"If I were to randomly stop and ask a 100 people in the streets of London, 'How did you find your job?' and then repeated it in other cities and towns in the rest of the UK , what would they say? How many would point to some part of the internet?"
This was one of the questions I posed to a panel of job board owners and general managers during the final session at Onrec's London conference yesterday but similar interesting discussions cropped up several times Tuesday with corporate recruiting leaders who were decrying the state of their "primary vendor" (3rd party placement firms) model.
One member of the job board panel addressed the issue by describing the pounds spent on online help-wanted advertising versus print versus placement agencies but the answer appeared tougher to answer than I thought it should be.
Apparently there is no Source of Hire study (flawed or not) in the UK. Hmmm, perhaps I should spend less time bitching about the lack of data integrity of US SOH studies...nah.
"So", I asked several of the corporate delegates I met during the day, "if no one knows the answer to Source of Hire, then just help me out by guessing how many hires (in a typical medium to large corporation- ones that have a recruiting leader and a team or teams of recruiters) come from 3rd party hires?"
The agreed on answer from about a dozen folks representing some of the UK's largest and best known firms was that somewhere north of 30% of all hires come through agencies. And several opined that if the real number were to turn out to be double that then they would not be a surprised. Must be a British way of saying they were conservative.
"And what would be a 'good' figure for hires resulting from employee referrals?", I pressed in another discussion.
Most felt 10-15% would be very good and doubt many at all are beyond 5%.
The surprise for me is that the resistance and slow adoption of online technology like ATSs is not only directly related to the money being spent on 3rd party agencies but it has only nominally changed in the last couple years. Of course the adoption of technology by 3rd party angencies is very high. Of course, the money is really really good. Ask any US recruiting leader about what keeps them up at night in globally integrating their UK counterpapers and you will likely hear about these costs.
In some ways the UK's embedded recruiting model is a variation on outsourcing and to bring it, hire sourcers, develop non-transactional recruiters with consulting skills, etc. they have to make the business case and, they have few benchmarks.
There was also an unusual response (at least I thought it unusual) when I asked the pane about how they saw "job boards evolving in the next year or so and adding services such as applications to assist corporate clients screen candidates."
The CareerBuilder GM quickly and pointedly claimed that they were not in that business and that the business of a job board was to drive leads and that was it. Others chimed in... in agreement. Too bad. I had a good follow up question for the answer I thought I would get. Pays not to make assumptions.
Enjoyed the conference and trade show, learned a lot since my last trip and had a fabulous Indian diner at the Cinnamon Club that would rival some of my favorite diners of any cuisine in Chicago, New York or even, New Orleans.
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