Are recruiters losing the technology race to employers?

I am concerned that employers have seized the initiative from recruiters in terms of incorporating technology to enhance and streamline the recruitment process.

Gareth Osborne, my business parter at Bornto, and I have issued a stark warning to recruiters to catch up and engage with existing and emerging technologies to stay ahead of the game in terms of candidate attraction, processing, matching and selection and the correct application of recruitment software or risk giving employers the upper hand in the so called ‘War for Talent’.

I have been monitoring the online recruitment and technology vendor marketplaces since joining jobs.co.uk in early 2003 and continued to do so passionately throughout my tenure at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and now at Bornto. In this time the impetus has swung away from recruiters in favour of employers who now have by far the greatest appetite for engaging with technology to energise their recruitment processes.

Recruiters were quick to acknowledge the importance of recruitment software to streamline their operational processes and the efficiencies job boards and CV databases could bring to their candidate accrual activity, however, it is employers now who are embracing and implementing the latest innovations in integrated recruitment and employment technology.

How many recruiters can claim they have in place a fully integrated end to end technology suite giving them a job board style corporate website, advert creation and approval mechanism, multi-posting functionality, CV parsing, databasing, matching and selection abilities and fully automated back end processes!!!

Not too many, but when you look at the client lists of companies like Stepstone Solutions, Jobpartners and Vurv Technology, who have incidentally posted record growth and turnover figures quarter on quarter since early 2006, there are literally thousands of employers who now have the capability to attract talent to vacancies showcased on their corporate websites, multi-post these vacancies to job boards and screen and select the most suitable candidates to interview directly, without engaging a professional recruiter in the process.

I recall my days as a Corporate Account Manager at Securicor Recruitment Services and Randstad and the amount of times clients referred to agencies as a ‘necessary evil’ and confirmed their wish of a time when they didn’t have to rely on agencies to mange their temporary and permanent recruitment. It was always said and meant in the best of faith, however, even in 1997, I personally experienced clients investigating ways to reduce their dependency on agency support.

Until now we as an industry have been effective at proving our value in the recruitment process, however, technology has advanced so much that in certain recruitment situations, employers do not need a recruiter to intervene. I saw a technology at the beginning of 2006, that when put to the test, chose the exact person a company hired for a position two months before simply by running the 5000 CV’s generated by the advert for the role through the software.

I admit that technology will never remove the need for human intervention in the recruitment process but if technology can serve up a short list of the best five candidates for a role in seconds, will that human be a recruiter or an HR manager?

It’s not just the impact of employers’ self hiring aspirations that recruiters need to keep an eye on. We have both been observing the developments of the online recruitment industry, especially surrounding the ownership of the mainstream job boards migrating to the major press groups.

Many are now predicting the effect press group ownership will have on job board pricing and some recruiters have commented that prices have started to rise disproportionately to the increases in reciprocal value provided, plus services are being split out and charged for separately, such as advert posting and CV database access, thus constituting a major increase in candidate accrual costs.

Bornto accept and support the view from job boards that the more value you provide the more you can charge, but by combining the aspirations of employers to go it alone and the conspiracy theories surrounding increases in job board posting and CV access costs, we believe this should now be the catalyst for recruiters to catapult technology and online presence to the top of the board room agenda and urge recruiters to join the technology debate.

It’s interesting to note that the recruitment industry dominates candidate flow already, it just doesn’t know it. We tried to harness this dominant position by operating a recruitment industry specific CV database service at REC, however, legislative constraints limited our ability to operate an industry job board to accrue candidates, therefore, the RE-source solution was ultimately unsuccessful.

Given the additional pressures on candidate flow costs and employer self hiring, perhaps it is the right time for a recruitment industry exclusive job board and candidate database to exist and the formation of a recruiters technology champion. Bornto would consider operating such a solution and assuming this role, if there was a real demand from recruiters for it to do so.

We would like to hear your thoughts on this matter either on this Blog or privately via www.bornto.net