The Internet Killed The Recruitment Star
‘As a result of changes brought about by the Internet, in recent years the recruitment industry has become much more transactional and price-driven, rather than the people and relationship-focused industry I’d originally joined.’
This is part of an email I recently received from a recruiter that has over 10 years industry experience, a high profile and by all reports is very good at their trade.
This email got me thinking about 5 ways the internet has impacted staffing and recruitment.
1. Proactive sourcing and talent identification.
With the evolution of social software and subsequently online social networks and resume databases, talent has increasingly become more visible as society becomes more comfortable with creating and sharing content on the web. No longer can a third party talent supplier’s main value proposition be the size of their propriety databases and exclusive access to certain talent pools. We now have skilled sourcers and researchers who have finely tuned skills that enable them to find candidates using the telephone and the web. These people have the skills to build networks and identify prospective candidates in a job category and industry at rapid speeds, which can potentially mitigate the competitive advantage that traditional search & recruitment models claimed to have.
2. Networking
I’m not in the generation that had a “Roladex”, but I identified the value of contacts and networks very early in my career. The internet has brought profound changes to the way we engage with with our business and social networks. Never before have we been so connected…so ‘linked in’… had so many ‘friends’ or follows… but it seems, at least to me, that the value of real-world personal relationships is gaining greater value in the digital world we live in. Having said that, the internet has given us the opportunity to connect with more people, in more places, more often - essentially giving “networking” scalability. Lastly, I have found doing some background research on a person I have not met before gives me better sense of who they are and what interests you have in common, which makes building rapport easier.
3. Referrals
There has been a lot of research about the Referral channel as a source of hire and the benefits of employee referral programs and refer-a-friend programs. These schemes have been in place for decades, but with the evolution of the internet referral programs can be designed to use web applications, giving jobs a greater distribution through a referrer’s social graph. Tools like Jobvite & the JobGenie have integrated referral platforms with social networks like Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter which allow the social sharing of jobs.
3. Productivity and efficiency.
I remember faxing resumes to clients (there, I said it!). Having said that I was also the first person in our office to have a PC on their desk. I vividly recall those days standing next to fax machine (with, upon reflection, what was probably 10% of the Tasmanian forest in my hand) with a bunch of resumes that were going out to clients for the following day’s interviews. Sometimes I would literally wait for up to 45 mins near the fax, waiting for the confirmation that the transmission went through. Email brought great efficiencies here, however the flip-side is that now it’s too easy to send a resume application via email to an online job ad.
4. Job Classified Advertising
The internet gave birth to the online classified market with sites like SEEK satisfying a huge market need for cost effective advertising solutions for the advertiser, and a more efficient search and application process for the jobseeker. As I touched on in the earlier point, the low barrier to apply to a job has created issues of relevancy and also increased the time it takes to screen and respond to all candidates that apply to a job. Candidate experience is now a primary issue for employers and agencies alike.
5. Background checking & your digital footprint.
Now, I’m not a lawyer and this is still a grey area for some people, but those of you who think it’s unethical to do background research on a candidate before interviews or without the persons consent need to get over it! My view is that if you share information about yourself on the public web - then it’s there for public consumption, so my advice is be proactive about managing your online reputation and think about Google when you go to upload that photo to facebook, send that drunken tweet or post that politically incorrect comment on a blog post.
THE VERDICT: My view is the the internet has had a very positive impact on the recruitment and staffing industry. Recruiting is and will always be about relationships, relationships with talent, relationships with customers and with your team. The internet have given birth to a suite of tools to enable us to build and maintain relationships with more context and with greater scale.
In response to my colleague who sent my that email, recruiting today is even more about people, relationships and community than it has ever been because we live in such a hyper connected world - and the relationships that you have invested in should never be commoditised. My advice to you is stay in the industry and politely tell your customers that want to commoditise what you do to go and find another supplier - and only work with the customers that value the relationships that you have invested heavily in.
UPDATE:
Some other views on the background checking issue below
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Hi Riges,
Great post. It’s certainly been an interesting evolution of communications, and in our business, that’s the area where most of our gains are made.
One question, particularly given all the recent discussion around background checking on the web. If you heard an active candidate having an argument with their spouse in a public restaurant, would you use that as part of your character reference? Would you tell the employer that this person had a violent temper, or was a bully? Would you extrapolate this to comment on their potential workplace relationships?
