We don’t often blog about ‘our’ industry, by that I mean the recruitment industry. We prefer to talk about marketing and industry events as it’s usually a lot more interesting.

However, I felt compelled to write a short tome along the lines of the Direct Line advertising extolling the virtues of not being on price comparison websites. Direct Line’s argument is that they offer a superior service to other insurers and, by not being on the price comparison sites, can pass on more competitive rates to their customers.  Take a look at their most recent advert.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC9z2KJoOw&fs=1&hl=en_GB]

As an aside I think Direct Line have somewhat missed the point here, certainly from my experience at least. As the vast majority of people don’t ever claim on their insurance and, as their policy rates are often significantly higher than the market average, I am not sure that the levels of customer service or their pricing strategy necessarily works in their favour.

However, I was mulling over an equivalent phenomenon in the world of recruitment and specifically for us, marketing recruitment. The landscape has changed significantly over the past 3 years or so. Where previously the market was led by a smaller number of specialists in marketing recruitment such at BetterPlaced, EMR and ourselves, we now find that our competition has become far more generic and recruitment consultants will claim to be ‘specialists’ in everything. In addition the market has fragmented wildly, much the same as the marketing agency sector across the UK. Many people have been either made redundant and started up on their own as freelance consultants or have proactively decided that the grass is greener and set up their own marketing agency.  In our business this equates to more marketing recruitment agencies.

In addition there are a number of businesses that claim to be able to do the same as traditional businesses such as ours, but on-line, agencybods and webcruit are examples.

What that has lead to is some of our clients or prospective clients suggesting we should all be working at the rates charged by one-man-bands or purely online businesses. This isn't going to work but we accept We have a job to do to explain why.  What we have to do as a business is justify where the difference is, and that, in our type of business is a tricky sell. You see, you kind of won’t know unless you’ve tried us.

What’s clear to me however is that we are in a completely different market to the one man band operators and purely on-line services. We have built a business over 15 years. We’ve built up resources, processes, experience that all combine to create a great service and the best candidates, not just the first ones you can find on Monster. It’s the intangible stuff too. Just take a look at this comment from one of our clients. In fact, take a look at any of them – there are some consistent themes. I know anyone can generate a few testimonials but these aren’t from our ‘mates’, they are from genuine clients who have experienced what it is like to work with Network Marketing.

So, if there’s anyone still reading at this point(...) I’d urge you to think about the type of businesses you are dealing with when discussing ‘value for money’. What we supply doesn’t come cheap. The people you will deal with at Network Marketing aren’t paid peanuts to process online applications. You are also dealing with real people.  We have proven for years that we deliver for our clients.

And finally, you won’t ever find us on a price comparison website.