Random Ramblings re: Recruitment

As a trainer with 20 years’ experience in recruitment I am lucky enough to have the chance to talk to some pretty intelligent and well-informed people, both inside and outside of the recruitment industry. One of my favourite topics for discussion is how the recruitment industry is going to/needs to evolve.

At this time of year, there are a whole host of future-gazing articles popping up all over social media – often written as part of a marketing campaign promoting something or other that will help you in the future.

This collection of thoughts (I hesitate to give it the grand title of ‘article’!) is not promoting anything in particular, it’s just some 'stuff' I have been thinking about recently. I freely and unashamedly admit it’s a long one – if you’re a TL;DR type person, it probably isn’t for you!

A.I.

Other than being the title of a film starring Haley Joel Osment that makes me cry like a baby every time I watch it, A.I. is often heralded as the beginning of the end for huge numbers of professions – Recruitment, Customer Service, Accountancy… you name it, a lot of people are saying that robots can probably do it better/faster/cheaper – so there will be no jobs left for any humans to do.

Nope. All kinds of nope. I don’t believe this at all.

It seems to me that the primary drivers behind automation at the moment are 1) making things easier and cheaper for business, and 2) making more money for businesses by enabling customers to serve themselves.

Am I the only one who believes that in an age where everything is automated, there is a place in the market for a more personal, bespoke service? The retail market is a prime example – at one end we have self-service checkouts and Amazon, and at the other we have personal shoppers and ‘experience-led’ shopping. The retail staff of the future are experts who excel at adding value to their customers through relationship building, empathy and ideas. They won’t have to do the ‘donkey work’ stuff of ringing things into a till.

In recruitment, when labour is plentiful and you are doing high volume/low skill recruitment, there is undoubtedly room for automating huge amounts of the recruitment process.

However, will robots be able to replace humans when:

·        You need to reach out to passive talent – people who aren’t interested in changing roles?

·        You are recruiting for values, soft skills and potential rather than hard skills?

·        You are dealing with humans who are nervous about a huge life change like moving jobs?

·        You are facing a candidate-led market and, in order to hire the best, you need to stand out?

I am all for embracing tech that automates the donkey work, but the important thing then is to look at what the human workers can do with all the time that is freed up. Recruiters can invest so much more time in relationship building, creative thinking, and becoming a real business partner.

Recruitment ‘Plus’

Being a Chartered Member of the CIPD as well as an Honorary Fellow of the IRP (now branded REC Professionals) I see the most successful recruitment companies of the future following a similar path to the one that HR has travelled in recent years.

HR started as ‘personnel’ – a largely transactional model that looked after people processes and payroll – then moved into Human Resources, then became HR Business Partners, and is increasingly now finding its rightful place at the Board table.

Recruitment started in a similar vein – largely transactional and focused on ‘bums on seats’ – and yet good recruiters are already acting as business partners, investing time in understanding their clients’ organisations, and helping them to design and implement effective recruitment strategies.

The best recruiters in the market are going even further, and proactively seeking additional ways to add value to their clients – extending their service offering beyond pure recruitment.

So, what are the areas where I believe the best recruiters can add value? What about:

·        Real Business Partnering – a seat at the table to look at strategic planning and the recruitment issues and options associated with it

·        Expert Consultancy – reviewing and advising on clients’ EVP and employer brand

·        Expert Advisory – supporting best practice in areas such as reward and retention

·        Training/L&D – especially if we’re advising to hire on potential/values and then train

·        Compliance and Risk Management – employment law and HMRC regulations (e.g. IR35)

One of the best things clients have said to me is “you feel like one of us” – I heard it as a recruiter, and I hear it now as a trainer/business consultant. The recruiters of the future will integrate more closely with their clients and become multi-functional, adding so much value they make themselves indispensable. (Their work will also be hugely satisfying, as they will be much closer to their clients and will really get to ‘feel’ the difference they’re making.)

We’ve Got Reward All Wrong

I am an avid reader of business books. One of my go-to authors is Daniel Pink. In addition to the fabulous To Sell is Human, his book Drive reveals some really interesting stuff around motivation and getting results.

Research shows that money is a great motivator for repetitive manual work, but for any role requiring the application of cognitive ability and problem solving, using money as a reward can decrease productivity!

