So the idea is to start a collaborative group – create a brand that small agencies could associate with, something they can fall back and deliver under. We aim to get around obstacles that make it difficult to the smaller player. For example, you might have a client that likes your service and wants to work with you but gives you opportunities that you can’t resource because it’s outside of your sector. With IRG, you can pass it on to another agency in the group, deliver your client service and still get a share of the revenue.

Likewise if you have a strong candidate, but no vacancy to put him forward to, you can market him out to the wider network – providing a greater service to your candidate, but also giving you a chance to get a revenue share from him.

So… aside from sharing leads & candidates, what else do you offer to members?
We have our own social network – IRG Socialise – which we have built ourselves from scratch. Members can use this to find each other, post messages and advertise vacancies or offer collaborations.

We’re looking at getting discounts from services – job boards, legal services, recruitment software and so on. One thing small agencies get penalized on, is overheads. If they are looking to buy access to a service, then because they can’t buy bulk, they often have to sign up for full service price because they can’t leverage volume. When you join IRG, we would buy for our members and they would invoice us for usage, with discounts being passed directly onto to our members. The big agencies have these advantages, so we want to generate those advantages and pass them onto the smaller companies.

Why smaller recruiters?
Because there’s a totally different culture between smaller agencies and the big corporates. When you’re owner managed business, it’s your business and every client and every candidate matters to you. You can’t play the numbers game like an agent in a big corporate. The clients and candidates can see true accountability and customer care from the small agency recruiter. We cannot hide and will typically provide a much higher level of service than you would find from a big corporate agency.

HR generally has a very negative view of the recruitment. My question to them would be, where they get that impression? Is it from the large agencies, or have they worked with small agencies? I would argue that they get that impression in large part from the larger agencies, – they are the ones who cold call the most, they are the ones that are KPI driven, they are the ones who are staffed full of young people who may have a need to make a quick buck, and don’t think of recruitment as job. Our members are all agency owners and for us, this is our livelihood, this is our career. It’s what we want to do, not something that we do because we have debts to pay off.

Confirm this: IRG doesn’t trade as a recruiter?
Yes, that’s true. We do have brands that trade as recruiters, but what we really want to do is support the agencies that do the recruiting.

What’s your view on Social Media vis a vis recruitment agencies?
We see a climate in the future where a lot of recruiters will want to set up on their own. In the past, recruiters only had two options – work for a big recruiter and secure the benefits of infrastructure and brand but lose control over the service they deliver and the value they can extract from their time. Or they set up their own, at high cost and high risk and do it all from scratch. Social media – especially tools like LinkedIn – releases individual recruiters from being dependent on a corporate database. With IRG they now also have infrastructure, network and support to quickly get up and running as an owner managed business – and trade on an equal footing with the corporates they are leaving behind.

How do you make your money?
It’s a completely free service for our members. We are not a trade body. There are no members fees, no anything. We intend to generate revenue from leveraging out buying power to secure discounts on services, and in promoting services to our members by other suppliers who have best of breed for the small agency recruiter.

How long to til world conquest?
We’ve got plans for being a global operation. We plan to have agency networks across the globe, and have already started expanding outside of the UK, into the Irish Republic. We are aiming to change recruitment for the better – small agencies have a quality driven MO and we’re here to make sure that they have a chance to win against the big corporate recruiters.

Thanks Sean, sounds like a plan.
A pleasure Wise Man Say, speak soon.

Thanks to Sean O’Donoghue, UK Chairman of Independent Recruiting Group. Find out more on http://www.irg-uk.com/ and follow the company on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/IRGUK

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

Please.

Pithy and ungrateful commentary adds no value. And also completely misses the mark. Let’s look at what actually happened on Thursday July 8th 2011:

Mark Zuckerberg, along with Skype CEO, Tony Bates, and their respective teams, brought video calling to 750 million people. Worldwide. Overnight. For Free. That’s the equivalent of BT rolling out broadband to every customer they have over single day. Or the BBC delivering TV broadcast across the Empire for every household with an antenna. It’s not just impressive. It’s a historically significant event. So when you complainers – you know who you are – do something half as cool and make maybe a millionth of the contribution Zuckerberg has already done – then and only then – should you feel free to speak up. Otherwise, keep quiet and get on with whatever the hell you do – write an email. Or open a spreadsheet. Or something.

