Recruitment Consultants: as Dead as the Dodo?

Hiring companies are moving away from jobs boards and recruitment companies and moving towards social media as their dominant recruiting tool.

Between current economic conditions, the evolution of the internet and dwindling HR budgets, the traditional approach of finding a candidate is becoming increasingly redundant. Are we counting down the days to the demise of the recruitment consultant?

A recent online survey, the Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010 asked 600 participants between May and June if they plan to use social media. 92% of those answered that they were planning on using social media to find future candidates.

The social networking site most used by companies for recruiting was, not surprisingly, LinkedIn (78% of respondents), followed by Facebook with 55%. Twitter saw most of the growth over the 2 years since the survey was last carried out in 2008. It was used by 45% of respondents in 2010.  

On the most part, spending on more traditional recruitment tools, like placing ads on jobs boards and using third-party recruitment firms had either decreased or stayed constant. On average, 58% of companies had successfully hired employees via a social networking site.

For the majority of companies in these trying times, given the choice, they would forego the traditional route of hiring staff through a recruitment agency. The expense alone is often enough to put hiring managers off - usually 3 months of the new hire’s annual salary.

Often outing feelers out into a company’s own social media network will bring back more relevant results and will find candidates with a knowledge of the organisation and with suitable skills to boot.

Recruitment consultants may be paid employees with specialist recruiting skills but there are instances where an unscrupulous recruitment consultant who is simply out to make a quick buck, at the expense of everything else, often including the client and the candidate, will put forward a candidate purely for the sake of it.

There are also times where a recruiter may not put a candidate forward for a role simply because they don’t have the relevant experience needed to interpret or understand what they can offer.

Or, they haven’t really got to grips with what the client needs. Most of the time a candidate‘s details are pulled out of a database via a keyword/tag search without being given a thorough once over.  When writing a CV, don’t bother with the long-winded finely crafted prose, appeal to the search bots rather than human eye. Shove a list of bullet points in there and you’ll get further.  It seems that way anyway.

When it comes to looking for specialist digital roles, say an experienced search manager or PPC marketer for instance, they are more likely to be filled by recruitment consultants. Specialist agencies that employ consultants with experience in a particular niche are worth their weight. Consultants can properly evaluate the candidate’s level of experience and succinctly apply that to the needs of the client.

There has been one recent high profile instance where an actual job offer was been made via social media.

A young developer and Stanford University student built YouTube Instant; a YouTube version of Google Instant.  YouTube Founder, Chad Hurley offered Feross, the super star developer, a job offer via Twitter.

Feross is currently settling into his new job at YouTube. Talk about cutting out the middle man.

Photo (cc) Stéfan.