You’re a hiring manager. Your problem is that you frequently receive the same candidate’s CV from two or more recruitment agencies.

You currently deal with it by either opting to go with the first agency to send the CV, or you bin the candidate and take him or her from neither recruiter.

You’re not dealing with it right. Your real problem is that you’re working with too many bad agencies.

A bad agency doesn’t screen their candidates properly. A bad agency doesn’t disclose their client’s name. A bad agency throws resumes around in the hope that some will get snapped up.

Perhaps you’re working with only one bad agency. One bad agency can poison your whole recruitment process.

A candidate represented by a bad agency doesn’t know which end client is looking at his CV. He can’t give this information to a good agency when they ask his or her permission to represent them for your vacancy.

A bad agency can send you five resumes within ten minutes. But they can’t talk to five candidates in ten minutes to qualify and screen them properly for your company. If you opt for a “first-come first-served” solution, you may not be doing the jobseekers any favours. And if you bin the application, everybody loses out.

Here’s how you solve this problem:

Insist that every CV you receive from your recruitment agency is accompanied by an email from the candidate concerned, giving the agency specific, express permission to be represented by the agency for the role in question, with your company named as the end-client.

All agencies should be doing this anyway. In some places it’s a legal requirement, and in every place, it’s common courtesy.

You, as a client of  a recruitment companies, can help raise standards with this small step. You won’t receive any duplicate CVs ever again.

The company you work for has a website. Even if it doesn’t have any bells and whistles, it’s an online calling card: a business card with a mission statement and contact details.

Recruitment consultants change jobs regularly. You’re unlikely to stay with one company for your entire career. You need your own online calling card.

You’ve got a CV, and you’ve got a LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn profile will give you some visibility.

But you really, really want to own your own domain name.

Personally, I don’t run this website as a vanity tool, I run it as a professional tool. Googling “recruitment brussels” gets you here within two clicks.

How much is your own online presence worth? If it wins you business or gets you a job, it has to be worth thousands.

If you’re ever toying with starting out on your own, it’s almost indispensable.

Setting up your own website can be daunting. If you don’t know where to start, my web-friend and general genius Johnny B Truant (yes, really) will set you up for a one-off fee of $39.

You’ll be responsible for the hosting fees (about 10 dollars a month in my case, less than two drinks), but he’ll have you hitting the ground running, with your own website/blog and hosting and a bit more, within a couple of days max.

If you can send an email, or muck around with a Word document, you can manage your own website. And you’re likely to be wealthier and more visible as a direct result.

$39 is the kind of money that you drop on a round of drinks, if you’re like any all of the recruiters I know. By getting your own web-presence NOW, you’re setting yourself up for future opportunities, starting tomorrow.

Click here to get started, and you’ll have your own website within a few days.

Even if you’ve got nothing to say today, you can start to drive business your way by virtue of sticking your contact details online.

“Thinkers think and doers do”, and if you’ve been thinking about getting a web-presence, which you probably have, now is not a bad time to get doing.

(Incidentally, if you’re not a recruiter, but a nurse, or a DJ, or a part-time poet, or an aspiring astronaut, you could do a lot worse than take advantage of this as well.)

Margin and markup are different.

As a recruiter, if your buying price is 400, and your selling price is 500, that’s a difference of 100.

100 is a 20% margin, and a 25% markup.

100 is 20% of the selling price, and 25% of the buying price.

Clients and candidates are interested in your margin.

Which has the added advantage of being the lower figure.

This is the equivalent of just more than one book a month for a year.  Read, apply, and get better at your job.

• Cold Calling for Chickens
• Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work!
• Cold Calling: Cig (Complete Idiot’s Guides)
• Cold Calling for Cowards – How to Turn the Fear of Rejection Into Opportunities, Sales, and Money
• Cold Calling for Women: Opening Doors and Closing Sales
• Secrets Of Successful Telephone Selling
• Conquering Cold-Calling Fear Before and After the Sale
• Easy Step by Step Guide to Telemarketing, Cold Calling and Appointment Making:
  
• How to Win More Business Through the Telephone
• Selling by Telephone: From Cold Calling to Hot Profit
• Dead Guys Don’t Buy: A Winner’s Guide to Cold Calling Live Prospects Successfully
• 42 Rules of Cold Calling Executives: A Practical Guide
• The Telesales Pocketbook

Read and grow!

A piece in this week’s Bulletin magazine, and they interview some “recruitment expert”.

Waking up early has been a goal since I started goal-setting. I’m not a consistently early-riser, and it frustrates me.

I find it frustrating because the mornings are, for me, the best time for getting things done. In terms of productivity and drive, there’s nothing like being fully dressed, showered and fed, with another two hours before I’m due in the office.

That time is largely spent tying up loose ends, paying bills, reading,  writing, and, often, just drinking coffee and thinking.

(In an ideal world, of course, there’s no coffee, and it’s an hour of exercise and deep-breathing, but one step at a time.)

