What is happening in the job marketplace at the moment?  We are seeing business growth, business confidence and importantly for the recruitment industry, an increased demand for both permanent and temporary recruits. This is fantastic news for everyone on a whole number of levels.

But, before the whole recruitment industry get's carried away with this news, and starts hiring as many new recruitment consultants as they can get their hands on to satisfy this new demand (have you seen the millions of job board adverts for recruiters, sourcers and researchers?), just ask yourself one question …….. 'HOW?

1. How are these 76% of employers actually going to meet these new hiring needs? 

• Will the trend towards direct sourcing continue?
• Are there enough good in-house recruiters to go around?
• Can their recruitment technology cope with changing candidate behaviours such as social and mobile?
• Will there be enough budget to use recruitment agencies?
• Will recruitment agencies be able to deliver the required talent?
• Will they turn to RPO companies for help?
• Will we see PSL's enforced or relaxed as talent availability dries up?

2. How many companies are looking for the same (limited) industry talent?

• Why should the sought after talent join their company?
• What are they doing different to source, attract and hire these in-demand people?
• Are they changing their processes to be flexible?
• Are they acting quickly in the market, or still making candidates wait long periods for interviews?
• Are they building talent pipelines or mapping the industry talent they need to hire?

3. How good is their attraction strategy, employer brand and recruitment process?

• How good does their career site look?
• Can the jobs be found easily?
• How long (and by default painful) is the online recruiting process?
• When was the last time they updated all their employer brand content to keep it fresh?
• Do they know where their target candidate audience actually is?
• If advertising, where? Job boards, LinkedIn, social networks?
• How good are the HR team / in-house recruiters at sourcing or headhunting?

4. What about changing technologies?

• How is the changing face of the recruiters favourite, LinkedIn, going to effect who actually finds the candidates? Fees or no fees?(Favouring license fee paying corporates as with their recruiter licenses, as opposed to 'free' agency users)
• What about the speed of change of adoption of (relatively) new technologies?
• How agile flexible are companies to change recruitment systems and processes, if needed?
• What are these companies doing about all the candidates on mobiles? Are they even thinking about them in the recruitment process?
• Social media ins't new, but how many companies are still not utilising it's potential for sourcing and engagement?

These questions could easily apply to companies and recruitment agencies alike - they are both trying to recruit the same talent, after all!

So how many of these questions are you asking your recruiters, your recruitment leaders and your HR teams then? I am guessing not as many as you should be!

It is great news that companies are hiring again, but how many of them are looking seriously at the whole talent question. The direct sourcing trend is in full flow, but for how long? Will businesses become impatient with their recruitment and HR teams to deliver the numbers they need? (I am already seeing this happening as in-house teams are struggling with more and more new requirements for new hires)

The recruitment agencies are already ramping up their numbers in anticipation of increasing people requirements from their clients. RPO companies have been getting busier over the last few months. Contractor rates and salaries are rising due to simple supply and demand.

And yet still there are plenty of HR and Recruiting departments and recruitment agencies still doing the same things they have always done. Remember what happened to Kodak?

I work with recruitment agencies and corporates to improve their recruitment strategies, recruitment processes, candidate attraction, employer branding and content marketing strategy. Click here >> get in touch today.

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