Executive Search & Recruitment The quality of the final recruitment decision is no better now than it was
40 years ago. High quality recruitment is a matter of having a high quality talent pool
available. Ironically, the great promise of social media was that it would bring people closer together has failed to impact on recruitment pools. Research by our annual Blue Book employment survey indicates that job
seeking candidates turn first to their most trusted help source, their agency, second to personal contacts, and only last to social media. The secret of sustained quality recruitment therefore is to find the talent
pool most trusted by the target audience. This is easy to find, but difficult to access. There is in the UK, a huge network of SME recruitment agencies. These agencies significantly, and sustainably, outperform all other methods of recruitment in their sweet spot. They cover most of the ground, are generally ’local’ and are irritatingly inaccessible to national level recruiting teams. As a result, their main clients are local companies, or nationals who are empowered to make local decisions. Keeping ’ownership’ of their talent pools is
Feature
(The quality stats of candidates on our private website, fed by previous candidates, and word of mouth, compared against the public sites we also use, are astounding). The most important element of attraction is recruitment branding. The
most important element of recruiting is listening. The most important thing about getting the best relevant people is clearly spelled out in the McKinsey paper War for Talent. It is up to 50 per cent greater productivity, and huge competitive edge. There is no level in a modern company that the extra quality does not impact, and that will get more noticeable with AI. Recruitment branding is a disturbingly big subject, in its ramifications.
what these companies do best. They do it better than anyone else. Significant proportions of their talent pools are exclusive. In our case, good candidates who stay in our recruitment zone never need go anywhere else, and they don't. In the past 20 years, there has been an attempt by the
‘Recruitment branding is not about sound bites and by-lines. It is the DNA of the company, is real, and is lived every day’
The Progressive Employers Group (PEG) initiative, recently instigated in Birmingham by Katie Bard, our local Birmingham office, is a small attempt to try to help companies value, and create value in, their recruitment branding. Recruitment branding is not about sound bites and by-lines. It is the DNA of the company, is real, and is lived every day. There is reality, and there is appreciation and articulation, of reality. It is possible to ‘sell’ a candidate an untrue story about an employer, but the reality always emerges. It is ROI that counts in recruitment, not transaction costs. Recruitment is too important to be left to one person, whether in-house or outsourced. It needs the entire
company to participate in every day actualisation of the intention, and contribution of the company, and for that story to be commonly heard in the language of the company, both internally and externally. Recruitment needs to be the business of the line. The people who are
national recruitment agencies to try to harness these independents into a substructure, run by themselves. In the past 10 years, for obvious and simple to understand reasons, the independents have walked away from these arrangements. The best independents are thriving. For national recruiting companies, this is bad news. Local SMEs are mopping up the best from the best talent pools. Understanding recruitment is very simple. It is about
attraction, listening, interpreting, acting, and delivering. A small amount of time is spent administering. All technology does is accelerate attraction from the second best level of candidates.
living the brand need to be part of the recruitment process. The internal team putting all that together needs power, and respect. They need to earn it. The reality of quality recruitment is that it is and will be carried out by humans. Results are about ROI, not about transaction costs. Centrist, organisationally neat companies find recruitment very irritating, and try desperately to reduce it to a process that can be centrally controlled, and preferably done by computers. However, the best recruiters are not easily found. The future of competitive recruitment is to find them, gain their trust, and inspire them to deliver to your company model.
John.Mortimer@
angelamortimer.com
December 2017/January 2018 CHAMBERLINK 41
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
