Winter Rant - what's wrong with the recruitment profession?

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Permalink Reply by Gerry Crispin on September 8, 2010 at 9:08

I get that a good 3rd-party recruiter is focused on sales, especially sales for the near term [if they want to put food on their table] but, since I'm in it for the career as well (and so are some of my colleagues within corporate settings) I make distinctions between those recruiters who are 'invested' in staffing and those who could [and probably will] leave the world of staffing tomorrow for new horizons as automotive, rug, or vacuum cleaner sales reps.

Let me give you an example. One of my friends in the US, let me call her Karen B, is, by my assessment, a truly world-class, third-party recruiter (and leader). She has been around for awhile. She is focused on a specific area of skill, knowledge and experience (PR and Communications professionals). For many years (and still to the present day) she tracks down young graduates coming out of the various Masters programs in dozens of the best schools and gives them the benefit of her advice about pursuing a successful career in PR and Communications. She invests in hundreds of these newly minted and early developing professionals. She will not place any of them in the short run (often for many years) but she will follow up with all of them periodically and spends hours with some of them without ever a concern about whether they will be placed by her (many of them had her home phone # before the smartphone era). Several key schools now ask her annually to come to campus and address the entire graduating class from the Communications program..which she does. She attends all the major PR and Communication conferences in the US. She pays her own way. She schmoozes well of course but, during the day she goes to EVERY session, takes notes and passes on what she learns to these up and coming pros and encourages them to get involved and give back as well even if their firm won't support it. She also attends half a dozen national staffing conferences in the US and goes to EVERY session, takes notes and brings them back to her home city, Chicago, where the local staffing chapter (which she founded) then brings in the best speakers.

There's much more but you get the idea.One of the things I make a point of doing is going to staffing conferences as a student and noting who shows up to learn. It's actually how I met KB. I've recommended her (not referred) to half a dozen clients in the last decade and she makes me look very good.

So, here's my learnings:

1. When I was a recruiting leader (at Johnson and Johnson more than a few years ago) I was happy to give lots of external service suppliers the time of day but, any one who wanted to be on my 'partner' list needed to first show me how they are 'invested' in my profession. I grilled them on that first and it told me all I needed to know about how well they were going to represent their prospects to me. To work with world-class staffing leaders and recruiters in world-class companies, third party recruiters that take it up a notch know that pitching my firm on twitter isn't any more useful than dumping a bunch of quickly vetted resumes into my system.

2. In the future, employers won't pay more than a token for 'finding' someone but, if you KNOW the people in some area of expertise well, you will be my go to supply-chain because I cannot develop pipelines for every job family...just the critical ones and you really do know who is ready. The larger firms in the US have reduced their dependence on 3rd party firms to about 2.5% of their openings...and it will fall further.

3. Did I mention that she is successful? On so many levels. BTW, these days seek out people who invest in our profession like KB and find more ways to tell employers to use them. There are many more folks who get it than you might imagine.

So, rather than pitching your client with the problem of being seen as ingratiating yourself or helping the competition place a better candidate, show me you are meeting people who I may one day want or need and that you are teaching them to make better career decisions without regard to who is placing them. Seems to me that Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin would make that goal so much less costly time-wise in the long run.

You are right Paul. that does feel better...only it is Summer here.

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