We have been in a competitive market for talent and by all world demographic accounts the competition for talent will only increase. If you agree that this is true the need for companies and organizations to control, manage and optimize talent supply cost, quality and effectiveness will become greater. Technology continues to play an important role as it allows us to scale the important recruitment relationship recruiters have built our practices and careers on. Talent knowledge becomes strategic. We as industry professionals are focused on two key issues, strategic planning and candidate delivery. How do we produce the candidate that a client is seeking and do it in a timely fashion while bringing value to our service.
A number of A/E consultants rely on a career section of their web site or they have retained Monster, Hot Jobs or Career Builder at a sizable fee each year to post their job orders and screen the current candidate pool. The results are mixed and the cost in terms of time spent screening candidates who are clearly not qualified has to be evaluated when it is time to evaluate your overall recruiting costs.
What is your time worth? How pleased are your senior managers going to be when after shuffling through a stack of unqualified out of the area resumes who have no interest in moving to your location, do they find that you have no potential prospects and they are facing an upcoming dead line.
Most contingency recruiters have at one time or another subscribed to one of the major search boards and without exception admit that it requires that you abandon the training that has made them successful in the past. The majority of the candidates posting their resumes on the major boards are out of work engineers from the manufacturing, IT or telecommunication industries. Screening the thousands of new entries each week takes a great deal of time and in my opinion is not what a professional recruiter offers.
Our strength as independent search consultants is that we will handle your search in a professional and confidential manner. I personally believe that plastering your resume on major search boards lessens your value in the marketplace and should you choose to provide the name of your current employer for everyone to see, you might as well sign your termination papers. I have been told by representatives of Monster and Hot-Jobs that a growing number of their clients are A/E firms who are interested in discovering who amongst their employees is open to new opportunities. I suspect that an embarrassing call from your own human resources department could prove to be the Monster that bit you.
The main challenge identified by recruiters last year was finding the good resumes in the haystack of resumes submitted by applicants-qualified or not. While the Web is renowned for its high-speed delivery of quantity, quality results are often harder to find.
