Recruiters, your job is changing !

It’s 2020 and thanks to technology the in house recruiter has a very different role.

When talking with our clients I sometimes get the impression they feel as though they are seen as little more than well paid PAs. This is not to belittle what a damn good PA does (they are life savers) but what I mean is that the in house recruiter seems to be seen as a go between from agency to candidate, from hiring manager to candidate, from hiring manager to job board.

Most of the in house recruiters we work with are bright, highly capable people and dare I say it…...probably not stretched enough. Too often they are bogged down by some admin heavy duties instead of being unleashed to exploit their full potential. Ok, enough waffle….here’s what I’m getting at.

Picking up on Bill Boorman’s excellent blog post, we are also seeing a trend and are adjusting our product accordingly. So here is what is happening.

The increasing adoption of easy to use, low cost recruitment software means that so much of the time consuming administration can now be done by the hiring manager in seconds.

1. Post job to careers site - easy, 1 click and it’s live on your ATS powered careers portal.

What’s stopping the hiring manage doing that themselves?

2. Sourcing candidates - easy, any decent ATS will allow you to post to leading job board aggregators, your social media sites, paid job boards and to your own employees to tap into their network of possibly applicants. Just a few clicks and any hiring manager with virtually no training can do this.

3. Screening - just add in some killer questions into your ATS to filter the obvious duffers then for the rest, ask them to complete a brief video profile so you can identify the stand out candidates easily. No need for the in house recruiter to act as a first screening layer with a telephone or 1st interview.

Once the hiring manager has identified the 1 or 2 that are the obvious standout candidates, they can arrange their own interviewing. One of the things that bogs an in house recruiter down is going back and forward between candidate and hiring manager trying to match up interview times. Why? Let the hiring manager and candidate liaise directly. Any decent ATS will have an inbuilt interview scheduler.

4. Rejecting/communicating with candidates. Again, any decent ATS will let the hiring manager reject 1 or 100 candidates with a couple of clicks with whatever email they choose to create and store. Does the in house recruiter really need to do that?

5. Offer management - store a template offer letter and contract in your ATS, adjust for the job/candidate and email it out through your ATS and as for collecting references, well that’s easily done through any decent ATS. Once again, what role does the in house recruiter need to fulfil……...not much if truth be told.

6. Onboarding…...guess what and sorry to sound like a broken record but all decent applicant tracking systems will have an onboarding module by 2020 making it effortlessly easy to get the new recruit onboarded.

So what exactly does that leave our in house recruiter to do? Well I see the role moving away from relatively mundane admin work to a higher level consulting position. The in house recruiter is finally going to be stretched to do the type of role they are more than capable of doing but don’t do enough of now.

Best practice:

Assessment of the success of job boards and staffing agencies.

Assessment of why one department is hiring more quickly/more cheaply than another.

Role: the in house recruiter will become a facilitator of best practice throughout the compan.

Bottleneck prevention

Providing emergency assistance to a hiring manager if they have trouble filling a role.

Role: a recruitment troubleshooter.

Marketing

The creation of a careers site to attract the best applicants direct to lessen dependency on job boards or agencies. Constant content uploading to maintain interest from prospective employees. Thus the in house recruiter will develop expertise in SEO, google analytics, copywriting and online advertising techniques. They will also need a detailed understanding of how to use social media to create a talent pipeline of candidates logging their details into the talent pool as possible future hires.

Role: Recruitment marketing specialist

Analysis

The in house recruiter will focus on the analysis of the types of people applying to the company and being hired not just for basic EEO compliance reporting purposes but to ascertain trends in where superstar performers are being sourced from. Retargeting recruitment efforts to exploit only the best sources of top candidates.

The role will also include detailed analysis of actual cost per hire vs monetary cost per hire (time spent reading applications and interviewing is a major cost to a business).

Role: Analyst

Sourcing:

Acting almost like an old fashioned research consultant at a search firm on senior roles, the in house recruiter will be tasked with supplementing applications sourced from ‘normal’ channels through the identification of talent typically via Linkedin networks and industry referrals.

The in house recruiter will also spend a lot of time identifying potential future hires….’persons of interest’ for roles that are likely to arise in the next 18 months. The market place of available talent will be mapped so that should the expected vacancy arise suitable candidates can be contacted immediately. The recruiter will be expected to establish a relationship with the potential applicants long before any vacancy is signed off so the candidate is ‘warm’ when formal contact begins.

Role: in house executive search consultant

Superstar identification screening:

Ok so not a very catch heading but the in house recruiter will be tasked with profiling superstars in all departments. What exactly do they have in common if anything and how can the company build a screening system to identify these potential superstars at the application stage so hiring managers hire brilliant and not mediocre talent.

Role: Hiring process development consultant

#general