I definitely agree that the old style recruiter who posted a few ads, collected the CVs and presented the best candidates is well and truly on the way out.

LinkedIn and social networking tools are now encroaching on the ‘well networked’ individuals territory.

So, the truth is for recruiters to survive they need to add more value than simply aggregating candidates. They need to ensure they are selecting the right candidates to present to shortlist. CIPD has shown the CV based interview that most recruiters use to assess candidates is at best 25% accurate at predicting future performance. Recruiters need to become adept at the new ways of assessing candidates using psychometric tools or behavioural interviews which can raise hiring accuracy above 75% (CIPD). Quite a seachange for most recruiters!!

R

Great, just great!

I like this site, the concept is good, and the fact its free is a massive bonus. A company can post jobs, ask the candidates to submit video pitches/ complete specially prepared tests/ questionnaires, post examples of their work (if appropriate) and can effectively have a live virtual interview in one of the interview chat rooms. This must surely benefit/speed up the candidate screening process, and eliminate the need for agents…

Without a doubt there is an opportunity cost to doing recruitment yourself. In my case, that cost was outweighed by the value associated with getting the right person for this very critical role- I felt confident that I could get better results than any recruiter. Further, it is hard for an early stage start-up to justify a recruitment fee- especially when you have 24 hours in the day.

I certainly would not have bothered with a junior hire. Indeed there are some relatively senior hires we have coming up where I expect we will make the hire via a recruiter although we will still run the same route as before in parallel (although CrunchBoard probably not the right medium).

I think what the recruitment industry should take away from this is that prospective clients really can beat them at their own game, if they want to make the effort. The recruitment industry needs to recognise this and innovate… find ways of adding value… and justify/rationalise their proposition.

Recruitment is a process and any employer could easily do it themselves, it’s just many choose not to. HR prefer to focus on strategy rather than function in terms of recruitment, which is why so much is subbed out to recruiters and the recruitment industry is worth £26 billion a year.

To defend their position recruiters will claim speed and management time and cost savings. Let’s be honest how much do you and your senior managers cost your business per day you spend recruiting, what impact does your absence from other functions have and how much value would a hire bring if a month was taken off the time to recruit.

I prefer not to claim web 2.0 is the end of recruiters. HR recognising they can do their own recruitment and doing it would be.

But again, let’s get real. Supermarkets could do their own distribution but they don’t. Why, because third party’s on average can do it 40% more effectively and cheaper!

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I face many recruiters in my job and I think they are getting there in terms of social media. However, when it comes to make it a common practice or a routine, they all face the time input issue. There is no structured way to deal with social media, nor any mean to aggregate the information and keep for further recruitment tasks in the future.

This is still an area that will move significantly in the coming years.

I’ve been in the talent acquisition and development business for over a decade, and I figured out early that identifying talent is simply a process. A process (enhanced by various tools like LinkedIn) that when tracked and measured can be continuously improved (i.e. shortened and made more accurate).

In my opinion, there are only one questions you should ask yourself next time you have a senior level hiring need, or any need that might require outside assistance. Can the service provider do it cheaper, faster, or better (in this case find a higher quality candidate). If after considering a service provider you can’t answer yes to at least one of these questions you are most certainly better of doing it yourself.

For the rest of you who are considering doing this on your own check out my blog on “Low Budget Candidate Sourcing Advice” at http://wp.me/pCoJJ-k. I’ve been working with entrepreneurial companies to help them build management teams for over a decade and know a number of them can’t afford to retain a consultant like myself to do their searches. This is the advice I offer them.

Happy hunting,

CorDell

I think the only recruitment agencies that will last are the real head hunters.

I couldn’t be happier with my team – they are extremely talented people and I didn’t pay a penny to hire them!

Agents can go to hell, I hate them!

Of course this does not apply across the board – we have worked with a couple of agents that have been very helpful – particularly in the more senior hires, but most have just performed the function of sending CVs that they’ve downloaded from job sites.

Having dealt with the other end of the spectrum (agencies), the main issue I had with them is that they basically didn’t deliver the most basic thing what I was expecting of them. They typically didn’t do a great job at screening candidates.

Yes they have the reach into a good number of candidates. And one would think it’s relatively easy to screen candidates.

But in my experience, not matter how much care I took in writing the job spec or spent time with them explaining the role and experience I was looking for, the result wasn’t disappointing. But I shouldn’t be since they simply didn’t know my business, market space or company ethos as good as I did (…duh).

Of course doing it direct requires that you already have well established networks. A good reason to invest in them while you are not searching for something specific!

Recruitment, like many other services, is a process which, if you have the time and expertise, you might undertake in-house. And social media certainly increases the number of potential candidates an in-house process could reach.

However, often recruitment processes are time critical and many hiring managers, busy running their business/department/team, would find it difficult to put the time aside, in the manner you did, to personally screen tens or hundreds of candidates – often conducting interviews in the evenings or at weekends.

Moreover, even in this day and age, not all candidates are actively using social networks or responding to online postings. So the better recruiters use social media as just one of their tools – supplementing this with tenacious efforts to find their clients qualified and motivated candidates. And, as Peter points out in his comment, the better recruiters are also innovating – finding new ways to delight clients and find & attract candidates. So no need to turn on the life support system just yet – innovative and focused recruitment consultants like AlpinaSearch are very much alive and well!