Cape Town, 03 Apr 2014
How the market perceives recruitment has a lot of catching up to do. And it starts with the recruitment professionals.
Technology, social norms, community and networking tools have enabled a revolution in recruitment practice. But the market value chain is stuck. Businesses and candidates still dance to the slow rhythms of yesteryear, controlled by recruitment middlemen.
Selecting a candidate is actually a decision about your business future. Signing on for a job is at least a medium-term commitment. Margins alone over the last 10 years have been eroded... the game plan has changed.
The recruitment event is a pairing of equals. The right person for the right job in the right company. When all is said and done, the point is to be one team, working together. Yet orthodox and old-fashioned approaches treat it as a form of divergence and almost distrust.
Social networking, online community tools and their integration with enterprise systems have changed what's possible.
We believe recruitment is a relationship event, happening in a public space, offering spin-off potential that most businesses (and recruitment agencies) are unaware of.
Seen like this (not far off online dating), the business offering and the candidate applying for a job are the contact points in two extended networks. And networks are the generators of value in our new world.
For our company, advertising jobs, connecting with candidates and illustrating our attractions as an employer are brand events and marketing opportunities. We believe our values, mission, capability, capacity, strategic goals and successes are attractors in themselves, initiating applications before jobs and visible at the front-end of role advertising, right up there with salary and benefit packages.
Job hunters pick and choose, their aspirations connecting with company capability. Companies build and sustain relationships with potential employees that start long before even a job is available, and last way beyond employment as well.
In a social networking environment, the company's social profile - our digital avatar and our social media activity levels (and the energy in its presentation and its responsiveness to comments) gets the same careful management as a rock star's identity. We believe perception is everything.
The right recruitment partner becomes a key enabler, with technology platforms designed specifically for social recruitment, with high levels of responsiveness, a trusted identity in that same online community and a business model designed for precisely the new market we are now attracting.
The approaches our competitors currently sell as best practice and value add ('we find A-players", "we'll do the selection for you", "CV writing for free now") are by now nothing more than standard services.
Empowering both the company looking to place and the candidate, to meet and connect with ease and efficiency is, right now, the real difference, because it is the new reality. Our clients looking to hire as well as the candidates looking to be hired need to work with a partner that sees the hiring event as a meeting of equals each with ambition to match the other, seeking opportunity, commitment and energy.
This is only possible if that recruitment agency has the online platform (and presence) to host it. For both company and candidate, we provide an online environment, the marketplace where we meet and we actively sell to both parties!
For partners in a long-term relationship, what does it matter who first asked whom to dance? We want to dance with you.
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