360 Recruitment Service
Employers: Do you have a 360 recruiter?
Where once my inbox was awash with offers for Viagra or Nigerian royalty requesting help with a wire transfer, today it is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firms who want to take the pain away from the day to day grind of recruiting talent for our clients needs. Oh the promise of a life without the drudgery and the opportunity to focus all our energies on "making deals." Take me away Calgon!
Well, the fact of the matter is an increasingly high percentage of Executive Search firms are doing just this and with some success. So what's my beef with it? Twofold:
1st - The only way to speak with authority to your client candidates and client companies is to be a "360 Recruiter."
A 360 Recruiter is involved in or conducts every single phase of a search. From interviewing the client to gather requirements through sourcing of candidates, list development, recruiting, screening, candidate/ client preparation, de-briefing and finally closing the placement. Because they are involved in every phase they are knowledgeable of every phase and thereby able to provide accurate advice and counsel throughout the process.
A large part of bringing together human beings requires trust and belief in what you are proposing and in many cases that means educating both about market realities, realistic compensation ranges, the difficulty of attaining certain skills, etc... If you're primarily focused as an Account Manager you're spending all your time engaging the client and "selling deals".
So what do you actually know about the difficulty of finding certain skills, the demand for or the compensation required to attract those skills. Best case scenario you know what you've been told. Ever repeated something you've been told by others only to learn later it wasn't true? I thought so.
2nd - If we're not doing the actual recruiting ourselves we're decreasing the probability of representing the highest level of talent and thereby short-changing our clients.
Anyone can source candidates and almost anyone can gather the resumes of those active candidates who respond to postings and email blasts to the masses. However, at the end of the day our clients don't engage us to place the best person who just happens to be looking.
They hire us to identify, recruit and represent those true A Players who aren't looking. The role of a true Recruiter is to open the eyes and ears of talent to the possibility of an even brighter future and once doing so, learn their goals and the vision they have for their career. In this way we are able to ensure the opportunities we present offer a compelling value proposition which allows them to achieve their career goals more fully and/or more rapidly.
This is what justifies professionals go through the pain of change. This is what our clients buy when they engage us. They buy our perceived ability to attract true "A Players" but if they're engaging a firm that outsources that role to junior internal or off-shore RPO's are they actually getting that competency? I don't know every RPO but I've spoken to and in several cases worked with enough for list development to know that they don't.
Call 400 people a day - yes! Email half of the known world - sure. Open the eyes and ears of an industries top talent - Sorry but no.
About Dan The Man
Dan Martineau began life as a professional recruiter in 1983 and is currently president of Martineau Recruiting Technology. He specialises in IT and Executive Recruitment.
E-mail: feedback@recruitmenttimes.co.uk