The changing face of recruitment

We've been recruiting at Pepper Stark now for over 5.5 years and I decided to look at what I saw as being the key changes and recent developments within recruitment that have changed the way we do business.

What has fundamentally changed over recent years is the vast number of ways in which we are able to communicate to candidates as well as continue to engage with and interact with them. As a recruiter the ability to connect and communicate with people via LinkedIn, facebook, twitter etc as well as traditional email marketing to provide updates and information is invaluable. All communications to be of value to the person that receives them need to be targeted and relevant. Communicating to the masses works when the mass is well segmented and messages tailored.

As a recruiter the importance of meeting a candidate and spending time understanding their background, experience and their career objectives is the key to being able to successfully help them find the role they are looking for and develop their career. Getting to know someone personally also ensures you find out how they like to communicate and receive information and this is then the best way to keep in touch, never forgetting the need for personal interaction in any kind of business relationship. You have to build trust as an individual and a business as well as brand awareness.

For our business to continue to be successful we need to put continued effort into the human contact. We hope that our clients will continue to come back to us when they have a recruitment need because we know them and what they need from their staff. As we successfully match candidates with clients we hope that referrals both online and offline will help us continue to build our business organically.

For me, perhaps the biggest recent change within recruitment is the dynamic of job seeking. It has always been possible for employers or recruitment agencies to research and headhunt specific candidates. Now candidates can control the access the employment world has to them and what they proactively depict. More importantly, access to this information is now immediate.

For a long time, employers have been able to see your CV if you have posted it to a job board and that employer pays to get access to that database. Now any company can view your online CV on LinkedIn for example for free, or a video CV on YouTube as well as tracking you down on facebook or twitter and find out more about your personality and interests just by googling you. This means a candidate can job hunt reactively to a greater degree and wait for companies to find them as well as using these social networking or online tools to be proactive in their recruitment networking.

And there will be much more to come…

 

Posted by Liz Pepper, 31st January 2011