There is a buzz in the ether getting louder by the day. The end is nigh for recruitment companies they say! Well as a recruitment business owner that is enough to get my attention, and thought it serious enough to take a deeper look. To see this in context we have first to give a respectful nod to the past to get to the “why” and put the latest “ogre”, Social Media, centre stage. Should we be frightened of this new pretender, or use the challenge as a springboard for a new recruitment concept?
I have been in recruitment since 1989, and came to Peterborough from London, leaving financial services to join a major national recruitment company as a Sales Development Consultant.
For those of you old enough to remember the Internet was still to be invented, computers had 5 inch floppies (if you had them at all) Word Perfect ran on DOS and recruitment depended on typewriters, filing systems and gallons of white correction fluid. CV's were all paper based and posted through snail mail, ads were all in the local paper with it's once a week offering in the weekly job pages. - technology was in its infancy (some may say better for it) and Peterborough was lagging behind London by a long way!
By 1993 when I opened my first independent recruitment business things had moved on a pace - we worked on laptops, had a data base, a fax, and computer based testing and training! WOW!
Then came the Internet, emails and JOB SITES. At that point the soothsayers forecast the end was nigh for recruitment companies. What happened in effect was that recruitment changed, adapted, progressed. What had been very much a local affair got caught up in globalisation and modernisation - maybe even radicalisation. Who knows what was in the mind of the first job sites - did they intend to replace the High Street, or even specialist niche agent? In effect recruiters embraced the technology, pleased at last to spread their net further afield. Move on a pace and those who jumped first achieved significant competitive advantage over those who held fast to the classifieds as their main source of candidates.
Technology changed the face of recruitment for ever. But it did not stop there, this is, after all, an unfolding story.
The burgeoning web offered small companies and large corporates an even playing field - equal opportunity to present a 24 hour shop window always open for business - always open for applicants to browse and apply for jobs on line.
Then came the recent earth shattering financial implosion. Personally I think this was a cataclysmic event for much of the business world, but for sure caused a mercurial shift in recruitment and it's role in business.
I could go on and on about the effects of that on recruitment. In a nutshell however the effect has been to polarise the marketplace - high volume low margin RPO companies at one end of the spectrum, with Search companies and niche players at the other. The bit in the middle is at risk from internal recruiters, job boards and flat fee recruiters.
Predictions are those on the High Street are vulnerable and unless they change their model they will not survive.
The latest risk is the growth of Social Media in recruitment. Millions of people globally now have Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, My Space accounts that have taken over from writing a letter, making a call or sending an email. Recruiter beware - ignore this at your peril - it is happening!
OK so that's a potted background - but what is the reality?
Why does recruitment exist at all as an industry? I am sure I am not the only one to ask that question! The standard response is that good recruiters add value to the recruitment process, taking a clients problems and delivering added value solutions - saving time, saving money, always adding value. That of course includes filling jobs with the most appropriate candidates - but now more than ever we need to be adding value through market knowledge, enhanced services, maybe psychometric testing, running open days and a whole host of time saving professional services. It is not just all delivering CV's, after all the jobs boards do that very well, it's not just all about budgets, if it were the flat fee recruiters would not be able to cope with the volume of business coming their way. It has to be about our ability to manage all of the elements and resources available to us as professional recruiters in a way that delivers results and exceeds expectation - and better than customers can do for themselves.
In my view the future of recruitment centres around people, and delivering what they want, when they want it at a price appropriate for the service offered using the most appropriate medium.
Maybe the future of recruitment agencies will depend on having a wider range of services so we can deliver a true end to end solution, helping business to succeed in attracting the talent it needs through listening, understanding, interpreting requirements into a workable plan of action which capitalises on all of the elements available in today's hi-tech instant action environment - job board advertising, managed advertising flat fee options, fixed fee, pay as you go contingency and search, embracing Social Media, - a service managed by professional recruiters, not sales people or media moguls - all under one banner.
