Hiring is not Recruiting in 2010
Seth Godin is Dead On: Hiring is not Recruiting in 2010 One of Seth Godin’s recent blog entries differentiates between hiring and recruiting and gets at the heart of what I’ve been moving toward through all of 2009–the idea that the recruiting profession as we know it is largely dead and just doesn’t know it yet.
In summary, Godin’s piece asserts: “Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you’re accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they’re doing and come join you.”
The majority of what passes for recruiting is not recruiting at all. It’s rote hiring, posting a job online and waiting for the applications to roll in. If you are an employer with a recognized brand name, you’ve got a fair chance of attracting hundreds of candidates instantly even if your job description is utter crap. In our still-depressed job market, maybe you don’t even need to be a recognized brand.
That’s going to change.
While Godin’s short piece focuses on the question of whether the job you’re hiring for is cool enough to be recruiting-worthy–a good question in and of itself–I’d like to focus on the question of the implications for the profession of recruiting itself.
Why Recruiting Will Change in 2010
While companies have yet to fully embrace social media technologies, they are now at least mostly aware of them and accepting of the fact that they are here to stay. Despite their terror, we’re going to see companies in 2010 and beyond begin to embrace these tools for the purpose of engaging with communities of talent for their hiring activities. Why? Mainly because they’re being dragged kicking and screaming in to this space by high profile customers who bring their issues there (see the Whirlpool example). Once companies get that their customers are there, it’s not a huge leap to realize that their next employees will likely come from the same place.
The unfortunate aspect of all this for anyone with recruiter in his or her job title is that the technology also disintermediates. In other words, if a hiring manager has great LinkedIn connections or is simply a good networker, why bother calling the need out to recruiting? Why get lost in the bureaucracy and paperwork of an HR department’s corporate hiring function?
If you are a corporate recruiter, you had better be able to do more than just post a requirement, run a phone screen, and forward a stack of resumes to the hiring manager. You need to be creative at finding, engaging with, and staying in contact with the communities of talent you want to make hires from.
If you’re a third party recruiter, 2010 will mean further erosion of your fees and profit margins unless you can know and be known by the talent you mean to hire. Third parties don’t win unless they are faster and better at networking, able to articulate why a position is worth leaving a stable job, and effective at winning the trust of both customers and talent.
The sky is not falling. It has already fallen, but I run into to many recruiters think it’s still there. The best recruiters are those who truly do recruit and can demonstrate their valuable expertise by again and again showing their deep connections with and commitment to the talent communities from which they hire.
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