Whilst many in-house recruitment teams may be trying to reduce, or even eliminate, their usage of third party recruiters, our recent Quarterly Recruitment Review showed that consultancies remain a key route to market for over 50% of businesses and 60% of jobseekers.

In this guest post Adrian Kinnersley, Managing Director of Twenty Recruitment Group, looks at five reasons why it pays to still keep them in the talent acquisition mix…

“One of the major objectives for any in house recruiting team is to drive down costs by reducing the reliance on third party recruiters – an objective that many feel can be met more easily in a digital age. My view however, is that a reliance on social media and other networking tools is not only short sighted – it’s a false economy. Recruitment has many business models but I believe that good recruiters will be at the very heart of the corporate future because:

• Talent is not a commodity – it has opinions and options. It can also be unpredictable, irrational, high maintenance and uncommunicative. As recruiters providing a professional service, we can take into account all the intangibles and freedom of thought from all parties which prevents the existence of ‘black box recruiting’
• There is too much margin for error – A bad hire is so much more costly than a recruiters’ fee. A recruiter can help qualify what a client actually needs and market map that role against competitors to avoid clients heading down blind alleys when defining job roles and department structures.
• It’s a labour intensive process – A good recruiter should provide information on what type of candidate a client can expect; what other companies are looking for the same skills; advice on how to position your role and company to appeal to candidates; present multiple candidates and identify what their ‘hot buttons’ are; manage the interview process; manage the offer process….I could go on.
• Recruitment has to be high touch – The mobility and flexibility of talent in the global generation is the most valuable corporate currency of the future. Being able to attract, extract and deliver talent has to a high touch service – being able to just see where it is in a social network just doesn’t cut it.
• Talent has a choice – Candidates want to interact with a recruiter because they want a variety of options; they want to have a clear idea of their market worth; they want background , advice and coaching on interview technique; they want advice on how to go through the resignation process… they want a consultant.”

Adrian Kinnersley is Managing Director of Twenty Recruitment Group, a specialist finance, technology and engineering recruiter with offices in London and New York

What part does chance play in business? There are many examples of new inventions or business concepts coming to fruition almost by accident, by a chance occurrence that leads to a change in the way we see things.

Recruiters have often been divided over whether their work is art or science. What part can a chance meeting play in the hiring of the perfect candidate?

In this guest post Adrian Kinnersley, Managing Director of Twenty Recruitment, wonders if our current recruitment processes are reducing the likelihood of this happening…

“Serendipity is often described as a happy accident or it can be described as the ability to make creative use of a chance idea or person or event. But in business we are almost always hard wired not to do this. Why? Because often we are totally focussed on the drive for efficiency through systems and process and so fail to grasp the broader perspective.

I was reading an interesting article about this recently which argues that in business we are often at the mercy of chance to locate the people that we should be working with. The piece on CNN authored by Thor Miller said quite rightly that: “There wasn’t a recruitment company that brought together Lennon and McCartney, Jobs and Wozniak, or Ben and Jerry. Each of these people put themselves in motion — they escaped their isolated environments or routines long enough to bump into each other. Circumstance brought these personalities together, but to achieve success they had to connect, see something in each other and ultimately take the initiative in pursuing the partnership.”

So what has this to do with recruitment and RPO? Well recruitment companies used to be excellent at performing this function. We’d work to get to know a client, their goals, the mission and values of the company and not only would we submit CVs for people who fit the current brief but when we met people that shared the same passions, values and goals as the company we would make an introduction and suggest a meeting.

These chance meetings often took a lot longer than a traditional hiring process for a live role and sometimes amounted to nothing more than a pleasant exchange of ideas or theories. They also often resulted in those companies actually making hires, amending plans and evolving for the better or gaining new customers and revenue streams. This is simply not possible through an often highly policed recruitment portal in the form of a traditional RPO format. Continue reading “Is the RPO Model Killing Serendipity?” »