CheckMate

This is the third part of a series about whether you can trust recruiters, and the kind of questions you should ask or ask about recruiters to help make that determination. In Part 1, I gave an overview of the reasons behind the series and guidelines for working through it, and in Part 2 I discussed the market leading position that a recruiter might claim.

In this third installment, I want to address the number of recruiters a firm says they have:

• Does the firm claim to have a large number of recruiters, say, several hundred or more?

• If so, how does the number of recruiters claimed stack up against the industry standard, i.e., known leaders among executive recruiting firms? (For reference, the Lucas Group, perhaps the premier firm among executive recruiters and a place we’ve mentioned previously, says they have 400 associates.)

• Is the firm claiming part-time independent contract recruiters in their total, possibly in an apparent attempt to make the firm look bigger? There’s absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with contract recruiters, but what about claiming them all as members of your firm so you can advertise having a large number of people? How does that strike you?

• Are the names of all of the firm’s recruiters listed on their website?

• How many of the firm’s recruiters do you see with an online presence, e.g. job listings, on social networking sites, and so on? If a firm says they have several hundred recruiters, I’d expect to see some evidence of the majority of them online, not just five or ten of the same names. Do you?

• Does the company list national or division directors? Are those one-person divisions (i.e., the director), or are there actually teams of recruiters assigned to those divisions? Are the team members’ names listed on the firm’s site?

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