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The recruitment lifecycle starts with sales.
So why aren't we talking about it?
Thanks to the mainstreaming of social media, any wingnut with an opinion and a keyboard can set themselves up as a recruiting guru these days. Google virtually any recruiting lifecycle stage or buzzword and you're guaranteed to turn up hundreds - if not thousands - of blogs, articles, templates, tweets, whitepapers, discussion groups and god knows what else by legions of recruiting 'experts' who've managed to convince everyone they're geniuses simply because they've consistently churned out 5000 words per week.
But there's a yawning gap in all this content, apparently concealed by a Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) field: Sales.
Go ahead, try Googling. Google "how to recruit candidates" - you'll get a million articles, tip lists, strategies, etc. Then try Googling "how to sell recruitment services". You'll notice there's a distinct lack of op-ed/advice pieces, and the only one even remotely interesting in the first few pages of search returns is 'How Not to Sell Recruitment Services', which is less than helpful.
But none of us (by 'us', I mean those of us who seem to have no shortage of opinions on every other aspect of the recruitment lifecycle, and the time to write about them) would be in a position to talk about recruiting as much as we do if we didn't first have a requisition to fill. After all, to get a requisition, you must first have a client - and that means that someone, somewhere, had to sell something.
So what's the problem? Why aren't we talking about recruiting sales?
Great salespeople hate writing
Show me a guy (and sales is male-dominated) who's a sales rockstar and I'll show you a guy whose idea of cruel and unusual punishment is having to write a 500-word blog post. Salespeople like to draw a straight line from 'action' to 'result', and the shorter that line, the better. The slow build of social media and the murky relationship between "X number of hours spent on the blog" to "$X in revenue" drives them nuts. So the people most qualified to talk about sales are too busy actually making sales to fart around in the blogosphere.
Great marketing people hate selling
Oh, don't deny it: We all know that good salespeople - in any industry - can and do make a whole lot more money than any salaried marketing or HR job. And agency recruiters can and do make a lot more money than corporate recruiters. So why do we stay in marketing, HR and/or corporate recruiting? Because at the end of the day, we all hate the hard sell - the cold calls, the rejection, the endless client visits - and
Social media is still in its 'early adopter' phase in terms of business use
For all the mainstream hype about it, social media for business is still very much undiscovered territory, and we're just beginning to establish some benchmarks and best practices around social media for recruiting. Most of the discussion is around 'theories' of social media.
The type of person most likely to be an avid user of social media for recruiting, therefore, is the type of person who is more interested in writing a whitepaper on, say, the role of grassroots corporate philanthropy on employee engagement than they are on coming up with "10 tips to make your sales team more effective".
HR-types are often reluctant to focus on 'filthy lucre'
While recruiting has a natural affinity with sales - they're both very results- and bottom-line focused - the truth is that HR types often know doodley-squat about sales, and could care less. So while you may see HR professionals talking/writing about some parts of the recruitment lifecycle, you won't see them focusing on the 'sales' aspect of it.
Talking about 'sales' seems too transactional
We're - those of us making the most noise about social media for recruiting - always droning on about how you have to build long-term, solution-oriented relationships with clients, and that it's not about 'selling' but about 'results', blah blah blah.
Writing blog posts or articles on highly tactical, transactional stuff like how to get a first meeting with a potential client or how to close a deal almost feels like a betrayal of that mantra - even though it's not.
WHY WE NEED TO START TALKING ABOUT SELLING RECRUITMENT SERVICES
The move to RPO - whether bundled or unbundled - is changing the way recruitment services are sold.
Organizations are learning that the traditional contingency-fee-based recruiting model just isn't going to cut it any more: It's too expensive in weak economies and too inefficient in strong ones.
The contingency model is fairly low-risk for clients (they don't pay til a hire is made), and lends itself well to commoditization (if your fees are 17% while your competitors' are 19%, you're halfway to making the sale), so recruiters haven't had to be particularly sophisticated in their sales strategies.
But asking an organization to turn over some or all of their recruiting process to a third party - and to commit to paying for that service regardless of the number of hires made - is a different kettle of fish altogether. That kind of selling requires the same long-term relationship-building that we so often talk about around candidates. It's important to remember that the C in 'CRM' stands for 'Client' as well as 'Candidate'.
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