Moscow’s top recruitment agencies in the IT and telecommunications sectors gave themselves a pat on the back last week, at the presentation of a rating of the popularity of recruitment agencies working in the sector. The new ratings should be useful in assessing how good the agencies are relative to their competitors, and prove as a boon for IT and telecommunications companies wanting to know which’s the most popular recruitment agency in town.

The five most popular recruitment agencies among employers in the IT and telecommunications markets are Anchor, Kontakt, Kelly Services, BLM-Consort and Coleman Services, according to the Association of Personnel Search Consultants (APSC).

APSC, a non-commercial association, recently presented ratings for recruitment agencies specializing in the IT and telecoms sectors at Kelly Services’ Olympic Plaza office. The association was founded in 1996 and currently unites over 50 Russian recruiting agencies with the aim of creating a civilized recruitment market.

The research methods were developed by the information and advertising department of the company Kontakt Agency in February and March of 2001, and the research was carried out under the aegis of APSC.

For the research, 81 IT and telecom companies taken from 22 of the various sections in the Moscow Business Telephone Guide and were contacted by telephone and asked what recruitment agencies they currently were working with, had worked with in the past, or had heard of. Only companies that were perceived by the organizers to work with recruitment agencies were contacted.

Fifty-three percent of respondents claimed that they were working with a recruitment agency at the moment, 75.4 percent said that they had worked with a recruitment agency before and only 8.8 percent said that they had never used a recruiter’s services.

Sixty-four recruitment agencies were used in the research. According to Valery Oskin, deputy general director at recruitment agency Kontakt, there are twice as many companies involved in the personnel market in Russia as were used in the survey, but those that were not included are either very small or provide inferior-quality services.

In general, ratings of recruitment agencies should carry out at least three functions, according to Mathew Igel, general manager at Kelly Services: “They should help recruitment companies establish benchmarks which are necessary when implementing ISO-compliant quality systems, as Kelly Services is now doing. Secondly, they allow us to see where we stand vis-a-vis the competition. And thirdly, they should help client companies chose a supplier based on hard data, not just on promises.”

The figure in the rating table that aims to indicate the overall popularity of recruitment agencies was arrived at using the formula R = 4a + 2b + c, where R was the coefficient of the fame of the agency, a was the number of allusions to an agency in answer to the question: “Which agencies do you work with now?”, b is the number of allusions to an agency in answer to the question “Which companies have you worked with in the past?”, and c is the number of allusions to an agency in answer to the question: “Which recruitment agencies have you heard of?”

It was calculated in this way, because the number of companies working with an agency is seen to be a more valuable indicator of its popularity, than the number of companies that have indicated that they have heard of it.

According to Valery Oskin of Ancor, the research for their next rating will take place in July and August and will be of recruitment agencies in the media market. The survey will include PR agencies, advertising agencies, newspapers and magazine. In September the agency and APSC will research into the popularity of agencies among FMCG companies.

It will be interesting to see if Kontakt does so well in those too. In response to queries as to the objectivity of the research, Valery Oskin highlighted the fact that neither Ancor nor Kelly Services are members of APSC.