Recruitment has changed. No, I am not just talking about Lou Adler's "hub and spoke" sourcing model, although there is a connection. Even just a few short years ago, recruitment at most companies consisted of a one stop shop with the words "human resources" stamped across the front door. Especially at smaller companies, Human Resource Coordinators and Assistants doubled as recruiters. As I review the resumes of many of the newly unemployed HR professionals, they have a mixing bowl of experience. Managing open enrollment is often listed right above planning company events and "recruiting top talent." They are puzzled to receive generic rejection emails after applying to recruiting openings, as after all, they did manage recruitment strategies along with new hire orientation and exit interviews. So what has changed that makes their experience not measure up to the competition? In two words: specialization and technology.
Finding the best candidates no longer amounts to simply scanning applications and buying licensure lists to send out mailings. Even the so called "boomerang" campaigns have lost their charm. My husband would laugh to hear me say this, but recruiters have become a new brand of detective. Think I am exaggerating? Consider the manual process that recruiters must go through to source great passive candidates. It often begins on Bing, Yahoo or Google with a Boolean string targeting company and association publications. Once a name is found, the first stop becomes people search engines such as Pipl or Yahoo People Search. If you are lucky, there is only one Joe Smith in Chicago, Illinois, and his home phone number is listed above his address. Or maybe he is on LinkedIn, and you can shoot him a quick InMail plugging your exciting opportunity at Employer XYZ. If not, it is back to the drawing board.
Further searches uncover the domain name of his current employer, and a coworker's email address suggests that his email mail be joe.smith@employerxyz.com. You give it a shot, and it works. Great, but not good enough; time to find a personal email address and phone number. A targeted search reveals that Joe is the coach of his daughter's soccer team, and has created a web page to house an updated schedule and team photos. It also contains a contact phone number. Does it belong to Joe? A reverse phone lookup reveals that the cell phone number is currently registered to a Joe Smith in Chicago, Illinois. Jack pot. All-in-all, it may have taken anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to find information for a single passive candidate.
This is just one process that a modern recruiter goes through to source talent. Remember I also mentioned technology as being an important ingredient in the evolution of recruiting? Now programs like Broadlook are automating some of these manual processes (side note: I am a huge fan), but as the majority of companies are either unaware of these developments, or unwilling to pay for them, recruiters are still pounding the online pavement. When technologies like Broadlook become main stream (and I believe they will eventually), the role of the recruiter will change yet again. In addition to mastering a myriad of programs, they will have to master something that has been around a lot longer: time. How do recruiters function effectively when they have great leads to follow up on coming in from a variety of sources, candidate relationships to maintain, pipelines to develop, phone screens to complete, interviews to schedule, offers to make... Is a role this diverse one that should be handled by one recruiter, or many?
My vote would be for many. There are only so many hats a recruiter can wear before quality of hire is sacrificed. The result: another evolution in recruiting. In the very near future, I believe recruiting will become entirely fragmented, with common functions segmented into different roles. This can already be seen in the emergence of roles dedicated to candidate sourcing, brand management and social media strategies. The recruitment revolution has just begun, and the companies leading it will be those striving to build a diversely talented workforce while simultaneously delivering exceptional customer service, something which, sadly, is often ignored in recruitment. Doing so means adapting your model to incorporate changing methods of communication. Excited?
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