A company gave Cody an assignment to find 10 trainees. A new company manager was appointed halfway through the process, who chose to cease the Cody assignment, but to honour the five appointments already made. The company went on to successfully recruit five additional staff.
Three months later all five Cody appointees were making good progress.
Of the company-appointed trainees, three had left and one of the remaining two was under review.
Interviews are a notoriously unreliable means of selecting staff. The “job” of the applicant is to convince you they desperately want the job whether they do or not. Before Cody had forwarded the CVs, they had taken the time to make it absolutely clear to candidates what the job entailed, what the drudge parts of Recruitment Consultancy were and what the joy parts of being a Recruitment Consultant were. The company had told their appointed trainees too but, just because you tell someone something, it does not mean they have taken it in. It takes time to communicate and Cody make that time.
The first law of economics according to Adam Smith is that specialists do a job better than generalists. Skills are developed that are not necessarily visible to the person watching the job being done. We can all make chairs, but how many of us do? We can all sing a little, but how many of us listen to our own music? It is possible to be extremely effective at selecting trainees if you do it most of the time. It is far more difficult to do it well if you do it once every three months when you have a hundred other things on your plate.
The cost of using Cody for each trainee would have been £2.5K.
The cost of a failed trainee is between £10 and £20k.
Forget the principle of “we can do this ourselves” – think economics and opportunity cost
