An IT World Without Recruiters

If new entrant to the IT job board game Jobreel has anything to do with it, the future of employment will be “Jobs in technology from employers you know”, not from recruiters who know the employers. And I’m willing to declare upfront, that as the head of a recruitment agency, my opinion is going to be skewed toward the importance of the service that recruitment agencies provide.

Having said that, though, reckon I’m fair and reasonable enough to, at the least, initiate a discussion regarding self-recruiting by employers.I’m gonna make the Blue Poles analogy here. For those who have no idea about art, Blue Poles by Jackson Pollack was a piece of modern art purchased by the Whitlam Government in 1973 for The National Gallery of Canberra. Whitlam copped a lot of flack for the A1.3 million purchase because some folks didn’t get the complexity of Blue Poles and thought it was something their kindy kiddies at home could have knocked up.

But there was more to it than that…and so it is with recruitment agencies.We screen applications, take dozens of calls a day from folks who have “sent in their resume and just want to check on its progress” or others who “want to send a resume but would like to chat about it”, we line up interviews, one, two, perhaps three per viable applicant per job, we offer a second opinion of the appropriateness of candidates, negotiate salaries, check references and make offers to successful applicants. Kid’s games? I don’t think so. It is time consuming, energy-consuming work that requires skills in networking and people management.

Now, I know a lot of folks with pretty important roles in big corporations and each of them, without exception, complains of their lack of resources and the time demands of their jobs. Even if employers wanted to take matters into their own hands and self-recruit, would they have time?Point taken?Next up, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of what jobreel is proposing. (Read related article) Here is a job board established for employers only. Part of the pitch for why this was necessary was that recruiters view the candidate as a commodity and that jobreel will only have ads from caring employers. What? For a start, yes, candidates are a commodity to a recruiter (der), but they are to an employer too (double der), and how will jobreel ensure that their jobs come only from caring employers? The mere fact that they are willing to own up to who they are does not ensure their high rating on the caring scale, and the fact that a recruiter who is advertising on jobreel is willing to name their client does not mean that they view the applicant as any less of a commodity.

I hate this kind of ill-founded logic and spurious claims.Footnote: Blue Poles is now one of the museum’s most popular exhibits and is worth over $A150 million