The recruitment industry is facing a dilema. It has always been the case that some recruiters took the time to screen the CVs they received, and met with potential candidates to carry out interviews and gain an indepth picture of each candidates skills, motivations and career goals - and others didn't. Instead they recieved CVs by post or fax, perhaps had a telephone conversation with those 'more placeable' candidates, and then started sending them out to clients and trying to 'get interviews for them'.
Then email arrived, and the whole process sped up. More recruiters abandoned the face to face interview as being too slow. This was driven by the competitive nature of contingency recruitment - if you didn't get your CVs to a client within days, or even hours, of receiving the job briefing, one of your competitors would and you would lose the chance to book any interviews.
Now, there are online job boards and social networking sites - a plethora of sources of 'instant candidates'. A shortlist for a recruiter's latest job order is just a few clicks away!
Does all this technology mean that clients are receiving a better service, however? Has their speed to hire reduced? Has their retention rate gone up, or down? Perhaps most importantly, has the proportion of their new hires appearing within the top 50% of annual appraisal results increased, or decreased?
Do recruiters even ask their clients for these metrics? Would a recruiter's client company consider hiring someone their HR department had found online, had a quick telephone call with, and then made an offer to? Only if they had taken leave of their senses. Yet this is the level of care and professional skill that they seem happy to pay 20% or 25% of their new hire's salary for - often many thousands of pounds!
HR Directors and Procurement Manager's aren't stupid. If the recruitment industry keeps moving in this direction, driven by Master Vendor outsourcing contracts and a drive to cut costs, at all costs, then it may well drive itself out of existance. Organisations' HR departments are equally capable of using the new technologies, building their brands online for recruitment as well as marketing, and attracting their own applicants.
The value of the recruitment industry lies in the skill that comes from being a recruitment specialist, a genuine consultant - someone who can advise on job analysis, drafting of job descriptions, benchmarking of salaries, advice on benefits packages in their industry sector or the functional specialism being sought, and indepth assessment of potential candidates.
The trick for those consultancies determined to work in this way and offer a quality recruitment service, is to distinguish themselves in the minds of HR and line managers from the increasing ocean of 'download and submit' recruiters out there, whose only desire it to meet their quotas...