So, more as a reminder for me than a resource for you, the definitive guide, courtesy of the internets, to getting out of bed and carpe-ing diem, full of vim and gusto.

How to Become an Early Riser by Steve Pavlina

The original for the life-hacking community, dating from almost four years ago. A long post, summed up in the final sentence: “Go to bed only when you’re too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning.”

Steve followed up on this with another piece, in which he addressed the need to give up caffeine intake and the reasons for getting up early:

I’d say the main reason is that you’ll have a lot more time to do things that are more interesting than sleeping

Keeping the bandwagon rolling, he went on to write close to two and a half thousand words on how to get up as soon your alarm clock goes off, making him far more eloquent, commited, and verbose than I will ever be.

How I Became an Early Riser by Leo Baubata

The inspirational Leo Baubata of Zen Habits writes clearly and simply on how he gets up early and then expatiates on his morning routine.

He mentions that watching the morning dawn is beautiful, calm and peaceful. Maybe. Perhaps on Guam. But in Brussels it’s more grey and wet, and filled with police sirens and garbage trucks.

[Edit, seems there's more: 10 benefits of rising early and how to do it - includes prize for best use of aspirational word: "quietude"]

How to Wake Up Early dot com – does what it says on the tin

A blog devoted to the army of well-meaning sloths. Entries of varying quality, from “Ask someone who wakes up early to wake you up” to “Use multiple alarm clocks“.

Nothing if not common sense.

Becoming an Early Riser by Dave Navarro

And if you’re serious and can apply yourself, this could be money well spent. It seems that there really is a market out there for books and audio-sessions on getting out of bed and making your day longer, and you’ve got the internet and its long tail to thank for that.

I’ve not tried this yet. But I’ll be pleased to hear from those who have. Naomi Dunford, of Ittybiz.com fame, says it’s “extremely accessible, cheap, and insanely practical. It’s about making a couple of tiny changes and capitalizing on your momentum to make monumental change“.

… and another tool for your CV-writing kit.

Guy Kawasaki makes decisions about people, as an employer and an investor. He’s endorsing the advice of Glen Kelman – CEO of Redfin. His advice is a comprehensive overview of how to write a CV.

1. Verbs ending in “d”: shipped, launched, built, sold.
2. Results: not responsibilities or experience — but what responsibilities and experience helped you accomplish.

And his take on the length of your CV? “Two pages, max. If you’re under 30, one page.”

Read the whole post, and bookmark it.

If you don’t know who you need to speak to, say exactly that.

“My name’s Bob and I’d like to become a supplier, but I don’t know who I need to speak to. Can you help me out, so I won’t need to bother you again.”

and if you’re speaking to the right person for the first time, don’t waste anyone’s time:

“My names Bob and I’m a recruiter. I’m phoning to sell you something, unless you tell me that’s a bad idea, in which case I promise I won’t sell you anything today. I would, however, be grateful for any pointers for the future.”

An astute look at ten archetypes of recruitment consultants from the always interesting Andy Headworth at Sirona Consulting:

9. The Order Taker: I hate them! They phone up and say (exactly),” Have you got any vacancies today?” then you say “no”, and they reply, “Ok then, goodbye”. They need to be put down – they are not recruitment consultants!!

Read the whole list over at Sirona Says

Your CV belongs to you. The data in your CV belong to you. You alone can choose who you want to share your CV with.

The agency wants to send your CV to a client company of theirs, and thinks you’d be “great for the role”, and “is certain” they can get you an interview, and has “never met a better candidate”, and “will buy you a beer” when they see you next.

But they won’t tell you the name of their client.

Time to find a new agency.

There is no good reason to withhold this information. There are plenty of bad reasons – you’ll cut us out of the loop, you’ll get another agency to represent you, you’ll tell your friends who’ll go directly to the client – but not a single good one. It all comes down to trust, and the question of whether you can trust an agency that doesn’t trust you.

No recruiter likes to hear  “I’ve already received this CV from another agency”. A lot of hiring managers bin any CV received from two different sources, which puts you out of the picture altogether.

And even worse, there are agencies out there that send your CV off for open roles without even telling you that much.

The key frustration for me, from a recruiter’s viewpoint, is that even though we’re offering full disclosure, and even if 90% of other recruitment companies are, it only takes one agency to “do the dirty” to make it look like none of us are doing our jobs properly. CV arrives twice, therefore recruitment agencies aren’t screening their candidates properly.

We had a case like this last week. Our candidate was dropped from the running after the client received his application from two sources. We had written authorisation to represent the jobseeker at the named client. The candidate hadn’t spoken to the other agency in eight weeks, and they’d never mentioned roles in Belgium, let alone with the company in question.

The market’s pretty tough at the moment, and we’re seeing more and more dirty tricks, but this is one that’s dressed up as “company policy” far too often.

As a jobseeker, insist on this information. Don’t expect it until the end of your conversation with the recruiter, but make sure you get it then. It will save you heartache, and put the pressure on the non-compliant to get their acts together.