Should SEO and PPC recruitment agencies be regulated?

I would like to qualify the below by saying there are also a lot of good SEO and PPC recruitment agencies in London.

Apologies for the following rant BUT;

At 4Ps Marketing the recruitment process is very simple we use our CRM system to track the sales funnel and estimate how many new employees we will need in the next few months to ensure we can manage the increases in workloads effectively.

When we identify the need for a new employee we contact our recruitment agency “Yellow Cat Recruitment”. They know us well and we can easily turn around a brief in the time we need. Added to this we have a very effective graduate scheme that on average results in 1 new employee per month.

So what is the problem?

I have no problem with SEO and PPC recruitment agencies calling the office and enquiring if we need a recruitment agency. This is how business is done and we are happy to have a polite conversation about how we are happy with our current provider. We all need to sell our services and being in an industry where many of our competitors have been accused of going over the top in the sales process I don’t want to sound hypocritical.

What is not acceptable is the 2 following practices that we encounter at least 5-10 times a day;

1) A recruitment agency lies to get through to decision makers in the company and attempts to pitch themselves as “not a recruitment agency”. Yes a company needs to position themselves in an industry but blatant lies to get a potential customers attentions is just shoddy.

2) Again a recruitment agent calls our employees in work time to offer them a job at another agency. Yes I understand we have the best employees in the WORLD (This is fact) and this will attract attention BUT contacting them in work time is not acceptable. Even today a recruitment agent called our office and tried to impersonate one of our clients to get through the operator!!

I understand that as in SEO there are good and bad agencies and the same is true with recruitment agencies BUT the levels that they stretch to is really causing resentment within our industry. I count many SEM directors within other agencies as my personal friends and they share the same experiences.

SEO had a bad name and as an agency we pitch all our strategies as long term and sustainable. Surely these practices are just short term and will come back to bite the SEM recruitment industry in the bum.

Happy to invite comment from any agencies that ensure their staff act in a professional way. Our recruitment agency are very professional and for that we reward them with exclusivity. Surely that is a good long term business model?

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