Recruitment after the crisis - 10 observations/ideas for the future of recruitment.

It is said that innovation is the mother of necessity. If someone would have told me that I will spent 10 weeks (and most likely more) in home office I would have said this person is crazy. But now its fact. We collectively went to home office from mid of march and the whole company works now in a setup, which would not have been thinkable before this crisis. This weeks in homeoffice triggered a thought process, challenging the current patterns, which made me think if I was oblivious about the reality. It is clear for me now that a lot of the daily routine in recruitment industry miss to be sane, agile and effective. I believe that a crisis reveals the strengths and weaknesses of an industry and could be a driver for change. Let us have a look on 10 observations about the future of the recruitment industry:

1.) People/Employee’s resilience to crisis

From my observations I was deeply impressed how people adjusted to the crisis. Not only our employees, but also our families and the whole society absorbed the initial shock of the lock down and adapted quickly to the new reality. I believe that the strength shown here will be the core driver for the transformation of our private and business life after the crisis. The crisis will have a long-time impact on this generation by transforming our values as well as our habits.

2.) Meaning of work

In my job I speak to a lot of different companies and I notice a mind shift as the industry is transforming away from an organizational top-down (“better control then trust”) approach. The crisis will re-adjust the meaning of work. I believe that the future of work will be defined by a personal and employee-led definition of work. Each employee will thrive for his individual experience and the engagement with the employer will need to be based on trust and will be based on individually defined core principles and work setup.

3.) Home Office does work and reduces unpleasant daily commuting experience

Due to the lock-down we have now reached the ideal commuting time – and based on my conversation with most of our employees that’s “zero”. After hearing this feedback, I have looked up the internet and have seen that Londoners commute an average of 74 minutes a day (UK average 54 minutes). Reflecting my travel patterns and having friends flying every week from Zürich to London or to Berlin, I must admit this was insane. Why didn’t we reflect on this more? We now understood that home-office does work, and we will see a lot of employees demanding more efficiency by more then 20 hours per month of commuting time.

4.) More time at home – for a better mental health

Fortunately, our company has invested heavily in our IT-Infrastructure – our CRM Salesforce is web based, our employees equipped with Laptops or can connect their desktop easily with the help of our helpdesk. Since we have founded this company before 10 years, I have never spent more than 2 weeks subsequently at home. And besides of the crisis we need to navigate our company through, I must admit that I like working from home and that it has a positive impact on my mental health. I invest more time in my family and doing sports regularly. On another article I wrote about burn out in the recruitment industry and I opt for mentally healthy employees in which work is part of life rather life part of work.

5.) Agile Networking instead of office-based communication

Today I read in a study that 68% of our employees wish that homeoffice will get an integral part of the future work space. I started to think about the benefits and the typical behaviours we have in office life. Did you ever thought about what really are the benefits of Face 2 Face social interaction and daily F2F office collaboration versus using Microsoft Teams? Huge parts of our daily work and coordination surely can be done online. Recently we added a online recruitment session (digital-recruiter.com) to our training plan - and it works perfectly. I think the future of work will be "agile networking" - where the trained employees are capable of operating and organizing independently and own process control then an agile network of colleagues will work primarily home-office and meet for certain defined occasions at an office with a flexible desk policy.

6.) Drive a real digital operating model in recruitment

Due to my network in the recruitment industry I often get the feeling that we live in the digital age, provide (digital) experts yet in recruitment have the opposite of a digital operating model. Ask yourself, how many people you still know in the recruitment industry which are working their “secret” excel spreadsheets? An old fashioned and ill way which totally ignores that "data" is the new gold. And being self-critical I am asking myself why I never hired somebody based on a videocall only? A digital operating model must start with the Vision & Strategy of a company and is not only about the Technology (CRM, Platforms etc.) and the processing of data, more important it is about the people (Culture & Responsibilities) and the ways of working and engagement with clients and candidates. Recruitment Agencies must start to set the “digital” strategy right, but it is us – the individuals - which must start working “digital”.

