Matthew Jeffery
Head of EMEA talent acquisition and global talent brand, Autodesk

Recruitment in the future will be about building value to your communities and keeping them engaged

Now is a great time to be a recruiter. But what lies ahead of us. How will recruitment evolve in the future? What will recruitment in 2020 look like?

Recruitment (4.0) will see:

• Recruitment moving from a cost centre to being a profit centre
• The death of many recruitment agencies
• Job boards faltering as communities grow in importance
• External referrals via ’crowd-sourcing’
• VIP/premium ’paid’ content and ’Pay for’ mobile apps
• Recruitment embraces concepts from ’Gamification’
• Global community ratings of companies: ’Crowd-sourced company rankings’

Recruitment 3.0 is all about building communities; recruitment 4.0 is about the ’value’ of those communities.

Cost or profit centre?

Recruitment has traditionally been a cost centre, sucking money from the business, be it through ’post, spray and pray’ job postings or dreaded high-cost (low-value) agency fees.

Now imagine recruitment actually becoming a profit centre. How is that possible?

More targeted recruitment and a focus on passive candidates has resulted in a sharp decline in costs. The costly services of recruitment agencies and job boards are geared to the active pool. Unless agencies present unique talent from the passive pool, they will die.

Then consider the world around us. Value is defined differently. Companies like Zynga and Facebook have huge valuations, often above their profitability. Why? Because of their reach, potential and mass following their ’engaged’ communities.

Today power lies in networks. Networks are data. Data is power. And data is money.

Combining a recruiter’s recruitment database in some organisations, amounting to thousands/millions of names with social media communities creates a ’valuable’ community. And don’t forget these databases and communities will have been built as a mix of direct sourcing, direct attraction and targeted employment brand activity.

That community is firstly a potential asset for referrals. Why not ask your community for recommendations? ’External referrals’ through communities will become commonplace as recruiters use marketing techniques to reward referrers, building up points/rewards/league tables before monetary rewards kick in. Crowd sourcing of candidates as well as crowd sourcing of ideas will be a huge asset to recruitment.

Advertisers need the targeted communities that recruiters are building. Why not cross-charge internally the marketing team to advertise to your community? Marketing happily charge recruitment for their services and creativity. Taking this a step further, why not allow (when it does not conflict with the brand) external companies to advertise to your community at a charge?

Engagement is key

’Engaged’ communities is the key here. Recruitment is fundamentally boring. Many companies in the UK still don’t understand this, and merrily set up Twitter pages and Facebook pages with a list of jobs and a hyperlink back to the jobs board. Playing to the active community. Would you subscribe to a community and view a list of jobs if you were not looking? Answer no, unless your life is unimaginably dull.

’Engagement’ takes many forms but the key is revealing behind the corporate ’iron curtain’ and actively entering in two-way transparent communication. Revealing behind the layers of the onion skin what life is like. ’Humanising’ the brand.

As content gains that engagement, as communities achieve repeat visits, the chance then comes for recruiters to create ’VIP’ or ’Exclusive’ access areas with content that people are happy to pay for.

This applies to both the corporate careers site, which needs to have repeat visit content, and, perhaps even more relevant, to mobile phone apps. People want instant conversation and information 24/7, and the mobile is the key vehicle to feed that insatiable desire. People are happy to pay for mobile phone apps. But such apps must offer much more than merely job board content.

How to keep people engaged? Embrace ’Gamification’. This is not about posting a game online which people are charged to play. Instead, learn from social games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars the psychology of what keeps people coming back and engaging.

Are you ready?

Not every recruiting leader is ready for ’next generation recruitment’. But ask any CEO: who would you prefer leading your recruitment function your current recruiting leader or someone who has:

• not only identified and mapped-out key talent but also built relationships with them
• built engaged communities
• has a successful social media strategy that enhances employment brand proposition, with a positive spin on consumer/product/service brand)
• slashed recruitment expenditure
• and now brings the business proposals of how to turn recruitment into a profit centre?

Times are changing for recruitment. Ready for the ride?