I’d suggest it’s tremendously unethical to begin a relationship that’s based on trust by doing background checks without a candidate’s consent. Technically, you’re within your rights to physically follow your candidates to the pub, the gym, the coffee-shop and listen to everything they say. The only difference between physically doing that and using the web to do it (through social media like FourSquare) is that if you do it in person, they’ll see you. And probably object.
Respecting the basic humanity of your candidates/talent means recognising that they’re not always employees, and have personal time (and space) in which to exercise that time. Using that to sketch out a background for a candidate without their consent isn’t just a ‘grey’ area - it’s a statement about how much your organisation is willing to ignore the privacy of people for the sake of business. And that’s a slippery slope indeed.
*Employee difference of opinion below, beware! :)*
Have to say that personally I disagree with point #5 on background checking. I’m a firm believer that people should be assessed in a professional capacity for a role, and not in any other way. How people spend their time online can be for a multitude of reasons, and when people are using technology socially I don’t believe it should form part of the recruitment process in any way.
I’m happy to look a candidate up on LinkedIn, as it’s a place which is clearly defined as a professional space. Facebook is mostly used as a social tool, so for me it’s a no-go zone in a background checking capacity.
I guess it’s similar to the reason I disagree with the practice of “backchannelling” (reference checking people with peers and contacts without gaining permission) - people should be given the chance to represent their professional selves without fear of their entire lives being under the microscope.
That’s just me!
Hi Riges, how you been?
As per others’ views, great post. Still looking for a place in my head is this conclusion that ‘for recruitment, people, relationships and community are more important than ever’.
If we say that it is easy to ‘reach’ or ‘connect’ just like dexterous sourcing specialists would, then that component of the value chain is kinda commoditised by definition?
This being the case, what is more important than ever is the skill of the recruiter to select/filter/assess fit (whatever school that is: behavioral, psych, head/tails), right?
From that follows the question as to whether the recruitment industry is prepared to stop chanting that they are in the people business, in lieu of being in the people selection (and rejection) business; which as you know is no capital sin (well noone’s come back to tell us yet).
Stay well and hope to see you in Melbourne soon
ps Kel! whatcha doing disagreeing with the boss online. what do you think this is? 2010
Following the interesting discussion with both Kelly & Jared today I wanted to point my two cents worth in here as well. These are mainly from a corporate perspective not necessarily just the agency view point.
I am a firm believer that if it is in the public domain then there is nothing stopping anyone from viewing the information, hence public domain. If you do not want someone to form an opinion of you do not put your opinions in the public domain, period. However I also firmly believe there has not yet been enough discussion/education around how people should use these social media tools to ensure they proactively protect their online reputation. Very very few employers provide any sort of education as part of induction. Why? They cover ethics, confidentiality etc etc.
There is also an area that needs to be looked at around disclosure. In the same way as police checks have to be disclosed, should recruiters and employers be having to prepare a social contact on what they will or will not check?
The flip side of this is the discussion today stemmed mainly around the negative side of things. If a candidate applies for a customer service role and you find out they are an senior moderator of an online forum does this not add weight to their ability to do the job? Extend this to fields of research, technology, medicine etc where people are publishing content online all of this should really form part of the review process.
There is a view point that using LinkedIn and Google to check on candidates is ok but Twitter, Facebook etc not so. This is a very dangerous area. It is all about context. Who said Twitter is only personal or professional, same with Facebook etc. The only one that is more clear cut is LinkedIn, but even that is falling with the ongoing integration of tools into LinkedIn. Add to this the continued push for real time search anything that is done anywhere in the public domain will end up in Google etc, therefore Google search cannot be limited to just viewing professional content.
There have been some high profiled cases in Australia over the last 5 years where a simple Google background search would have stopped some very serious miss-hires.
The up shot of this I see is twofold. We need more disclosure about what organisations are taking into account, but even more so we need education of candidates about their digital footprints and what they might mean next month, next year or even in 5 years.
I have lots more on the topic but it is almost 1am so end of soap box.
As a Recruiter it’s great to hear there are such diverse views out there on these issues. My view is that if I were a client of a recruiter and despite owning two recruitment businesses I am a sizeable one, I would, like many clients find it difficult to distinguish one recruitment organisation from another. So given that difficulty of differentiation in the industry this is a great issue to differentiate yourself on.
