Individual recruiters are being targeted to join the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC).

As part of what chief executive Kevin Green calls “a bold agenda” for the trade body in 2009, the REC aims to attract individuals working
in in-house, online and recruitment outsourcing operations.

As outlined by Green to Recruiter, the REC’s agenda for the coming year will also include:

• re-energising and growing the existing 21 sector groups and expanding by eight groups for early 2010
• putting in place a new corporate governance structure
• building regional activity to support individual members
• delivering a variety of new research, training/ development and market information materials
• rebranding the organisation as an institute for recruitment professionals, with a name still to be decided.

A significant portion of the REC’s attention over the coming year will be aimed at offering services, materials and programmes for individual members, at a time when, according to Green, the trade body is re-emphasising its commitment to members (Recruiter, 10 December
2008). The initiative to broaden eligibility for REC membership is one strand of the trade body’s strategy to both relaunch the individual membership proposition and to increase the number of members.

“We’re going to broaden the offering, so it’s not just open for people who work in recruitment agencies; it will also be open to people who work in recruitment in the corporate sector, online recruitment and in vendors,” Green told Recruiter.

He continued: “We’ve got 6,000 [individual] members. It’s been at more or less the same level since 2000. We want to grow. We want to double in size over a fouryear period, but we need to improve the offering, and there are lots of things we intend to do.”

Improving the service

At the core of the improvements will be “a whole host of new offerings” such as a sizeable management database delivered by, and cobranded
with, the Chartered Institute of Management, career development products for consultants, and business support research and information
for owner/managers and consultants, Green said.

“Our regional activity will become focused much more in support of the individual member,” Green added. “We’re going to set up more local networking meetings focused around the individual consultant. We may well establish branches to do that at some regional level, and we’re going to refocus some of the activity of the regional directors around the development agenda.”

Sectors will get added emphasis in the REC’s redevelopment as sector groups become one of the body’s preferred channels of communication with and between members. “All members will be — as part of their REC membership from the beginning of 2010 — part of a sector group,” Green said. “At the moment, it’s sort of an opt-in, opt-out thing. What we’re going to do is make it part of the membership fee. When you join or renew, you become part of a sector group.”

Insiders have suggested that attendance has traditionally been low at meetings within some sector groups. When asked by Recruiter about the reported lukewarm response to the current groups, Green said that only 16% of the 3,600 REC member businesses were currently signed up to sector groups. “At all of the [sector group] meetings I’ve attended, there have always been 13, 14, 15 people in a room, which in these times I think is quite reasonable,” he argued. “We’d like more people to attend the meetings — of course we would.

“We’ll strengthen the offering so there are chairmen and executives on each of them driving the agenda forward within each industry. A lot of the central REC stuff will be about supporting those sectors,” he said.

Another key point on the 2009 agenda is to rework the existing board of directors structure. The current arrangement consists of 12 representatives of corporate members and seven individual members. Green said that the governing body’s membership will be expanded to 24 at the REC’s AGM in June “so it will be more representative”.

Of the 24, six will be appointed to work with Green and the staff team “on a more regular basis” in the roles of chair, two vice chairs and heads of committees for finance, policy and standards. The new structure will “make us more agile, more responsive”, Green said. He added that trying to work with a full board on each and every issue throughout a year was “like trying to herd cats”.

Increasing professionalism

A longer term vision is to increase the recruitment industry’s spend on training and development, which Green equates to greater professionalism. “As an industry, we don’t invest enough in our people,” he said, offering a figure of 1% of industry turnover as the amount spent currently. “So some of my objectives over a fouryear period are to increase the spend on training and development, increase the professionalism and the amount of people in the industry with qualifications.”