For us Recruitment people, Skype-on-Facebook is going to change a great deal of what we do. Most of you who follow this blog will know I’ve been longtime evangelist for the whole video-in-recruitment thing. A recruiter’s worst nightmare is conducting an interview with a guy who you know within 5 seconds of meeting that you could never put in front of your client. So anything that gets rid of that socially embarrassing waste of time get’s my vote. But user adoption in video has lagged behind technical capability, handicapping existing video recruitment services before they’ve even had a chance to prove the concept to the market.

Facebook’s Skype roll-out last Thursday will change all that. By enabling the worlds most familiar video calling app to surf on top of the world’s biggest social infrastructure, Facebook has massively increased the number of people you can practically have a video call with. No longer will we have to get two people to each download a stand alone video client, sign in at the same time to the service AND connect with each other on it – because those things will have already been taken care of by dint of being friends on Facebook. At a stroke, video calling has gone from being a project that you had to set up with an agenda and advanced notice, to being a spontaneous virtual meeting you can with anyone in your network, at any time they are online. Expect a hockey shaped curve in any graph that charts this sort of stuff on online video usage. And as Skype-through-Facebook moves into the mainstream, it’s going to lead to new demands and expectations for recruitment and the job search. I foresee the following:

1. An Increasingly Liberal Interpretation Of The Facebook ‘Friend’.

Most of us understand by now that Facebook isn’t a popularity contest. But some of us are also beginning to understand that the wider the network, the more useful that network might be for us, especially if you’re looking for a job or looking for someone to do a job. Facebook users involved in either activity will review their privacy settings, curate their personal content and connect more freely to people they may not personally know. The utility provided by video interaction with a potential employer or a recruiter will be a big driver of this trend.

2. A Reordering Of Who’s The Best Seller.

None of us know how to sell through video. This is true of recruiters, as well as it is for job seekers. We are well used to first contact sales on email or phone, but none of us have much experience of doing so on a video call. It’s a new skill and will no doubt give an opportunity to those who are quick to get good at it. Gladwells 10,000 hours rule applies – those that are first to adapt and embrace the opportunity will be first to develop the skills necessary to successful with it.

3. The Continued Loss Of Value Of The CV

I’ve written before about the end of the CV. I’m pretty sure I’m right, but it’s fair to say that I haven’t always been able to articulate the point. That’s a matter of personal style and a recognition of the vested interests which depend on the CV being around to keep going as viable concerns – job boards, ATS’s, recruiters agency and internal and the like. The bottom line is, a self produced, self edited, unverified sales document is an unsuitable artifact for use in assessing candidate suitability.

The ease and availability of an ‘always on’ video calling service will start to have an impact on the number of CV’s that get circulated. Simply put, less CV’s will be required because video will provide greater opportunity for mutual assessment close to or at the point of first contact. We’ll get that 5 second segment much earlier in the process, without need to go through a preset sequence of events to get to interview. It should also be noted that you can send video messages if the other guy is not on the line. Now what is that if not a video CV?

4. The Decline Of The Telephone Interview

We do telephone screening because the CV doesn’t give you all the information you need to know as a recruiter. Is he interested in the job? Is he available to do it? And of course – all important – who is this guy and would he fit in? Skype-on-Facebook provides the opportunity to answer these questions on a single click. Why make a telephone call through a telco carrier, at a cost, when Mark Zuckerberg has provided a richer, cheaper and more convenient experience?

5. The Slow Collapse Of The Candidate Funnel

Remember this? It’s already being challenged by rise by other aspects of the social web and video calling through Facebook will accelerate it’s collapse, as the discreet sequences start bleeding into each other with the increasing adoption of a global video communication standard. Recruiters and employers are going to encounter candidates at any of these ‘stages’, not only in the order that we are used to and we will be forced to engage with candidates there and then. We are going to have to rethink our assessment, recruitment marketing and employer branding approach to include training on how to do them all – at the same time – on the video medium.

