If your boss does not know THIS… change your job!

If you are a Recruitment Director, worried about the future, you will be acting on this. If you are a recruiter, I hope your leaders are dealing with this stuff. If not, you might want to find a job where they are. Fast.

750 recruiters attended my recent speaking tour of Europe, most of them Owners and Managers of Agencies. We covered a lot of ground in three hours, and here is a taste;

Disrupt your business now…before someone else does it for you!
Engineer micro internal change based on a plan for the future. Self-disrupt!
The secret to success in business is very simple. It’s the ability to adapt and change that underpins success.

The most compelling reason most of us in this room will fail is a lack of planning, foresight, and investment for the way the world is going to be.
Not everyone will thrive. There will be big winners in agency recruitment.
And big losers.
No wave of economic recovery is going to save you, if what you are selling is not what the customer wants!
The future of agency recruitment is all about the battle for candidates. Not so much clients.

Talent is the epicentre of competitive advantage.

Candidate identification will get easier and easier. Candidate recruiting and hiring will get harder and harder.

To the very cream of talent, privacy is the new advantage. The best candidates don’t put themselves out there any more.
We must accept, indeed embrace, the fact that recruitment is merging with marketing.
Finding candidates is a science. Recruiting them is a seduction.

In fact, every recruiting function, be it agency or in house, should really operate as a digital marketing agency.
Your company’s digital footprint is by far the largest and most important marketing presence that you have. Do you treat this key asset that way?
It’s no longer about candidates ‘applying’. It’s no longer about getting their attention. We need to know their intention.

The future of success in candidate acquisition is Digital Predictive Recruitment.
Technology in recruitment is not mostly about driving efficiency and automation. It should ensure a great candidate experience.
Don’t confuse candidate identification (via technology often), with candidate recruitment, via human beings (always), or candidate engagement (both).

Most recruiters proudly talk about their database when the word ‘technology’ is raised. But, most recruiter databases are candidate graveyards!
‘Social’ is not a ‘fad’, or a ‘task’, or a ‘project’. You have to embed social in your everyday recruitment activities.
Never underestimate the seductive power of your digital footprint.

Recruitment agencies need to invest more in marketing, including branding, and social, than they should in old school, hard-core sales.
Stop hiring dinosaurs. Yesterdays heroes who cannot or will not adapt to the new world of recruitment.
Profit is not a dirty word. Profit is like oxygen. We don’t wake up every day with ‘profit’ as our only goal, but like oxygen, we sure notice when it’s not there!
We are “short term” junkies in this business. It’s hard for us to see the value in investing for a return tomorrow. And that
shortsightedness is now more than an Achilles heel. It’s a death sentence.

We should not chase shitty margin deals so aggressively. Don’t be seduced by revenue and look always to make money.
If your company is made up of those lazy recruiters whose ‘strategy’ consists of posting and praying poorly written ads, or even LinkedIn InMail inundation, than you’re not only going to find yourself frustrated in the battle for talent, you’re likely to find yourself out of business.
We have to use consumer-marketing techniques to amplify our positive brand with a wide pool of candidates.

Open job orders will no longer be our key metric going forward. That will become irrelevant. Companies will hire talent when they find it. We have to be the ones that find it for them.
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Owner Manager Masterclass. ‘Powering Profits in Disrupted times’. With Chris Savage. Six cities, Australia and New Zealand. Over 100 signed up already. THIS IS GOING TO SELL OUT.  Book NOW for Early Bird Discounts.

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