“Agencies need to offer something unique”

Jo Faragher

Bill Boorman

Former recruiter and #tru founder Bill Boorman urges agencies to make themselves stand out as more companies turn to direct sourcing.

Founder of the #tru unconference series and maverick recruitment blogger Bill Boorman rarely shies away from controversy. Having led five packed sessions at the recent Recruitment Agency Expo, he believes that agencies are sometimes uneasy about what he has to say  – but that those who do listen up and take action reap the benefits.

“As more and more companies move to direct recruitment, making the most of their employer brand, agencies will have to be able to add something more. I think that more agencies will go niche, and that recruitment will be far more based on relationships,” he says.

He expands on this in a White Paper he has written in conjunction with Colleague Software, titled ‘From Transaction to Relationship Recruiting- the Agency Opportunity’.

In it, he describes how the traditional model for using recruiters is now in reverse. It used to be the case that, because most of the people they hired used to do roughly the same job, hiring companies would use agencies to bring in these staff, and focus on the specialist recruitment themselves. Increasingly, it’s more likely to be the other way around.

Employer brand

“Now, many companies have their own recruiting team, their own database of potential candidates, the power of their brand. From the candidate perspective it’s also much easier to connect to the company direct – they can follow the company on LinkedIn, connect with people who work there, or be referred,” explains Boorman.

The shift towards direct recruitment should not come as a surprise to most recruiters. Last year’s report on resourcing and talent planning from the CIPD found that, due to reduced recruitment and shrinking budgets, a third of organisations had reduced their use of recruitment partners over the past 12 months, and a small minority (6%) had stopped using them altogether. 

Going forward, it’s how they react to this reversal in the recruitment model that will determine agencies’ success, says Boorman. “Now the [hiring] companies feel like they can do that themselves, they think why should they go out and pay a fee for it? If I can come up with a candidate they can’t get, add some specialist knowledge they don’t have, then they’ll look at my agency. Agencies need to offer something that’s genuinely unique, that adds value.”

Technology may have played a role in a decline in the use of agencies (thanks to more sophisticated in-house applicant tracking systems and talent management tools) but it will also be central to their survival. So while CV databases and sites such as LinkedIn have arguably made the recruitment agency experience more transactional – simply matching CVs with requirements rather than developing a deeper understanding of the role or the culture of the company – using social media intelligently to build relationships could give recruitment agencies the edge that they need to stand out.

Boorman adds: “Most agencies used LinkedIn to some degree, but mostly not very well. They recognise it as a sourcing platform the same way they would a CV database, they can search it and message people, but they’re not using it to its full efficiency. With Twitter and Facebook, I think agencies recognise the potential of them but are fearful of the consequences of using them, or spending too much time on them.”

Nurture your network

It is in building this virtual network that agencies could make that shift back to old-fashioned, relationship-based recruiting, he says: “If you don’t have a network to back up what you’re doing on social media, it makes it difficult to do anything other than post jobs. The biggest thing is recognising that this isn’t a waste of time.” Boorman urges agency owners and managers to allow staff time to post and share content relevant to their network, as this is all part of how – in the new model – agencies will come to be seen as knowledgeable partners rather than, as they are to some hiring managers, ‘a necessary evil’.

Mobile technology has the potential to upend the traditional recruitment business even further, claims Boorman. For example, he quotes a statistic that 75% of email is now opened on a mobile device, while 65% of Facebook users and 80% of Twitter users interact with the sites on smart phones.  Agencies that insist on writing content or posting ads that only work on desktop computers may find that candidates migrate elsewhere.

The big shift will be in timing. Boorman points to several ‘golden hours’ during the day and the evening when candidates search for jobs, often while they’re doing something else such as standing in the queue for a sandwich or watching television. “Most of the times people want to communicate with you now is outside normal working hours, yet most agencies still work around the nine to five model,” he says. “They’re also looking for an instant response, because if you leave it an hour before you respond, they’ll be doing something else.”

New ways of working

This means that agency bosses will need to think about how consultants shape their days, and place the focus on whether they get results, rather than how they get them. “The technology is there for remote working, but the concept is still quite alien,” says Boorman. “There’s not a uniform way of working, so don’t try to manage people that way.”

 Because candidates and clients are now looking for more than a transactional relationship, more and more agencies will begin to specialise in supplying certain skills, and this means they will need to become ‘trusted advisors’ to their customers. Recruiters will need to spend time developing their knowledge (for example by joining LinkedIn Groups or subscribing to industry blogs), and managers will need to shift consultants’ key performance indicators (KPIs) away from a pure focus on revenue to also incorporate networking and relationship building.

“We’ve got to go back to basic skills, interviewing people properly for example, we’re not just a CV-pushing service,” insists Boorman. “Lower volume, but higher margin. Jobs for candidates, rather than vice versa.”

If any recruiters are scared of making the shift, Boorman offers one final warning call. And because he used to be an agency recruiter himself (he worked for Primetime Recruitment for 12 years), he believes people will sit up and listen. “The industry will say ‘we’re too big, companies are too reliant on us’, but look at where HMV was a few years ago [on music downloads] – they didn’t think it’d affect them,” he says. “The model is not working and it needs to change.”