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?” »