The dinosaur in the room

I got told I was “old school and ancient” at a recruitment seminar last week. I have to say it made me smile, especially when later in the conversation the guy used the word “dinosaur”. He said that technology is and will continue to change the recruitment industry in every way to the point of not needing “traditional recruiters” like me.

So I brushed off my spurs and swung myself up on my really high horse to deliver my belief, and hopefully that of a few others, that technology will never replace recruitment completely. It continues to change the identification, screening and interviewing element most certainly but it will never do the actual recruiting. For that you need to have built meaningful face-to-face relationships in order to have the difficult conversations about counter offers, as well as offer and acceptance negotiations. So with technology, the identification part of the recruitment process will I agree become easier. The actual recruitment part will become harder though because of the lack of actual meaningful engagement at the beginning of the process.

The really good candidate pools (which are also shrinking by the way) are people who have both career options as well as opinions. Going back to counter offers as an example, more and more candidates are building a better understanding of their worth these days through the use of the internet and social networking sites. As those talent pools get smaller and the candidate knowledge gets better (that’s a good thing by the way) you will see more and more counter offers. In order to navigate counter offers you need to have great relationships with candidates and clients alike. You won’t get these from technology, they’re old school skills, learned and honed over the years by great recruiters or dinosaurs if you want to call them that.

Nowadays it is easier to hide behind technology rather than do things in person. In my last role I used to sit next to a guy who would email me rather than talk to me because it was easier he said. We all do it. We text, we email, we messenger, we InMail. You need technology in your recruitment model but you also need human interaction. That in itself is nothing new but the skills are maybe dying out as the new breed of key search recruiters with a distinct lack of consulting skills and even sometimes a lack of technology skills are ushered in. If you need me I’ll be in Jurassic Park.

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Recruiting is far easier now than it’s ever been. Surely?

I met up with a client last week who casually said that my job must be really easy these days. What with the internet, social media within that and the social networks within that, it must be really easy to find good candidates. Luckily I had my really high horse with me and jumped straight on.

You see the reality of the recruiting world is that finding great candidates is actually getting much harder rather than easier for a number of reasons.

Trolley Dolly

When I first started recruiting many years ago, I had a trolley with candidate files in it (people I had met), a telephone and a rolodex. I had a Dos based computer but that was only for assignments and payroll entries. My boss on day one gave me a set of juggling balls, told me that I needed to learn to juggle (metaphorically) and that all the answers I needed were on the other end of the telephone. The best advice I ever got. Thank you Carole.

So at my desk I probably had 100 candidates, I had two colleagues who probably had the same and then I had access to all the other North and West London branches. So I could access and search through maybe 50,000 CVs. The added great bonus was that all 50,000 candidates had been met face to face and there was always someone who could do a personal introduction.

Now that might not seem like a lot but at the time for a pre-internet localised recruitment business it was. When you now consider that today I have access to about 15 million relevant candidates through job boards and then you consider that LinkedIn has over 11 million users in the United Kingdom alone, the reality is that it really wasn’t that very many at all. When you then add in all the other vehicles I now use to source candidates on top of job boards, I really could not guess the overall size of the candidate pool I can tap into now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was tens of millions.

There is no question that all this additional data enables me to do more resourcing that enable me to find better matches to client requirements. From way up on my high horse though, more data means more searches which means more structure which means more time. So if anything it’s got harder, much harder and I believe it is only going to get harder moving forward.

Databases

After the trolley came the database in recruitment. I moved to East Anglia and worked for a recruitment business that had people who understood the value of it. Well they did in the IT recruitment division I worked in anyway. I had worked for a City firm prior to that move and they had gone down the external pay-to-search route. The early job board if you like. In both instances I had access to a lot less data than I do now, but it was in a very relevant format within a framework that allowed me to search in a uniform way. I have subsequently built my own databases in this manner so I know that my first search every time is going to be a great kick off to the next campaign. The reason that sourcing CV’s used to be seen as the easy part of recruiting was because it was. The hard part back then was getting and verifying the data in the first place, face to face meetings again laying the groundwork. Searching through that small amount of really good data really was the easy bit.

Where we are now though is to acknowledge that CV databases as we know them have not been the cause of recent recruiting data growth. Social data is responsible for that and to a lesser degree, independent platform data such as that found on personal websites and blogs. Leaning down again from my high horse I can honestly say that the thing with this social data from my perspective is that some of it is useful and a most of it is rubbish.

So while we have a lot more data today than we did in say 2004, the vast majority of it is of really low quality. We’ve gone from having a small amount of really high quality data to having loads of mostly low quality data. That low quality data requires more experience, more skill and a lot more time to navigate and interpret.

Social Data

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn since its very early days and it has been fundamental to the growth in recruiting data availability. I don’t think that is in doubt. For that matter neither is the fact that LinkedIn changed the way that recruitment resourcing worked. I mention it as I often use it as my example of social data. It has turned professional information from what was largely private to voyeuristically public and I don’t mind saying that I got a bit grumpy with that happening in the early days. It opened up the kind of data that had given me a competitive advantage to everyone. LinkedIn really has made it possible for anyone to find anyone hasn’t it?

Erm, ..no it hasn’t.

The reality is that Linkedin profile data in most cases is nowhere near as good as you would find in a CV. The vast majority of the profiles on LinkedIn are incomplete.

I recently received a note from LinkedIn saying that I was in the top 5% of viewed profiles in 2012. Well thank you for the smoke blowing LinkedIn but there must be a massive amount of dead profiles for that to be so. So the majority of profiles must be merely husks, nothing more. Not very good for searching through when the vast majority are like that.

That said, it is only right to recognise that LinkedIn is easily the best social platform in terms of data quality from a social data (CV) perspective. The Facebook profiles I see are useless as are the Twitter bios.

The fact of the matter is that as the amount of data continues to grow alongside the number of platforms on which it sits grows, the more diluted the quality of the data will become.

Social data is not the solution to the candidate resourcing problem. It is the cause of it.

Time and experience are now the only solution and resourcing candidates is as a result much harder not easier. That said, I have always enjoyed the chase of finding the best people in a chaotic disrupted marketplace. Finding the best candidates with the most relevant experience, skills and culture mix at the right price is what it has always been about. The harder it gets for us in recruitment, the harder we will all have to work to solve it.

Rant over.

I’ll get down now…

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Markets picking up

February has been mad busy which is all good. I’ve not had time to write much in the way of blogs as I have been flat out all day every day working on client briefs. I am seeing greater growth demand in all three key areas, but significant demand for software development and information security skills in East Anglia and likewise digital broadcast in London. This can only be a good sign for the economy if roles are converted into hires over the coming days. Recruiters are always a good barometer of how things are going for the country as a whole and talking to friends in the industry they are seeing the same. Long may it continue.

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