It's Talent, Stupid!

Recruiters - What will become of us?

I recently read a blog which talked about how social media and networking sites were going to be the death of the recruiter. I disagree, if anything I believe the role of recruiter has become ever more important, but has also changed.

The argument in this blog was that the internet has enabled accessibility to candidates that would never have been possible before the internet revolution. Therefore by posting a few ads and doing some poking around on LinkedIn HR team can now source candidates directly and cut out the middle man.

This argument is sound if you accept that a recruiter is merely a way of sourcing or aggregating candidates. However, here is where I (predictably) disagree. I believe previously organisations used recruiters because they had lots of cards in their rolodex (I'm a bit young to have seen one, but I have been told about them) and could provide them with access to their networks. Now that organisations can directly source candidates fairly successfully the question becomes, as quite rightly asked in the blog I read, what is the recruiter for?

The answer (in my humble opinion) is about selection rather than sourcing. Recruiters need to become experts in selecting candidates, they need to be better than the client at predicting which candidate will succeed in each role in each company. Sounds ridiculous?

It shouldn't, the recruitment processes of most companies (CV based interview) is about 25% accurate (according to research conducted by the CIPD). The job of a recruiter is not to find the candidates but to help the client select the right person for their business. The British Psychological Society has shown that by using the right psychometric tools and behavioural interview techniques hiring accuracy can be raised above 75%.

Therefore if you're a recruiter and you want to stay ahead of the game you need to up skill big time. Recruitment consultants of the future will not be the salesman of old flogging candidates to anyone who'll have them; they will be a mix of occupational psychologists, management consultants and project managers.

If you are an organisation currently using recruitment consultants, you may want to have a chat with them about what tools and expertise they are using to select candidates. If the answer is 'I've been doing this for years, I know a good one when I spot one' then I suggest you go looking for a new one!

Anyway back to my original point, I don't believe the increasingly easy access to candidates the internet offer will be the death of all recruiters, however, as Darwin so aptly figured out years ago, it will kill off those those who don't adapt and quick! As Rupert Murdoch put it "The world is changing. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow."

Rowan

Job Advert - Chemistry are Hiring

Having a spot of bother at the moment, on a couple of counts!  Firstly I appear to be blogging for everyone else but us..:-( And secondly we are starting to look at hiring for ourselves...always a case of cobblers children.

Good news is, I am rectifying the first problem now!  The second is interesting, so I pulled the team together on Friday and asked them, what is it about us that makes us tick...the result was quite interesting.

So we believe we are a fun bunch, very open to newcomers...turns out we aren't.  Well, we are fun but we are horrendously difficult to gel with, according to those we asked (this included people who had left our business and one who came back), the traits of the group are:

Confidence - our people exhibit a sense of control, around their subject matter and expertise that can be intimidating...got to come in punching :-)

Pace - our people work at a pace that is 100x faster than anything people coming in to our business have seen before, the analogy used was "it's like trying to jump on to a speeding train".  The truth appears to be that if you can not hit the ground running at the pace we need, the train doesn't slow down and you never end up getting on :-(

Intolerant - Crikey, this was a rough one...apparently as a group we are highly intolerant of anyone not able to "keep up", we are religious when it comes to the brand (like that one) and fanatical about the quality of the deliverables to the client.  Two impacts of this one, we are consistent but uncompromising and consider communication and output that is not 'brand" coherent as criminal offences.

Open - by this I mean we discuss everything, nothing is secret or sacred.  The view is that the frenetic pace dictates that we don't have time or the inclination to "flower" anything up or "couch" feedback...it comes full on and as naked as it gets, if we are thinking it, we say it....again when you are struggling to jump on to the speeding train and you get swiped by a piece of "honest feedback", the impact can be twice hard.  Makes the humour round the office, oddly dark :-)

Caring - OK, so it all sounded a bit harsh and then, "caring" came up...once you are on the train, you are in the "family" and when in the "family" the business is generous, listens well and is protective

Hard Working - 65+ hours a week is the norm..., go online at 9pm at night and you will find Chemistry guys, IM'ing each other, writing up proposals, candidate profiles...no one switches off, last night I received emails from 4 of the guys...there are only 8 of us!  I question whether this is a good thing but these are bright people who have families etc...I am convinced they are doing it, because they love what they do.

Technology - there are 8 of us doing the work of 16...we embrace technology to help us with the workload, if you aren't typing fluently, using social media naturally, pulling together proposals and powerpoint together in minutes, not hours and not able to understand the different "bonus elements" in Mario Kart for the Wii...you are not going to get on the train...

Total Belief - Chemistry people totally believe that we are on a mission, to challenge the status quo, in recruitment, in consulting, in short, in everything we do...they believe that we can "make a dent in the universe"...this makes them, what's the word..."high maintenance" :-)

So there you have it, our job advert...call any one of us on 01344 418300, it may not be a normal job but it might be Chemistry

R

Intuition in Recruitment - A £Multi-million gamble!

How often do we do things that just feel right? We don’t know why we do them, we probably can’t explain why but we just know it’s right.  It’s been the same in recruitment for years.  Recruitment consultants will tell you they get a gut feel when meeting a candidate; that they somehow know when they find someone who is right for their client, but  how reliable is ‘gut feel’?

I must admit, I definitely do experience gut feel.  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a woman – after all aren’t we supposed to be the intuitive sex? Or, if it’s because I’m a Scorpio or maybe it is because I have high emotion in my psychometric profile.  Maybe it’s just an innate sense left over from our evolutionary past where we had to make quick decisions about people and rely on only our instincts. In fact, it’s probably a mixture of all of these things.

The question is, would I gamble £80,000 of my own money on my "gut feel", would you?  The truth is most of us wouldn't, but if you could validate your "gut feel" with objective data points, well it would throw a whole new light on the daily expensive gamble of hiring senior people!

As an experienced recruiter, who understand and knows her clients intimately, I do believe I get an instant intuition as to whether a candidate is the right fit for my client, I just know.  However, I am not prepared to bet my clients success and the candidates future prospects on my "intuition", rather I let it guide me to spend time with the right candidates, to assess them comprehensively and make in the end the more accurate decision. 

Chemistry are proven to be 75% accurate in predicting the future performance of a new hire, my feedback rating is significantly higher than even this, I have a gut feeling, it's my intuition at work :-)

Lorraine