In the blue corner we have the recruiter who says I will assess a candidate only on what they present i.e. CV, list of worded up referees, an interview, maybe some assessments and your polished up linkedIn profile.
In the red corner we have the recruiter who will assess all those same things and in addition every other piece of information legally available i.e. Market mapping of the industry they work for which may uncover feedback on their performance and work style, any Social Media profiles and comments by them or about them, any media reports, any articles, any images that they feature in, information on alumni groups, old school groups, clubs and comments they may have made on forums connected to any subject whatsoever.
Now as a client with my money on the line both to the recruiter but also in terms of the overall cost of a failed employment decision looming large, which Recruiter will I choose to find the employee who will add value to my business with the lowest risk of recruitment failure?
Before answering this rhetorical question lets remind ourselves generally that people get hired for their skills & experience as they are the easiest to assess & generally get removed for behavioural and personality issues which are more difficult to assess. Also increasingly in many organisations work and non work time in many industries have a degree of blur and to make an effective assessment on the behavioural and personality fit of person to the culture of a particular organisation requires a look at the evidence of a life lived not just the created facade erected for the recruiter by a candidate.
I’m not for a minute suggesting you have to do it secretly, but you don’t need their permission either i.e. ‘Mr. Candidate please beware that we will be incorporating the ‘Age-on-line’ article about your fraud charges in the assessment process’.
Can I firstly say that the discussion on this issue both on this blog and on twitter is truly representative of the great minds we have in our industry and I think we have some great thought leaders in Australia. Flattery aside, here’s where I’m coming from.
In my view, employers should have the right to be able to make informed hiring decisions, and if reviewing information that is in the public domain is part of that process, then they should have the right to do so. Similarly, I’m of the view that employees should also have the same right to do their own level of due diligence about a prospective employer or manager that they are considering working for to ensure that they are joining a company that aligns with their values. As it stands, the debate seems to have been focused exclusively on prospective employees being researched/background checked but similarly issues apply when the tables are turned.
The short supply of talent is a long term demographics based issue and the focus now is more about employers and hiring managers telling their story (EVP, Employer Brand etc) by articulating what’s it’s like to work for a company by exposing the true personality of their managers and their company culture. As you all know, companies are now using social media to engage in the conversation or distribute this type of content. Websites like Glassdoor.com allow employees to anonymously post reviews of employers and CEOs - I don’t hear anyone questioning if this is ethical? I have a similar view here, employees deserve the right to make an informed decision and their career, and if that decision is conditioned by the information they find in the public domain - then so be it.
We recently hired someone that researched me online before approaching me to join our business, did I feel violated? No. Did I feel stalked? No. Why? Because I control my online reputation and ensure that anything I put in the public domain, I put out there with the understanding that people will find it and use that information as part of their decision to engage with me/us or not!
Now, for the record - I have never background checked prospective employees on Facebook and I would only research a prospective candidate’s digital footprint when they were at an advanced stage in our process (with their consent) Having said that, employers that are making investments in people deserve the right to be able to make informed decisions.
Having read the Twitter feed on this issue and the comment on this post very carefully, it seems that most people see the negative implications of this. Let’s look at this from a different perspective, a positive one. I will use Kelly’s comment on this blog as to demonstrate a my point. If Kelly was being researched/background checked by a future employer (any competitors reading this, stay away - this is for demonstration purposes only :-)) and they came across this post and her comment respectfully disagreeing with her employer on an issue she is particularly passionate about, what would that demonstrate? As an employer, it would demonstrate courage, strength of character and conviction in what she believes in.
In summary, my point is about proactively managing your online reputation (employers, agencies and talent) because when you publish information in the public domain (positive or negative) it may be found and used (ethical or not) to make decisions. And for me this is not a question of ethics, because the practicality of the situation is that background checking is happening whether you agree with it or not. So why not focus on what’s in your control and that is your online reputation.
[...] the concept of using the content from social media as part of background checking. All started by Riges Younan from [...]
Hi Riges!
I finally got round to responding! I see the majority of the comments centre around the background checking debate. I was on the same call with Michael, Kelly and Jared so they are more than aware of my feelings on that but i do touch on it below. Mike, im going to read through your series of 4 posts seperately in the next day or so as they looked interesting.
