A thought for the business day

"The weak set their own goals and always achieve them,
The strong look to others and strive to exceed."

Gareth

Probably my best justification for a challenging NXD on the Board

R's about face

I visited over 1000 recruitment firms across the UK, Europe and the USA during my time at the REC and since leaving, in late 2006, I have worked with a handful of the best; all ambitious, targeted and successful businesses in their sector. I now think I have fathomed why so many recruiters fail to achieve their true potential and the professional recognition they rightfully deserve.

One thing always hits me when I start to get inside the mind and culture of a recruitment business; in most cases the best recruiter in the business is in the wrong job.

I sit around with business leaders listening to them bemoaning the lack of good consultants these days; ‘Oh they aren’t as committed as we were, they don’t do the hours, don’t build the relationships and they never take time to understand the clients (or the candidates) and the benefits they want!’ It all starts to sound rather Pythonesque and only gets worse when I ask ‘So who is the best recruiter then’ and they point surreptitiously at each other (or themselves). So I ask myself, if the best recruiters are playing at being MD, Ops Director and other posts with meaningless titles, why aren’t they still Recruiters? I say that the great recruiters should become even greater recruiters rather than shifting uncomfortably sideways and becoming less than adequate business managers, leaders and directors.

My solution would be to scrap the traditional model of a recruitment agency where consultants become team leaders, become branch managers, become area managers or directors and then find themselves so far away from the coal face that they simply shuffle paperwork, calculate the PAYE and make themselves, operationally, redundant. After all, we all know that most sales people make appallingly bad managers, so why do we persist in letting the blind lead the ill-informed.

Now, please don’t think this observation is a slight on recruiters; in fact, there is nothing I rate more highly than a top performing Consultant. I genuinely regard them as an artist; as good as any Ronaldo, Amy Winehouse or Tracey Emin, but let’s face it they aren’t great business leaders or administrators and rarely get to grips with the ‘back office’. Even Richard Branson considers his success attributable to his ability to put the right people around him to do the things he can’t (and doesn’t want to) do himself.

Therefore the answer is surprisingly simple and you only have to look to those two others business outsourced professions for a clue; Lawyers and Accountants, to learn how it should be done. When you enter the Accountancy Profession you train, you qualify and you become a junior accountant, you eventually progress and become a senior accountant. This leads to you becoming a Department Head (still a lawyers) or even a world-renowned specialist, and you eventually make Partner; still practising the law, and with ever increasing rates charged for your time and knowledge. Now I know senior lawyers don’t do the donkey work, they have juniors, but they do lead teams in support of major clients and they remain client facing. Oh, and most importantly, the business management and administration is performed by a team of business managers, maybe even a General Manger, who works for the Lawyers and are bought in for their expertise in that field and run the business around and for the owners.

So I say let’s adopt the same style of structural governance as the professions and keep recruiters doing what they are great at; recruiting. How knows some of the professional status may also rub off.

Gareth


I refer to this as the “Boon Gatherers” model for the significant advantages I believe it brings to the business. For more details contact me directly.

Stressed Out!

I was concerned by the recent report from the Stroke Association that cited recruitment as a highly stressful job. At least I was worried until I saw that in second place came the legal profession; I can only assume they suffer stress from the constant increase in their fees and from worrying about the choice of colour for the next Porsche.

Now I readily recognise that recruitment is a highly charged, target driven and fast-paced industry but I am worried that it all too often suffers from the headless-chicken syndrome rather than the wise old owl. As someone who suffered a brain tumour at forty, which ‘may’ have been stress induced, I can confirm that chasing your own tail all-day-every-day is less than effective and eventually leads to structural collapse.

I think it's time the REC started to do some work into the effectiveness of the general recruitment model; that has staff chasing numbers; phone calls, registrations, interviews, placements and fees in a regime that thinks you are a part timer if you leave the office before 8pm, and researched a more intelligent way to do the business. Wh knows it might even lead to a reduction in the ridiculous levels of staff turnover in the industry.

The Stroke Association Report could be just the spring board we need to professionalise the profession.

Gareth

Niche Job Boards

After serving as the MD of REC's technology subsidiary and doubling up as their acting technology director during the highly innovative and productive 'Osborne years', I developed a specialism in online recruitment and recruiting technology.

I saw everything from the existing to the truly innovative, however, one technology stood out from the crowd and I am delighted to be heading up its penetration into the UK marketplace for many reasons.