Final Thoughts

It need not be said that none of this is going to happen overnight. It’s hard to break habits, especially if we’ve built successful working behaviours around them. And there are certain things that Skype-on-Facebook can’t do for recruitment – record the video exchange, share it with others, group video and the like. Much of this stems from the fact that Facebook doesn’t seem interested in ever getting into the jobs space, and if we take Zuckerberg’s comments on Thursday that Facebook’s ambition is to be the social infrastructure upon which other companies can build value, at face value, then we can expect that Facebook never will produce the sophisticated features recruiters might ideally like for a video based tool. However, the open invitation is there for other companies to fill the gap, and we can expect video integration on many of the facebook based career apps currently running on the platform.

I can see only one outcome of the Skype/Facebook integration; more users than ever will join the network, and increasing numbers of those will be using video to communicate, normalizing what has always been a niche communication medium. And for recruiters and job seekers alike, this is a form of communication that fills in much of what has always been lacking in voice and text and will be sure to have a great impact on how we think and do recruitment. Facebook has changed the way we communicate before; last Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg probably did so again. And for that – for once – maybe, a little credit is due.

1. It’s recruitment With the small r & Marketing with a big M.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the need for recruiters to develop marketing skills and all of the big brands on show at #SRCONF made mention of it in their presentations last week. I think we are perhaps closer than we might realise to the point where recruitment actually becomes marketing, where the acquisition of candidates is a welcome but secondary outcome for any major recruitment campaign. This idea – pretty close to outrageous so long ago – becomes clearer when you consider an organisation like one of those who presented on stage – an Accenture, for example, a consultancy business who’s always depended upon the power of it’s brand within the extended community of the like minded. We can speculate that for an organisation like this, a recruitment need can become a major marketing opportunity. Need to recruit 100 graduates? Extend your recruitment campaign to bring in 10,000, provide a great experience throughout the journey and embed within them your values as a business. You might end up 100 great hires, but your biggest gain is an army of brand advocates who will no doubt go on to work for many of your client or prospective client businesses. In effect, you may be seeding your client base with allies of your brand.

In line with Matt Jeffrey’s contention that recruitment should formally become a function of marketing rather than HR, this is recruitment marketing with a small r and a big M. The implications for us, as recruiters, is profound. We need to find new skills in marcomms, community engagement and relationship management. Or it won’t be us doing the ‘recruitment’ at all.

2. The CV Chains Us To The Desktop; Mobile Recruiting Won’t Be Here Until It Goes

It’s unusual to have great presentations, delivered by two popular and charismatic presenters, somehow ending up a little bit flat.

Pepsico’s mobile app – developed by UK mobile recruitment leaders, topbananas – has certainly pushed the marble along when it come to mobile recruiting but it lacked the key feature which prevented it from being a triumph – you couldn’t apply through it. This is a critical break in the candidate journey, and it made the whole case study a little less revolutionary than perhaps we anticipated. Can a mobile app be considered truly mobile recruiting if, in the end, you are directing your job applicant to return to the desktop and apply, presumably by email and with Word? The overwhelming sentiment of the crowd was ‘no’.

This led me think of the role the CV plays in keeping job seekers chained to the desktop. You will never be able to download a Word document onto your phone (and thank f___ for that, imagine if Windows had ever won the phone war?), and so until the industry itself evolves beyond the idea that candidates must at some stage in the application process send in a CV, mobile will remain where Pepsico & topbananas have left it – a great promotional, recruitment marketing and employer branding tool, but not a genuine mobile recruiting app.

