Social Networking - Is This The death of the recruitment industry?
Finding candidates has never been easier. Is this the beginning of the end for recruiters?
With the success of social and business networking sites over the last few years finding candidates has never been easier.
Whether you link them in face them out or have tinkle with twitter accessing potential candidates is now just a few clicks away. It’s not just the ability to immediately access candidates; the sheer volume of people you can identify has increased in its thousands. Immediate access to hundreds of millions of potential Candidates free of charge must mean the beginning of the end for recruiters, is this “the death of the recruitment industry”?
When you combine this with low cost job boards and online recruiters charging fixed fees it surely must be the end for Professional recruiters who are charging 25-30% fees.
Twenty minutes writing an advert or preparing an e-shot of your vacancy, a couple of clicks of a mouse and hey presto you have it. Millions of potential candidates free of charge. All you need to do now is just wait for the responses to flood in, which in most cases can be immediate. Facebook has over 300 Million users, Twitter has 55 million monthly visits, LinkedIn has 45 million users and all are free to access.
No recruiters to speak to, no haggling over fees or payment terms to negotiate. In those immortal words of the Dragons Den’s very own ex recruiters James Caan and Peter Jones “I’m in”.
Let’s link, Twit and Face our way to millions of candidates without having to pay a fee.
No more phone calls from recruiters with someone who is the best person in the world ever (although they don’t look right on paper).
No more being badgered just many happy hours watching your inbox fill up with responses. It’s amazing! What value can recruiters possibly add?
The answer is…
Recruiters now add even more value than ever. Recruiters in their simplest form offer a find, funnel and filter service. Yes it’s correct that the finding of candidates is easier than ever and the volume of responses is far greater than ever before. And it’s this volume of responses that poses the problem as this makes the filtering and funneling a thousand times more time consuming than ever before.
Companies with a high volume of vacancies have to decide do they become recruiters or do they use recruiter’s services. Where the time to take a vacancy to market has reduced dramatically the time to taken in screening the responses has increased plus the people you have contacted passively may not actually be looking and this all boils down to time, your time. How much time are you prepared to invest in the screening process and how much money does this time cost you? You then have to control the process and more importantly the control candidate(s) which takes more even time (and dare I say it, skill). Is your opportunity really their favorite? etc. etc. Recruiters have a more holistic view of a candidate’s situation or circumstances and what are the deciding factors.
The focus of internal recruiters is to provide cost effective (more likely cost reducing) recruitment services; the focus of a successful recruiter is the reputation they gain by placing people who are successful. The question is do you want to save money or make money. Saving money may not help you make money or achieve your financial targets especially when you consider that a high percentage of candidates placed by agencies come from referrals and they are never on the open market.
Time and cost are important factors but what about the people you hire, do you want to hire the absolute best people available at the time you are hiring or if you forgive the pun the best people you stumble upon.
When companies are competing for survival hiring the best people available will help you maintain a competitive edge, save you time and increase your profits.
One Response to “Social Networking - Is This The death of the recruitment industry?”
Interesting read…
Your very right! it’s the same for many business sectors, in
that the internet has opened up a ton of options but its still the quality of service that matters!!! People will always invest in “brands” that they trust to deliver a great service, it’s entrepreneurs that scoop up these services to package them and make sense of them.
Food for thought… Twitter still hasn’t proven it can make money yet(to date it hasn’t made a dime only raised venture capital!), and Facebook still hasn’t found away to leverage advertising revenue out of its 350 million users!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/06/facebook-350m-users-advertising
It seems the ground is still hot for new services and ways to leverage these social networks and anyone who can, will do very well indeed…
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