Welcome back to the fifth episode of the Wise Man Show! Today, we are launching a new format – a panel discussion on the recruitment topics of the day. Today’s hot potato is business development in the recruitment space – Is Cold Calling Dead? What will Gary Franklin, Head of Recruitment at Aviva Europe and co-founder of the FIRM have to say? Or perhaps do? Will Sean O’Donoghue, UK MD of The Independent Recruiter Group, make the case for recruiters, large or small? Can Simon Swan, as new business owner of recruitment marketplace, Hiring Hub, add a new perspective? Will we add anything to the debate on how recruiters can develop business?
Click on the video below and find out.
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Hi Hung
You might want to check out the discussion thread I started on the IOR LinkedIn group a while back that whipped up a bit of a frenzy on this very topic. It was the most popular discussion for 3 – 4 weeks running with approx 130 comments. It’s died down now but what a great debate it started.
Look out for the title – “In-house recruiters rejoice! The cold call is dead. Long live Social Recruitment – Discuss”
Cheers
Hi Ben, thanks for your comment.
I did see the discussion thread and was very interested to follow what was being said. I was tempted to comment, but declined to do so when I saw that many of the people commenting were individuals I had interacted with before! I didn’t want to sound like a broken record, so I let them play.
My DM to you was re: your potential interest in taking part in a future panel on the Wise Man Show. No problem if not, but I think you could be good to have on
Cold calling to ask talent managers, HR and/or internal recruiters for companies the size of Aviva is a waste of time if the cold call is do you need any recruiters and/or have you got any jobs, Gary has told you why. I can understand the frustration with so many calls, but is someone offering you their time and untainted enthusiasm to help your recruit really so offensive?
I do think that large-scale employers who employ in-house recruitment/talent teams are not ready and/or able to present all their recruiting facts in my experience. For example it would be useful to know how much recruitment spend was spent outside the PSL budget, what it was spent on and why it was spent off PSL. It happens so why not be honest about it, and it happen quite often if you bypass HR and go direct to line managers, with a must have candidate.
Then it would also be useful to know what percentage of roles were filled in a time line that did not cause material loss to the business during the period the PSL roles took to fill the roles. I was taught at the start of my career by James Caan, the costs associated with not having employees onboard at the time they were critically needed. A famous Oil company I spoke to calculated their losses at 52 million a year. This approach served me well when making cold calls to explain the nature of nil risk to the employer to use my services, but great rewards if I came up trumps.
I don’t advocate cold calling in the style Gary dislikes, I do like canvassing proven candidates to client. Trouble was this methods worked so well in my time as recruiters I saw lots of recruiters then canvas phantom candidates just to get the relationship then back fill any jobs. Which I am equally sure made the internal recruiters equally as unimpressed.
In this age of technology why can’t job pages like this;
http://careers.peopleclick.eu.com/careerscp/client_aviva/external/en-us/rssfeed.do?functionName=viewFromLink&jobPostId=6813&localeCode=en-us&rssFeedId=321454
Have a place for any recruiter who has a candidate matching the skills required, to submit a CV for consideration. Some, not all, of the HR and/or talent managers I have dealt with in my past, are like the King in the image of the ‘Battle of Hasting’ where the King is standing fighting with arrows and cant be bothered to look behind him at the cold calling sales person with a machine gun.
The nature of the technology we have now, would allow the parsing, filtering and matching of CV’s via this source. Cold callers could be pointed to the jobs on the career site as the desired method of initial interaction, those who have candidates, the time and the desire to really begin a relationship would then be able to be found, filtered, groomed for future PSL status based upon proven matching skills, or maybe set on a list as GOTO niche specialist.
The overwhelming impression I got from these well-presented arguments was the same as when a bloke with billions called Abramovich bought Chelsea: suddenly and dramatically the rules of engagement have changed.
Now’s the time for some out-of-the-box thinking, starting with: how can we compete with an In-House team?
You’re not going to do it by just doing what the In-House consultant is doing!
I’m not sure operating at a loss to compete on price is going to work either?
Saying we can do the job “better” is not going to get past the likes of Gary F.
As Darren points out with the Oil company example, it’s speed!
Speed is the only “hard benefit” that Recruitment Consultants can offer that In-House recruiters cannot. There are soft benefits but no time to go into them here!
If we can help companies save “$52 million a year” by delivering candidates “just in time” we have our unique selling point.
How do we do this?
In-House recruitment subscribes to the same process that External Recruitment has followed for 25 years. You are given a job and you pretty much start from scratch. This is true even if you have talent pools or have anticipated demand. If you have a team of 10 Consultants (I-H or Agency) the process has a natural life-cycle: 3 weeks or 3 months to 1st interview.
What Agencies need to offer is a 3 days to 1st interview deal.
In isolation I don’t believe individual Agencies can achieve this..you might get lucky once but on a consistent basis?? However if Agencies grouped together in a Network of by joining the http://www.vacancy-clearing.com platform they could offer rapid response solutions simply due to their overwhelming numbers.
Scenario:
Aviva needs to find a replacement for a senior candidate who has pulled out at the last minute. Much is riding on this role being fully functional by Monday next week. You post the job onto Vacancy-Clearing and offer an attractive fee. The job and fee is posted out to the Vacancy-Clearing registered Agencies database (10,000 Consultants across the UK-lets say!) and ask for available and qualified candidates to be submitted by noon the next day.
CVs flow in and are screened. The 10 best are sent directly to Gary Franklin. 3 candidates are invited for interview and disaster is averted.
Not every job will be an emergency but if an Oil company could save $52 million per annum through a rapid response effort involving external agencies working together collaboratively, it might just be worth supporting.
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