I know from personal experience that even the most generous commission structures simply cannot get some recruiters to apply themselves and fulfil their potential. The most detailed KPIs - with as much nagging as you like! - tends not to work either. A competition with a leader board and prizes can have much more impact – even where the prize is a chocolate medal!

Daniel Pink’s book says the three main motivators are actually autonomy, mastery and purpose. These conclusions are drawn from a huge amount of global research studies by the way, not just plucked out of some academic’s head.

So how does this translate in the world of recruitment?

Firstly, hire people who genuinely believe that recruitment is one of the best jobs in the world because you transform lives and empower organisations to be successful through having the right people on board (purpose), then talk about that purpose all the time! Remind people that what they are doing is important and they will take pride in their work.

Secondly, give recruiters great training and regular feedback so they know they’re always improving (mastery). Always be coaching and upskilling your recruiters. Send them to industry events and encourage a learning culture. Get your staff to train each other – every organisation has their stars… the one who’s brilliant at using the CRM, and the one who has lots of sourcing tips, and the one who writes killer job ads – make sure that the team supports each other and celebrates everyone’s strengths.

Thirdly, set them objectives, but don’t micro manage them with ‘one size fits all’ KPIs or tell them exactly when they have to do their sales calls (for example). Give them the autonomy to choose how/when they achieve their results. If you manage by outcomes, you create space for innovation, new ideas, and flexibility.

There are already some recruitment businesses out there who don’t pay commission because they know there’s more to motivation than money. They may pay profit share, but some don’t even do that. They pay a sensible salary, they still have KPIs, and they have recruiters who behave more like in-house recruiters and nurture great relationships with their stakeholders because they’re focused on good recruitment rather than their next commission cheque. (It also helps their stakeholders to get away from the ‘you would say that, wouldn’t you – you’re trying to get your next placement fee’ cynicism.)

Is your commission structure actually getting you worse results than your staff are capable of producing? It’s possible, says science.

Are We Getting Pricing Wrong Too?

On the pricing front – why should a recruiter be paid a lot less for recruiting someone with a lower salary if they are just as hard to find and engage as someone on a higher salary? Shouldn’t we be pricing according to the amount of work involved in delivering the end result?

If you place one person on a ￡100k salary, is that really 10 times the work of placing one person in a ￡10k part time role? Sometimes, perhaps. Always? Probably not.

Where pay is low, the percentage fee is generally low too, meaning I have seen recruiters staying late and really ‘busting a gut’ to fill a job or a booking that is generating so little gross profit, they’re actually going to make a loss when you take all that time and effort spent on filling it into account. I’m telling recruiters not to work this kind of low paying, loss-making stuff – but too many care about their clients too much to say no. (That’s not what a lot of people would expect from a profession that is too often seen as being ‘only in it for the placement fee’, but it reinforces my argument above that money really isn’t the biggest motivator.)

Some professions charge by the hour. Some sectors have standard, gold and platinum service packages. Why is the recruitment industry so wedded to the idea of a percentage calculated on pay? I’m not suggesting the kind of fixed fee offerings that fuel a ‘race to the bottom’ – those companies that do a fixed fee of ￡1,000 (or even less) for any placement always make me wonder how many compliance and quality corners they must be cutting to make that sustainable! – but surely there is a better way to ensure recruiters are charging a fair rate that reflects the work they are actually doing?

Conclusions

Honestly - I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I am a great believer in listening to as many intelligent people as possible, reading as much as I can about current research/thinking and what other people are doing successfully, then using that information to make better decisions.

I believe that if you are one of those people with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, you need to consider an alternative if you want to still have a business in the future – “if it ain’t broke, I’m probably not looking hard enough – everything can be improved”. I’m not talking jumping on trendy bandwagons here, or change for change’s sake – I’m talking about regularly taking time to step back and ask yourself how you could do things differently, and challenging the things that ‘have always been done that way’.

I’ve read some great books recently – Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game, Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human, Katrina Collier’s Robot-Proof Recruiter, and Greg Savage’s The Savage Truth to name a very small selection of my favourites. There are some great resources online as well – Hung Lee’s RecruitingBrainfood.com and the Social Talent Blog from Johnny Campbell and his team are two I’d really recommend. In an industry that’s all about people though, it’s hard to beat sitting down over a coffee with someone else who loves and is excited by this industry as much as you do, and talking about it.

On the subject of which, I’m planning on attending the Recruitment Agency Expo at Olympia in February, so if you fancy a coffee – send me a connect request/send me a message and we’ll set something up!