Is recruitment for high jump?
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With more and more firms using the internet to hire new staff directly, is the clock ticking for the recruitment industry?
Dick Fosbury famously transformed the sport of high jumping through a fundamental shift in mindset and technique, producing a staggering change in performance — in HR terms a 'transformational change'.
As in the high jump, so in recruitment, with firms increasingly going to market themselves rather than using third parties. Need convincing? Just look at the number of organisations advertising direct on most of the major job boards. One recent example is a technology firm that reduced its agency hiring from 82% to 23% in three months.
Such firms have invested in web-enabled channels to market. More and more are using bespoke on-line behavioural and technical tests as early as possible in the process, vastly reducing the time and resources spent on critical face-to-face selection and assessment. Both hiring-managers and candidates alike use web portals to manage interviews and post-offer administration.
Why, then, this shift? For some, like Royal Mail, it is a cost saving both in terms of advertising spend and head-count. For others, a consistent employee brand proposition is more important, or simply a pragmatic solution — if I can do it myself, then why on earth would I pay someone to do it for me?
For the recruitment industry, this is a profound threat — not only is third-party hiring vastly reduced and limited to where there is a requirement for deep-seated knowledge during the assessment process, but it has also fuelled the explosion of recent RPO deals, which tend to support direct-sourcing strategies.
For the time being however, there are still enough chief executive officers and HR directors who view recruitment as a cost or an overhead — they have yet to shift their thinking to where recruitment is viewed in the same light as any other business unit and return on investment is the name of the game. For most recruitment firms that is good news. But all that could change.
Mark Gilbertson Peak Talent
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