What if we had a crystal ball and could look ahead 50 years to
see what the recruiting trends will be. How will people be
recruiting? Will it be some with the aid of some high tech "Web
29.0" job boards?
If we go back 50 years ago, how useful would a crystal ball have
been then? Had any of us had a crystal ball we could have predicted
many things and by now been richer than Bill Gates and Warren
Buffett 10 times over. That's because we could have foreseen the
explosion of contingency recruitment, contract and temp
recruitment, job boards, ATS technology and the list goes on.
Recruitment as we know it today didn't exist 50 years ago, so how
will it look 50 years from now?
With the internet, job board advertising and email usage
dominating the contingency recruitment market over the past 14
years or so, recruiters have had more and more opportunity to be
lazy. In theory a recruiter can get a job emailed from a
client, post the job on a job board, get the responses, exchange
emails with potential candidates and forward the top three to the
client. In theory that recruiter can make a placement with
very little interaction with either the client or the candidate.
This is not recruiting!
50 years from now it's easy and scary to predict how little
interaction a recruiter may need to have in the process. Maybe
computers will replace the need for recruiters in 50 years? We can
all argue that this could never be, but with a large percentage of
contingency recruiters already working as "administrators" and not
much more, we can be forgiven for observing a trend curve pointing
towards automation.
I feel very fortunate though to have a crystal ball. (-: I know
what effective recruiting is going to look like in 50 years, and
even 100 years from now. How can I possibly know this? Well it's
the same reason that in 2009 so many contingency recruiters miss a
trick. With a very high percentage of competing recruitment
companies relying almost exclusively on job board advertising and
their outdated databases of candidates, they're all fighting over
the same candidates.
These are the 10% or less of the working population who are
actively looking for work. In 50 or 100 years one thing is not
going to change drastically. The percentage of people who are not
actively looking for work will remain the high majority. So whether
it's today or in 100 years, why go fishing in the same pond as
thousands of other recruiters? Why not take a leaf out of our high
end head hunting friend's book and start to focus on the population
of the workforce who are not looking?
Mapping out company organization structures and headhunting
shouldn't only be for board level executive positions. Just because
someone is not actively looking for work, it doesn't mean to say
they'll not be open minded to a conversation about a potential
career move. In 50 years, picking up a phone and asking an employee
of a well respected company if they are "open minded to a
conversation about a potential career move right now", will be no
different to doing that today. A high percentage of them may not be
open to moving, but will be open to hearing about what's going on
in the market. This is where relationships starts. This is
where quality referrals happen.
Of course the cynics are going to say "well it takes too long to
headhunt candidates when I can just be advertising for positions".
Well how long does it take to work on a position only to find out
your candidate has already been forwarded? I'm not talking about
giving up your job board subscriptions and focussing exclusively on
headhunting. Why not do both, and over time I believe job board
administrator recruiters will develop a much more rewarding career.
Who knows, maybe you'll like it so much you'll be around in 50
years to tell the ERE community about your "most successful half
century ever".
[Read Entry]