3. Size & Hiring Frequency Matters in Social Recruiting

The point was made during the Social Media Strategy Debate segment by industry veteran Keith Robinson, that a great deal of the lessons provided at #SRCONF could not be applied to the small or infrequent hirer. This seems self evidently true, but is consistently underplayed on the conference scene. For a company that hires 1 person every 3 years, it makes no sense to invest in the building of any type of community for the purpose. Size matters in social recruiting, and hiring frequency matters more. The social recruiting initiatives described by the likes of Accenture, Societe General, Unilver and the rest have no bearing for the vast majority of companies out there. And so we have an urgent need to remove from the conversation the sweeping statements that so often plague our community. They are unhelpful when we consider the sheer number of employers out there are something other than MNC sized megacorps we inevitably focus on in showcase conferences like #SRCONF. The butcher, the baker and the candle stick maker – the modern day SMB’s – will continue to be dependent on what they perceive to be the turnkey solutions – staff provided by 3rd party recruitment agencies or candidate traffic driven through job board advertising.

4. Brand Based Talent Communities? More Questions Than Answers

The concept of a Talent Community based round a corporate employer brand has been under strong challenge this year. It’s worth exploring again here, as all the case studies presented at #SRCONF remain based around the conventional notion – that is, you build a Talent Community as an extension of your corporate brand. As panelist Gareth Jones of BruBakerHR has recently argued, this may be building a community around the wrong idea of the job seeker. Read his excellent blog post for a clearer exposition of the thesis. The job seeker is not a permanent category of person, nor even a category that people willingly embrace. It’s a transition phase that most people are keen to get out of as soon as possible. So what happens when the job seeker you’ve brought to your Talent Community, and have been engaging with for so long, actually get’s a job somewhere else? Brand advocate or not, he’s going to disappear. For a global brand like Accenture, who in my speculation may already have been moving down the road to using Talent Community’s primarily as a marketing hub, this may be the enough. But for most other businesses who’s need is primarily to, you know, recruit the people, it might make not make much sense to invest resources and continual commitment in building permanent assets for a ‘community’ that is transient and brand agnostic, and may, in the end, not be a much of a community at all. The argument might be to move into communities that already exist – as Jones indeed argues – those that have self organised around a trade or some other vector that was important to the community. Does this not then offer the 3rd party recruitment agent – routinely, and often correctly, lambasted for being steadfast in their hostility to change – a route back to relevance on the social web? It should for the smart ones, who are now moving into those verticals and building their credibility as fully fledged members of that community

5. Success Cannot Be Your Only Teacher

Perhaps the biggest cheer of the day was reserved for Katie McNab, Talent Acquisition Manager at Pepsico when she gamely ventured that she didn’t know everything, made mistakes and were learning as she went. It was important to hear. Too often, we hear of the unalloyed triumph of organisations delivering social recruiting projects, with the reverses minimized and the successes burnished for display. It is the nature of the beast, of course, but the display of success alone can be a poor teacher if it is not also accompanied with equally compelling examination and exposition of the mistakes and errors that were made.

Social Recruiting – change of any type – is risky. It’s only with a balanced understanding of those risks that we will be able to alleviate the cynicism that continues to pervade in HR and recruitment landscape when the topic of social recruiting comes up.

Perhaps what we need is another type of conference – the How Not To Do Social Recruiting Conference 2012 or the ‘Look, Here’s How I Fucked This Social Recruiting Project Up’ Conference 2014? Come Vic, Alan, and the rest – when are we going to get to go to one of the those? I’d buy a ticket. Wouldn’t you?

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

That’s right, Wise Man Say is going to there to provide the alternative. Live and uncut. From an Iphone. Interviewing people who won’t expect it, probably don’t deserve it and likely have got nothing to say.

Click on the video below, the Conference As If You Were There Experience will follow…

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

I must confess to a sigh of exasperation when I saw that little purple app first appear on my Facebook page. Not another spammy dig at the Facebook recruitment space? The moment passed when I realised it was Monster, and I had to smile; finally a Job Board making a serious play at the social recruiting game.

I’ll stop from writing another review – you’ll see too many of them over the coming days, and besides, I think it’s already been done by others who have gone deeper than I would have. Here are my favourites so far, representing the supportive from Megan Biro of Talent Culture, to the critical by Josh Constine of InsideFacebook, to perhaps the most balanced by David Manaster of ERE Media

My instinct tells me BeKnown has a chance; tech + cash + reach is a pretty powerful combination; mix that in with genuine recruitment know-how, then you have a formidable proposition on your hands.

