5 Reasons We Should Remember the “Good Old Days” of Recruitment

Hopefully we all have our own personal history that we look back on with fondness and nostalgia.

It could be a childhood vacation, being away from home for the first time to attend University, or the birth of your first child.

But whatever your personal, joyous memory, I’m sure you realise that all nostalgic memories are ever so slightly false.

We look back on happy times through rose-coloured glasses and filter out any difficult or troublesome elements.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Good memories should remain so.

As long as we don’t allow them to ruin our common sense in the present.

When we watch Mad Men, for instance, it’s guilt-tinged fun to chuckle at the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, misogynistic lifestyles of the 60s. But no sane person would really want to work in that kind of environment anymore.

Maybe in 40 years someone will make a TV show about life in the recruitment industry during the 1990s, and we’ll all be delightfully horrified at the testosterone-fuelled antics of money-obsessed recruiters in the 20th century.

It’ll probably feature these five relics of recruitment’s “good old days”…

1.    Lies, Telephone Calls and More Lies

Half the day spent calling businesses using a fake name to try and get the contact details of the decision-makers, and the other half of the day ringing those people, telling a couple of fibs to get past the gatekeepers, all to ask if the client has any vacancies that need filling.

Nostalgia: The thrill of the hunt. The excitement of landing a lead. The competition between recruiters to hit lofty targets.

Reality: Having a manager standing over you, making sure you hit your call targets created a pressurised environment. No matter how much management used bonuses and rewards to drive telephone calls, it was the part of the job that most recruiters hated. And the people receiving the calls didn’t care for it much either.

Modern Recruitment: Contingency recruitment has always and will always be a volume business, so it was a given that recruiters would spend most of their time on the phone using, shall we say, creative techniques for getting a foot in the door.

It was effective, no question. But for every successful telephone call that resulted in an assignment, there were several dozen irritated business people that got cold-called along the way.

Some measure of cold-calling still has its place in modern recruitment, but these days targeted marketing and networking is more effective. And because retained and managed service contracts are the norm, the pressure to make 100 calls a day is a thing of the past.

Quality over quantity is the focus.

2.    Email Blasts to Spam Folders

Half an hour crafting an email. Blast it out to 10,000 people. Sit back and wait.

Nostalgia: Refresh your inbox every 10 minutes, waiting for those opiate receptors in the brain to light up when a lead comes through. Minimum effort for maximum reward.

Reality: Most of those 10,000 had already blocked you. And the rest were hitting “delete”. Success rates were fabulously low but at least it was less troublesome than making telephone calls.

Modern Recruitment: Email regulations are more relaxed for business-to-business marketing, so this “throw mud at the wall” approach still goes on. But it’s far more effective to nurture a smaller list with quality information using a professional opt-in system.

Social media is also very effective for engaging the market and establishing your authority.

Every recruitment campaign produces a handful of disappointed candidates, and it used to be a quick fix to blast their CVs far and wide hoping to land a quick bonus placement. But candidates, and clients for that matter, deserve more care and attention to detail.

Quality candidate and client matches don’t happen through brute force but through careful assessment and consideration.

3.    Mining Databases for Gold

Receive a new assignment and the first job is to email blast the details to every candidate on the database (sometimes including those the recruiter has previously placed – naughty), looking for a quick response.

Nostalgia: A quality vacancy sent to a large database could yield a dozen CVs in a matter of hours. A quick browse to pick out the top five and you can present the client with a quality selection in record time.

Reality: Most candidates quickly became fed up with receiving endless emails. And those who responded positively were often a poor match for the vacancy. The shortlist presented to the client would have had minimal assessment and were a long way from representing the best candidates on the market.

Modern Recruitment: Again, quality over quantity. Candidates can be assessed using competency questionnaires and behavioural surveys to create a well-rounded profile that goes way beyond a mere CV.

Reviewing candidates from previous campaigns is a part of the process but it’s only one step towards gathering a shortlist. A deep dive into the market will turn up quality candidates that aren’t on anyone’s database but are an excellent match for the vacancy.

4.    Creative CV Polishing

An “average” candidate becomes a “great” candidate with a little artistic CV work. A little experience-tweaking here, a little skill-padding there, and the shortlist positively sparkles.

Nostalgia: Placing the candidate that everyone said no one would ever hire is a great feeling. Marketing at its finest.

Reality: The reason why the candidate was struggling to find a placement was because their skillset was lacking and their success rate was below par. It’s great for the candidate that they landed a job, but not so great for the client who has to let their employee go after only a few months.

Modern Recruitment: Marketing a great candidate is important, but putting forward a candidate that you KNOW is unsuitable for the role helps no one. In-depth assessments work for a reason – it ensures that placements stay in the role long-term.

12-month retention rates for placements should be in the 90 percent range. With the science-based tools available, there’s no excuse for anything less.

5.    360 Recruiter Heroes

The best recruiters manage every step of the assignment, from marketing the firm, to selling the role, to closing the deal.

Nostalgia: Everyone cheered when the first recruiter of the year broke six figures in fees. The spectacular success spurred everyone else on to new heights.

Reality: One or two elite recruiters kept the firm afloat until they realised that their earnings were propping up everybody else’s failures, and they decided to go off and start their own recruitment firm.

Modern Recruitment: A recruiter should be focused primarily on caring for their candidates and helping employers figure out their recruitment needs. Sales and marketing are still part of the job, but they’re supported by facilitators and by a time-saving systematic approach that makes the job more accessible to more people.

Recruiters come and go, but systems remain. Which is why the system is critically important for everyone involved in the process.

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What do these five relics of recruitment have in common?

Don’t cheat. Skim back over them and see if you can figure it out…

It’s that they were all about what was best for the recruiter and the recruitment firm. The employers and the candidates came a distance second.

This wasn’t just because of cynicism or greed – a recruitment business, like any business, needed to be profitable to succeed and this drove the development of these practices and a culture of self-interest.

Modern, forward-thinking recruitment is different. It takes a long-term view. It considers that what is best for the candidate and the employer is ultimately best for the health of the recruitment industry as a whole.

Like it or not, recruiters are middlemen. And no one likes middlemen unless they bring valuable knowledge or skill to the table that improves the end result for everyone.

We’ve moved on to an age of recruitment where everyone in the process matters. And that’s a good thing.

We should remember the “good old days” of recruitment, not because they were better but because they’re a mark of how far we’ve come. A bit of nostalgia for how things used to be is fine, but let’s not begrudge the march of progress. It’s why recruitment has a brighter future.

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