When Robbie Cowling was
motorcycling to his Basingstoke workplace from his home in Essex and each day
passed on the other side of the road a motorcyclist going the other way, the
thought occurred to him that if the other guy was an IT contractor like himself and
they swapped jobs they’d save themselves both the 3 hour commute!
Robbie goes on the found
Jobserve and become one of the architects of the single most significant event
in recruitment history; the introduction of the Job Board. Whilst the move from
print to digital significantly reduced the cost of attracting candidates, it
did not however change the agency process – Groundhog Day.
The basic process is the
same whether you’re in executive search or recruiting temps: take a job
description, source possible candidates, identify the best candidates and
introduce to the client. It is usually transacted by a small group of
recruiters and may involve a very large and far-flung group of potential
candidates who need to be “identified” (relatively easy), “approached”
(time-consuming) and persuaded or “engaged” (tricky).
The reason the recruitment
sector reminds me of Groundhog Day is that (with some exceptions) each time an
agency takes a brief it starts the process from scratch. This is arguably
because the candidate market is in a state of constant change and the best
available candidate 6 months ago may not be the best available candidate today.
This is where the “consultancy” in Recruitment Consultancy comes.
However…
Collectively the estimated
100,000 recruitment firms in the world know virtually all the candidates in
every market “personally”. They’ve all been contacted! Every SAP Consultant in Spain,
every Lawyer in Israel, every Accountant in Australia, every Engineer in the UAE has been identified, approached
and engaged! The gold’s not buried! It’s all been mined and is selling in
the market. All you need to do is find the right Recruiter that’s already got
the right Candidate.
In the same way as someone
living in Essex and working in Basingstoke doing exactly the same job as
someone living in Basingstoke and working in Essex makes no sense, so too does the
concept that the traditional highly engineered approach to recruitment is the
only way to use the agency sector. There’s a massive resource of existing
relationships out there that you could tap into in a matter of hours.
Now seeking business partners
to act as Associates (sector experts) and Country Managers (distribution
channel leaders). See website for details or email david@vacancy-clearing.com
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