Whilst it won’t rock LinkedIn, it might well head off any attempt the Californian giant might have had in expanding beyond it’s white collar, professionally experienced, University educated base. It will almost certainly be a major rival for the early pioneer of Facebook professional networking – BranchOut, who might themselves have been the headline act this month for their incredible traffic increase over the past month, were it not for the uncanny – yet surely coincidental – timing of BeKnown’s launch this weekend.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, the Facebook recruitment market will be supercharged by this move and we can expect more efforts from companies like Identified to follow. It’s been long overdue; there has long been an entire demographic untouched by LinkedIn that has probably been aware that they should be using their social networks to help them find job opportunities but have just not been sure on how. Apps like BeKnown will show them the how.

So watch this video, add the app and have a go for yourself. Be you a Jobseeker, Recruiter or HR, you probably will do sooner rather later.

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

From the agenda we can see the following topics are going to be covered: Global Recruiting, Recruitment Marketing, Employer Branding, Mobile Recruitment, Candidate Engagement, Social Recruiting Campaigning & Social Recruiting Strategy.

However, and as ever, you can expect the true value coming from the community of the people who will participate in the event, and who will take the conversation where it wants to go. It’s a fundamental truth of the social web is that everyone is a participant, so if you’re interested inSRCONF2011 or any of the topics covered by it, here’s how you can get involved:

1. Buy A Ticket & Show Up

Words from the wise that SRCONF is close to sell out. There might still be a few tickets left, so the first thing I’d suggest you do is have a word with your manager and explain why it’s imperative for the business that you attend.

#SRCONF 2011 will be held on 30th June 2011 at the Cavendish Conference Centre, located in the West End, just minutes from Oxford Circus or Great Portland Street tube stations.
The address is: 22 Duchess Mews, London W1G 9DT

And you can buy your tickets, here.

2. Follow the Ustream/Livestream

SRCONF 2011 will be unique in providing an unprecedented ‘alway’s on’ conference coverage. All the presentations and debates can be tracked by the following the Ustream live feed, whilst in the breaks you can expect on-the-floor livestreaming by yours truly – yes, Wise Man Say is lending a hand, an Iphone and completely unprofessional chat to the procedings, so if reality streaming is your thing, watch the feed here

3. Follow on Twitter

The #SRCONF hashtag should be ubiquitous on Twitter on Thursday 30th. Follow the tag to follow the conversation and get up-to-the-second participant commentary as the events unfold. Those with a particular taste, can following the following recommended tweeter-ers who will be onsite, and providing their unique take:

Jorgen Sundberg, Co-Founder of LinkHumans, tweeting @JorgenSundberg

Lee Coopers, CEO of MyPerfectCareer, tweeting @leecoopers

James Mayes, Head of Client Solutions at Brave New Talent, tweeting as @James_Mayes

Doug Shaw, Director of What Goes Around Limited, tweeting as @dougshaw1

Sara Headworth, Director of Sirona Consulting, photo tweeting as @saraheadworth

Keith Robinson, Founder of HZ Buzz, tweeting as @siteadvisor

Oscar Mager, Social Recruiting Specialist at Recruiting Essentials, tweeting as @oscarmager

Ben Philips, Founder of Trecknowledgyy, tweeting as @TRecknowledgy

Michelle Rea, Founder of SocialHonesty, tweeting as @michellerea

Amanda Buehling, Business Support Manager at Talent Works, tweeting at @Amandabuehling

Anyone else who is attending, has something to say and will tweet about it, comment on the blog below or respond to my #SRCONF tweet and I’ll add you to the list. Which, by the way, you can find here

4. Go To The Pub Afterwards

Well no conference would be complete without mandatory piss up networking at the end. So, whether you can or can’t / will or won’t make it to SRCONF2011, there’s no excuse not to turn up to the Dover Castle afterwards for a few bevvies. Think of it as the social recruiting equivalent of a backstage pass to Beyonce

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

If you liked this post…….like it!