I also wanted to comment on the wider points you made, so here goes.
I think we have to look at the Internet and consider ourselves fortunate that it exists. It’s such a powerful medium, both practically for business but also from a humanitarian perspective.
Closer to home, there is no doubt that the Internet has benefited recruitment in many ways. Your first point is a good example. The Internet, via social media, search engines and the like has provided a fantastic set of tools for researchers/resourcers. In my day, we had the telephone and printed matter – the memories of doing the ‘ident’ as we called it still send shivers down my spine. That’s why I have the upmost respect for researchers and resourcers – far more than many of the search consultants who they support who often treat them like second-class citizens.
Networking and referrals have also been greatly enhanced by the Internet so no argument there.
But I have to call time on you Rigues for the other areas you mention. And productivity has to be questioned I’m sorry! Despite all the advances in technology and processes, very little improvement has been made in the overall recruitment supply chain. Lead times – they real key measure – have barely changed and in some cases have increased. And don’t get me started on overall ‘customer experience’!
The sad thing is that, despite all the advances of the last 20 years, the distance between the hiring manager and the prospective candidate has just got bigger and bigger, with pretty dire consequences.
And whilst its great to celebrate the advantage to direct sourcing the internet and especially social media bring, the truth is that for the vast majority of the volume recruitment market in the UK (Which now includes mid level professional roles) this plays little or no part at all. Direct sourcing has all but disappeared in many of these companies. Resourcers or researchers typically only exist in research firms, in-house teams or executive search firms.
The vast majority of recruiters are now sucked into a world of KPI’s and financial targets etc, which do nothing to support good resourcing. Consequently they are caught in the spray and pray merry ground where they post their – largely poorly written - job ads onto the job boards. This in turn generates a continuous stream of CV’s from candidates who have fallen into the ‘a job is only a click away’ mindset.
It is this perpetually poor model that I suspect your colleague refers to in his email. To pretend that this reality does not exist for him is, frankly, patronising.
What we have single handedly failed to do is re engineer and simplify/sharpen up the processes that are captured within the online environment and this has created some significant issues.
And despite what you may think, Job boards have NOT satisfied “a huge market need for cost effective advertising solutions for the advertiser, and a more efficient search and application process for the jobseeker.”
Don’t get me wrong, the market wanted a cost effective advertising solution. But having spent the last year analysing the effectiveness of our not insignificant job board spend, down to placement level, I can tell you it’s not cost effective! I can share my numbers with you if you like. The problem is that most job board customers – the recruiters themselves – don’t ever measure the effectiveness and therefore just assume they deliver.
Re the last point on social media background checking, well I’ve blogged about it:
http://garethmjones.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/facebook-snoopers-paradise/
so no point in repeating myself here. Suffice to say its wrong. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what exactly they are looking to ‘check’ on social media that they cant already check more accurately, professionally and ethically in other ways. Please enlighten me if you can think of something. Otherwise we are left with trying to make some kind of judgement from opinions on twitter streams and blogs, and photos on facebook and flickr. Wow, some really robust selection tools and criteria there!
Like I said, I do recognise the benefits. And I applaud your ‘walk away from commoditisation’ approach. But not only is that a short term solution; Re invention is the only alternative.
Finally, i would echo your comments on the real positive element that this kind of debate brings - not really possible before the internet and to some extent social media. I find the debate not only stimulating but also educational, especially from a global perspective.
Hell, one day i might even be persuaded to change my opinion on an issue, as long as its not social media background checking!
Hi everyone,
Apologies this is late but there’s been lots happening in the trenches this week.
I think it’s important to remember that recruiters are professionals and that’s what they do for a living. They know about all the relevant legislation which tells them what they can and can’t do.
From someone on the front line can I tell you that it is still a struggle to get everyday Managers up-skilled in the area of recruitment. Generally they don’t have to do it all that often and they figure HR will figure it out for them. Time is always an issue they tell you.
Some managers I have had to tell that they can’t ask how old the applicant is and that they shouldn’t be making assumptions about the country they came from. I’ve had a panel say that they didn’t want to hire a young person because they didn’t look nervous enough for the interview and that they were a smart ass because they made a joke.
For this reason, I don’t think we should be encouraging the general population (i.e. Managers and some HR people who perhaps aren’t skilled up enough in this area) to engage in social media background checks.