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Recruitment Thoughts


Recruitment and recruitment effectiveness is, of course, something that I am deeply interested in. It is an activity that takes up a huge amount of corporate resource – both in terms of time and in terms of money. And yet there seems to be very little systematic measurement and it is still seen as a ‘black art’. It is also a mind blowingly fragmented market. Literally thousands of companies (I believe the REC quote 12,000 – but I am open to being corrected) and thousands of job boards and millions of people involved in one capacity or another. This complexity makes it even harder for both the candidate (job seeker) and employer (hiring company) to find their way through the maze.

The advent of on line recruitment has both improved and worsened matters at the same time. The sheer volume of data adds tremendous complexity. I chose the word data to illustrate the difference between data and information. At the moment there is an excess of data and we have not yet fully mastered the conversion of data into information. Intelligent IT systems that can do this for us are in their infancy and frankly it is just a matter of time before service providers such as CV writing coaches and indeed candidates themselves learn the new trick of the trade.

I can remember the early days of online applications (not that long ago, actually!). Indeed I was one of the first people to use Monster (I cannot claim huge personal insight, alas, since we used TMP at the time as our recruitment advertising agency and they offered a free trial!). For the first few years as a company we refused to accept on line applications. Clearly not a position we could sustain for too long (not indeed would wish to) but we had a well established speculative application process and a large internal database of potential candidates and the drop in quality and increase in work presented by electronic CV submissions was something we wished to avoid.

I run a Website – www.HireScores.com – which allows candidates – and employers – to rate their experiences with recruitment agencies. I have been delighted by the positive way that this site has been greeted by recruiters. Indeed getting candidates to rate is harder than getting recruiters to register! One real concern for recruiters, however, is that if they are getting thousands of applications for each vacancy, how do they give the applicants the level of personal service that both parties would aspire to. This is a topic in its own right so I will return to it in another article.

When considering effectiveness in recruitment I think, as with most things, progress will only be achieved through the combined efforts of all the players – in this case – candidates, employers and recruiters. Taken as a whole there are a finite number of candidates and a finite number of jobs and the trick is matching these in an optimal way. The first piece of complexity comes when there is an imbalance between supply and demand since this introduces competition – either competition for resource or competition for jobs (in reality both). The second piece of complexity is introduced by the involvement of intermediaries – intermediaries who both improve the process and indeed help make it possible – but who are also in competition with each other. Using simple organisation design principles, progress is best achieved when there is a full alignment of interests. Most organisations put a huge amount of effort into alignment of employees and corporate goals – and this is a controlled environment. The question is, therefore, for the uncontrolled environment of recruitment, with competing goals, how can progress be made?

Published by: Lisette on 02/05/2009 - Add a comment

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