King Safety and Security Ltd (KSS) pioneered it’s CPO assessment process nearly two years ago, and it works.
Companies engaging the services of CPO’s MUST spend the time, effort and money to physically assess candidates’ hard and soft CP skills and character, twinned with thorough vetting and screening.
If you don’t have the resources available to do this, take out a business loan or seek investment like a startup in any other industry. You couldn’t open a shop and sell suboptimal products because it’s cheap and easier to buy them blindly from a wholesaler, and then expect to do consistently well.
The role of a CPO is critical. To simply accept the assurances of a candidate during an interview that they are suitably equipped and qualified without pressure testing them before placing them with a paying client is a major disservice to all, including the CPO but not least of all the client. Especially in today’s industry where training provider standards are so inconsistent.
Jobs for the boys/girls, are based largely on who happens to be available so an ambitious young CP company/individual can fill a task and satisfy their unwitting client by providing an unknown quantity, just to tick the box and make a few quid….
Not good enough.
CP WhatsApp groups are not to blame in themselves. They are a medium for communication, and as such they are effective. KSS uses them to invite people to it’s selection process, because it’s not THE recruitment tool, it’s simply the means of communication to advertise it.
The problem arises when people start believing they are in some way an indication of quality control. They are not. That is the responsibility of the company providing the operatives.
Processes.
Data.
Pass or fail.
This is how to raise standards.
KSS’s CP selection days have a 30% pass rate. That means 70% of candidates are not fit to do the job in our opinion, at the time that they apply.
Vetting and screening, enhanced DBS checks, and fitness testing cuts that number by a third again.
That’s a final 20% cross-section of the industry (out of those who actually have the confidence to attempt the selection process) who make it to the point of representing KSS with a principal.
I’m passionate about this because I have learned the hard way. In my 17 years I have previously recruited based on a mixture of gut feeling, CPO availability and client demands, and I know first-hand that it’s flawed. Never again.
The key to cleaning up this industry and ridding it of bottom-feeding companies and the ‘tourist’ CPO’s who have no right to take jobs from the professionals that DO exist, is robust and efficient assessment-based recruitment.
Stop the cowboy companies and the (often well-intentioned) inefficient CPO’s from getting work, and they WILL have to upskill or move on to an industry where they are better suited.