I recently wrote an article about how recruitment has changed and thought I should share some thoughts about what has changed and why it will never be the same again.
The Net Natives online recruitment business model thrives because the nature of recruitment has changed in 4 incredibly important (but rarely mentioned) ways.
- Clients do not hire against potential, they hire against budget. It is no longer the case that a good CV will get an interview on spec. Clients recruit when they have budget sign off. This means that the recruitment process has gone from being predominantly proactive to largely reactive. Recruiters are not able to groom and nurture quality candidates and then “sell” them to their network, they have to wait to be assigned a role to work on. Candidates have understood this and now do more work themselves to get themselves a job. Which leads me onto…
- The advances in job board technology, with effective email alerts and intuitive artificial intelligence, serving recommended jobs has dramatically increased application rates through the boards. In the same way that better user experience has increased online shopping, so has better job board technology increased candidate placements. Coupled with dramatic increases in online searches for jobs through searches, 101 million searches for jobs last month on Google, this changes the initial engagement behaviour of the candidate. However…
- There is no loyalty to job board brands. No job board can claim 100% exclusivity to their candidate database, because of the candidates’ job search habits. Clients know that to make sure their role is seen, they need to get the greatest coverage. We are transparent about the job boards we use to fill the roles and we constantly review and monitor to ensure we are using best in breed.
- We are able to do this with incredible advances in technology. At the click of a button we can post a job advert to 750 job boards and then the job specification is “parsed” across the databases, automatically returning best results based on semantic searches (and with another click they can review all relevant biogs on LinkedIn). Is this simple process really worth 20% of the annual salary? We don’t think so.
One final note. I have never thought much of the contingent recruitment model. Why should I work hard to find the best candidate only for the client to turn out not to have budget or the role changes (or not be a good employer).
Companies like us do everything a recruiter NOW does; we create the campaigns, post, search, filter, screen and shortlist but our model is paid our ability to do this, not our client’s ability to hire. We are transparent in our successes and believe in passing on our specialist online recruitment knowledge to everyone.
But of course we provide regular recruitment training for our clients throughout our blogs. Something you would never get from a traditional recruiter.
And on a final FINAL note. I have been exposed to some pretty horrific recruitment practices in my 15 years all because the consultants wanted to close the deal. Not for the benefit of the candidate, nor the client but for their pocket. This does not happen when the client makes the objective choice to recruit without undue and irrelevant influence.
Hope this all makes sense, but if anyone wants to speak to me about this in more detail, feel free to get in touch –steve@netnatives.co.uk
