After hundreds of conversations with manufacturing and engineering MDs, the same patterns come up again and again. Here is what leaders say about recruiters, what they ask for, and what they turn out to need.
The complaint that comes up first
They send rubbish CVs. They do not understand the jobs. They do not care. And they do not even brief people properly before sending them over. That is the standard experience of recruitment for a lot of manufacturing leaders, and it is why so many have stopped trusting the industry.
What they say they want, and what they mean
Leaders say they want somebody who can understand what the roles are, understand the business, understand the culture and be part of it. All true. But dig deeper into the conversation and it usually turns out they need something completely different from what they approached us about in the first place.
That is why the discovery conversation matters more than the job spec. The vacancy is the symptom. The real question is what problem the business is trying to solve.
Speed or quality
Most leaders land somewhere in the middle, and they are right to. You need good quality, but within a timely fashion, because every minute that role is not filled it is costing the business money. Somebody else is covering the job, or it is not being done at all. Striking that balance is the actual skill.
What trust is built from
Some of these relationships have been built over donkey's years. Trust comes from understanding the business properly, getting leaders to talk about their challenges, the good and the bad, then placing good hires and following up on them to see how things are going. It is slow, and it compounds.
Partner, not supplier
The relationships that work do not feel like client and recruiter. They feel like a partner within the business. A leader can have a retention problem and not really understand what they need to bring in to fix it. A true recruitment partner, working exclusively rather than on retainers, gets under the skin of the business and understands what is happening inside it. That is more powerful, and more profitable, for the business.
The order-taker test
Recruiters should be consultative. If they are just order takers, they are not doing the job properly, and they should not be charging the fees they charge. A consultant understands the problems underneath the brief and flips things to solve the right one. It is much deeper than taking a job.
What changes when you commit to one recruiter
The leaders who have moved to working with Marshall Harmony exclusively describe the same change: they get their time back. They do not sit through piles of CVs, because they only see CVs when we are ready to interview people. They trust the process, and it takes the pressure off them.