Archive for June 2009
A recruiter on the future of recruiting
Recruitment companies compared to dinosaurs? Even It Up! loves this analogy! Peter Gold from British recruitment company Hire Strategies has made the comparison in a recent article on Personnel Today. He calls the agencies that refuse to innovate “agencysaurus” and those that do “velociraptors”.
In a nutshell, Gold’s contention is that the recruitment company (in its current form) will die unless it innovates and changes to meet the many current challenges; it can’t afford to take a “heads in the sand” approach if it wants to survive. Hear that all you recruiters that love to have a go at Even It Up!?
Gold says that we can expect to see:
a myriad of new breed recruitment suppliers emerge, very different from the fee-driven recruitment process outsourcing vendors who claim to be different, but in reality are not.
Low-cost fixed fee and 100% guarantees are just the start. Employers know what they don’t want so the velociraptors will focus on less phone bashing, value-based projects instead of transaction/fee-based placements; client/candidate collaboration instead of secret CVs; managed but client-owned talent pools. It is the traditional fee for volume vacancies that will become extinct, not the hunter.
The conversations I have with corporate recruiters is that they are very focused on reducing agency usage and costs by increasing employee referrals, internal mobility and direct applicants. Cost-per-hire is king, and quality is queen (albeit still wearing the trousers).
At least someone with some street cred is telling it as it is.
You can read the full article here.
ANU study finds anglo names get job interviews
We at Even It Up! always have a sense of validity when a credible university releases research – based on hard data – that there is discrimination out there in Recruiter Land.
The Australian National University (based in Canberra) sent out 4000 fake resumes to employers who were looking to recruit staff at entry level i.e. data entry, customer service and sales. The results (from our perspective) were not surprising:
Researchers found Chinese jobseekers also had less chance of being called back than Middle Eastern and Italian contenders.
The fictitious employment seekers went to high school in Australia.
The research found that overall, Chinese jobseekers were called back 21 per cent of the time they applied for a job, compared with 22 per cent for Middle Eastern people and 26 per cent for indigenous applicants.
By comparison, Anglo-Saxon job seekers were called back 35 per cent of the time, only slightly ahead of Italians on 32 per cent.
The implications? When it comes to getting that job interview, anglicising your name may help you get your foot in the door. You can read the full article from The Australian here.
And Even It Up! would take it one step further and contend that jobseekers are being discriminated against based on their address. Those who live in areas that are perceived to be “lower socio-economic” may well be advised to rent a PO Box in a wealthier suburb, because rightly or wrongly, judgements are made about a person’s ability, education, talent, work ethic etc. based on where they come from.
And posting photos on your online CV may also be one way to knock yourself out of the race… but that’s a post for another day.
Even It Up! 