned 
I was sent some research by 
The latest in 
We published a blog article from Maureen Sharib (a renowned American telephone names sourcer) recently on "
Jobsite
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