How Recruitment is Changing – For the Better
Recruitment, like many industries, is constantly having to adapt and change. We’re affected by so many factors – technological, economic, political even – and keeping up is both challenging and, often, quite a lot of fun.
Lately it’s been nothing short of inspiring to see how the recruitment community has come together, in more ways than one. First off, we’ve seen many recruiters unfortunately lose their jobs due to the pandemic – and a resulting massive uplift in open referrals to colleagues, clients, old friends even, to help them secure a new role. Next, there’s the jobseekers: I for one have observed, on multiple occasions, recruiters sharing profiles of amazing candidates they’ve worked with at some point, with no expectation of a fee of any kind; simply trying to help the many people who’ve been made redundant here in the UK.
But more than just banding together, the recruitment industry as a whole seems to be changing, almost certainly for the better – and I’d love to hear what my fellow recruiters and recruitment are experiencing. Here’s how things are looking from our end.
We're doing even more retained work.
Retained projects are somewhat of a holy grail for recruiters. Simply the commitment from a business who’s saying, “We’re putting our trust in you to fill this role,” is quite something when it comes to motivation. It means taking the utmost pride in our work, every step of the way. These days, we’re finding clients are actually out to find the right partner to fill roles for them, resulting in us picking up retained work every week.
Frankly, it feels great to finally be able to demonstrate why retained search is simply more effective. This shift is something we’ve known to be inevitable for a while, as people begin to realise the value in guaranteed-outcome recruitment; you wouldn’t work with an IT service provider who told you their service works some of the time, would you?
Which leads us on to…
Employers are finally learning the benefits of exclusivity.
We might have been singing this song for years now, but there’s a reason: working with one agency is simply more productive (provided we do our job properly, of course).
From an employer’s perspective, conducting a recruitment campaign with just one source of talent (minus your own direct/internal applicants) is undoubtedly going to save time, hassle and admin. Outsourcing a process to two, three, five suppliers ultimately means receiving as much work in return as a result, from arranging terms of business to corresponding with multiple parties at every stage through to, quite simply, having to work out which candidate came from where, and so on and so forth.
Furthermore, again, motivation is a real thing and the opportunity to prove ourselves is a strong way to achieve it. Much like retained search, giving a partner like us exclusivity means you simply know that we’re putting every foot forward to find you the absolute best candidates we can.
And with that in mind…
We're being held accountable at every stage.
Recruitment has a bad name – there, I said it. This is because there are too many outs for ‘bad’ recruiters; too many gaps for quality control to slip through, along with best practices which aren’t regulated. Now, with the advent of more retained work and exclusive projects to work on, guess what? It’s on us.
Accountability makes us work harder, aim higher, be better – and we’re not ashamed to say so. This is an industry-wide thing; we’re seeing our peers up their level of service, and less and less ’recruiter bashing’ happening as a result. There’s no longer a place to hide in recruitment: this time, the industry’s doing things right.
Covid has affected many things and, whilst we know the Certus name has already been built on exceptional service, we think that perhaps this pandemic was the push into that next level the industry as a whole needed. What say you?
