Member Article

Online recruitment – revolution or anti-climax?

Mention online recruitment and different things come to mind. Job boards, for example, with their CV databases. LinkedIn and other social media.

Mention online recruitment to an executive recruitment company, and reactions are mixed: “Online doesn’t work for senior executives.”

“Job boards are rubbish.”

“Someday LinkedIn will be how everyone gets hired.”

“There’s no substitute for face-to-face.”

Online recruitment has indeed produced a revolution in how people look for jobs, and how companies hire them. Not even 20 years ago, CVs were distributed by fax or post, and job advertising existed in only a few types of printed media – daily newspapers, and business and trade journals.

Today, most executive recruitment firms would struggle to deal with a hard-copy CV. Print advertising is in long-term decline and social media waging war with the job boards to decide which will dominate and survive.

Ever since the mid 1990s, when the first job boards came online, some observers have predicted the demise of the recruitment industry. If employers and prospective employees can connect directly and easily, what role would the recruiter play? That “disintermediation”, however, never happened.

What happened was the recruitment industry became expert in the use of job boards and adopted them as their own, as a way to provide a faster and more cost-effective service to clients. One leading UK executive job board reports 90% of its adverts are posted by recruitment agencies on behalf of their clients, rather than by the clients themselves.

The same predictions, and the same dynamics, are now at work in social media, particularly with respect to LinkedIn, the business/professional networking site. We see, in turn, the same adoption of social recruitment by agencies looking to improve their service to clients. While LinkedIn initially focused its recruitment offerings on direct employers, but more recently (following the money) has rolled out platforms and products specifically for the recruitment industry.

Executives Online’s ‘21st Century Recruitment’, published earlier this year, surveyed 1,200 managers and executives across the UK and continental Europe to discover companies’ preferences, tools and methods for identifying senior talent, and compared their answers to those given six years earlier.

The results of that research said that, despite the online revolution, much has stayed the same: The fundamental challenges of identifying and engaging people – leaders – to help drive an organisation’s success have not changed. Even the nuances and priorities within the process of matching person to profile are strikingly similar: Finding people with the right cultural fit and the speed of recruiting those people are as important now as then.

Across the diverse cultures and economies of greater Europe, there are differences in attitudes and experience on certain aspects of executive recruitment – economic outlook, average employee tenure and attitudes towards job boards, for example – yet consensus on the core priorities, such as job profile elements and the candidate’s fit to them being the most important consideration in recruitment.

‘21 Century Recruitment’ confirms that most companies continue to use a range of recruitment tools and methods to identify senior managers and executives to hire. There is no ‘magic bullet’.

Online innovations such as social networking sites and, before them, job boards, facilitate connections between prospective employees and the companies that might hire them, but paradoxically this makes recruitment more difficult, increasing the time and process invested in screening out the less promising applicants and identifying the best – work that, no matter the electronic method used to gather in applications, still must get done.

With the rise in new online tools, it is surprising to note the degree to which personal connections continue to drive the recruitment process in most organisations. Employee referrals were rated as one of the best ways to identify good people and personal relationships – knowing and trusting the individual recruiter who will be doing the work – emerged as the single most important determinant in choosing a recruitment provider, outranking the track record of the firm, pricing or speed of service.

In particular, EO and other relatively newer entrants to the interim market aim to harness online marketing to accelerate the recruitment of interim managers for clients. This means that many organisations now see the tactical use of interim managers as a valuable strategic option or even a source of competitive advantage.

Will disintermediation ever happen? We think not. Larger companies may bring recruitment in-house, reducing their use of external suppliers. Such companies must hire large in-house recruitment teams. Online tools increasing access to candidates doesn’t mean the work goes away.

Recruitment, particularly for executive and interim roles, is a nuanced process that must take account of a candidate’s accomplishments, career path, ambition and personality. Not all of these can be assessed by machine; others appear to require human judgment. Getting it wrong (hiring badly) is an expensive mistake.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Paul Barron .