Brainhunter provides its proprietary job board technology to professional body's and membership groups in partnership, to enable them to add a new member/audience service and capitalise on the myriad of benefits of operating a professional niche job board.

These include, adding a specialist membership/audience service to support its career aspirations, injecting a number of ways of generating new revenue streams, driving additional individual and corporate visitors to the host site and enhancing search engine ranking due to the dynamic content created by the job board.

I chose the picture above because it highlights one of the key areas of negative feedback I was given continuously at REC regarding the excessive volume of unsuitable applicants provided by online channels, a problem solved by all Brainhunter powered job boards.

One of the main reasons I was bowled over by Brainhunter's technology was that it matches each online applicant to the posted job specification across 200 data points and separates applicants into 'A' and 'B' matched lists. This ensures the best candidates on paper are not buried at the bottom of the pile. In addition, Brainhunter only works with organisations with an established professional membership, so advertisers know in advance they are targeting their efforts to the correct audience.

In addition, the advertiser desktop operates as a mini ATS and enables all candidates to be communicated to at the click of a button and suitable candidates routed within the recruiter and employer with ease.

Job seekers are the main focus of Brainhunter's attention, which is why they are given four levels of data security to ensure they are in complete control of who does and does not have access to their personal details.

Finally, Brainhunter has bridged the gap between online recruitment and print advertising by enabling all advertisers to surround each job posting with a four sided template to promote their corporate and employer brand and communicate their key recruiter/employer messaging.

During my years before, during and after REC I watched and commentated on the development of the online recruitment industry and in my opinion the only real change is the mass of boards that have developed without a tremendous amount of innovation or methodology to serve up suitably matched candidates to recruiters and employers.

The result is the propensity for recruiters and employers to have to purchase costly matching and parsing technology or spend valuable man hours matching more CV's than ever to job specifications.

Surely the job boards should take some responsibility in supporting their clients to achieve maximum efficiency. Brainhunter certainly does!

Toothless Tiger

Again this week someone felt compelled to tell me what they thought was wrong with our professional body and concluded “The trouble with the REC is that it has no teeth!”

In my normal, less than tactful, way I was quick to climb onto my soap box and exercise my theory about the reality of trade associations, which is that: All Trade Bodies (from the CBI to the Association of Acorn Crafters) have whatever power their membership chooses to give them. They can be as toothy and voracious as the Membership demands and the good ones (backed by their Members) have bite and the weak ones invariably get bitten. Put simply: “Members get the Trade Association (or Professional Body) they deserve.”

My headmaster’s report on REC Members would say “Good when present!” Sadly all too many recruiters abdicate their corporate responsibility and leave it to the few to get involved. I promise that if more took an active interest in their REC they would see the returns come back to them, ten fold. There would be far less legislation level against the industry, far fewer complaints about it and much higher margins across the board (and yes, it is that important!).

This is just another justification of my belief that “Recruitment is the spotty youth of British business” – see earlier Blog.

Gareth

Reed on!

Congratulations to REC on winning Reed back into the fold; after an 8 year absence. This is a major achievement and one that will bring considerable kudos to the Confederation. I am sure Kevin Green, as the new CEO, is delighted. I couldn’t do it during my time there and it took me leaving the REC to even get a meeting with James.

However I guess the greatest pleasure will be felt by the ex-Acting CEO, Helen Reynolds; who must be thrilled to have achieved what I always suggested was, the unachievable. Now she's gone I hope someone, at least in part, attributes the success to her. Its rather like REC winning Trade Association of the Year soon after I left and knowing it takes two or three years to be eligible to win; you hope a little reflected glory rubs off.

Winning back Reed certainly proves that ‘you should never say never’ and I hope this means that the other great target is now in REC's gun sights.

Gareth

Temp from Chiswick saves the World

Yes, OK, I know it’s only science fiction but Donna Noble (aka the brilliant Catherine Tate) may have done the Recruitment Industry a massive favour yesterday when she became the first female Time Lord and defeated the Daleks all in sixty minutes; and at an amazingly good hourly rate! Now if that doesn’t prove the value of a good temp, nothing does.

On a more serious note, I really hope Recruiter picks up this obvious marketing boon and invites Ms Tate to present an award at its next industry celebration, and only then if not beaten to it by the REC which should use her to present the One-in-a-Million award for the best Temporary Worker. I might have personally been tempted to create a parallel award for the ‘Best Temp in Chiswick’.

Mind you, having left the REC over 18 months ago, I am in little doubt that there are those out there who refer to me as ‘Dr. Who?’

Gareth