7.)   Leadership/Management “as a service”

If each individual member of a company works in an agile networking setup, then leadership will emerge from the interactions between people rather than from the specific capability of any single individual and contextual factor.  If an organisation does offer transparency of targets and strategy, then leadership will grow in a culture of trust and leadership will be part of the system and more a service level then an institution of power. Leadership will be part of daily live and carried out by “ordinary” people every time someone shows excellence and craftmanship, shares information and creates fun at work. Naturally, this will influence the definition of daily operational management as well, as the management needs to be then more an enabler rather than a controlling instance. Over the years I found out that most recruitment companies have incredible levels of inefficiency and complete polarisation of outcomes from the people. In a lot of recruitment firms 20% of the people generate about 60% of the Net Fee Income (GP) and management consumes so much time in tracking KPIs of low performers (as due to the high fixed salary of the employee must be driven in productivity) or dealing with problematic people who don’t play by rules but can afford as they are successfull. This consumes eternally management time and energy, creates collective office disharmony, lack of unity and politics. Future management “as a service” will need to stop with this erratic approach and focus to enable a work environment which is compliant, well functional, flexible and evolving. Main tasks will be to support the networking in the organisation, building up knowledge repository and taking care that employees can “book” management services as they need them.

8.) Remote work will change office rental usage and decrease overall fix cost

Looking at the Profit & Loss overview of our business, the second largest cost (after salaries and commission) are rental costs. Reflecting not only on the fixed rental costs but also on the costs of running three offices in Zürich, Munich and Hamburg this setup doesn’t seem to be future proven as well. The consequence of more home office work will be that the individualised workspace environment in own offices will reduce. I foresee the future of work being more in “fancy” WeWork-ish environment with very small sales floor and shared desks with big focus on meeting rooms rather then paying monstrous offices rents for inflexible rental contracts in Munich and London. Less overheads (office, seat cost, support staff, travel time, travel costs, etc.) will generate more earning potential for the sales consultant but also for the company.

9.) Increased activities of UK based recruitment activities in Germany.

The german culture is very process and engineering orientated, hence the success of global brands like Siemens, BMW, Mercedes or Lidl. The UK culture is much more orientated to a sales and service culture and has developed some of the best technical staffing companies in the world, including the likes of Hays, Michael Page, Robert Walters and SThree. I have had more than 1000 clients telling me about the “UK recruiter” pestering them on the phone, but I also had hundreds of  clients telling me that they staffed the position via UK, because they offered the best candidate on contingent base. The incredible comparative statistic in staffing is that there are around 60,000 staffing companies in the UK compared to about less than 10,000 in the german speaking countries. This is a intriguing statistic as the entire german speaking staffing market is about 30% larger than the UK. Hays has about 3% market share in the UK but more then 10% in the German Speaking Countries. Due to the extremely competitive nature of UK staffing companies, they attract more and more specialists and therefor extend their global and local presence. The recruitment companies in Germany and Switzerland, offering perm contingent approaches, will be faced with competition from the best UK staffing (vertical specialisation, aggressive BD, fast delivery, agile workforce, low social burdens and therefore flexibility). In the new age of remote and digital interaction, some of the UK staffing companies will increase their market share and increase the presure on local staffing providers.

10.) Size the chance and change the future!

Whatever time this crisis will consume – it is up to us to restart our approach to thoughts, beliefs and setups. What do you think about the vision of a recruitment agency that has little office space, little to no commuting or travelling, less expenses, that have virtual trainers not office managers, transparency in leadership, an open communication, reduced control mechanism, employee specific and personalised engagement models as well as flexible base salaries and very high commission potential. This setup has little room for office politics and wasted management time dealing with it. It can support highly invested top performers but also lower performers which set their personal targets just in a way to support their individual living setup. This will truly a setup intriguing for clients, candidates, investors, managers and employees. We just cannot continue “same, same but different” after this crisis, we have a moral and ethical obligation to change the future and stop obsolete behaviour.

Are you interested to engage with me in a discussion about this points? Please comment, like or send me a personal message. I am looking forward to engage with you.

Sources:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-55758-7_3

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2019/workforce-engagement-employee-experience.html

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/stuck-in-commuter-hell-you-can-still-be-productive

https://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/in-business/londoners-commute-74-minutes-every-day/

https://www.abhishek-tiwari.com/leadership-as-a-service/

https://www.underthehood.fi/operating-model/operating-model-continuous-business-transformation/

(https://www.diepresse.com/5804385/arbeitswelt-was-corona-verandert-hat).