“You can’t pick up where you left off.” So spoke a frustrated recruiter on the phone late last evening. In Metro New York, job ads are starting to produce fewer and fewer results.
When the pipeline breaks, companies scramble to hire contract recruiters. False bravado fills the halls as CEOs assume that they know how to recruit in today’s environment. Old time recruiting consultants will chime in as well.
These days, I am experimenting with Linked-In. After years of pooh-poohing the service, Shally and Don Ramer persuaded me that there was real value in the system. I’m fairly certain that a well groomed Linked-In network can be the foundation of a solid recruiting practice. I’ll take a long look at LinkedIN in a future article.
(If you’d like to join my LinkedIn Network, please send me a note at “john at johnsumser.com”. I’ll respond quickly)
So, as you can see, I’m revisiting the question of relationships and how they impact recruiting.
It’s very hard to generalize about a process that handles both call center development and strategic executive acquisition. It’s like trying to talk about construction generalities with a plumber a carpenter and an architect. The thing looks different one nail at a time or one drawing at a time or one leak at a time. The overall view (building a building or maintaining and expanding a culture) has generalities that don’t always flow down to the specific discipline.
You simply don’t need the same depth of relationship to recruit an assistant that you need to have when you recruit a rock star.
Historically, executive search professionals focused on relationship development (at least some of them did) while their HR based brethren focused on scale and relative anonymity. Between those two extremes, the range in technique varied from pure direct marketing (no real relationship, lots of volume) to pure advocacy (low volume, high touch) with all sorts of flavors filling in the gaps. When you are talking about 50 million employment transactions a year, there’s lots of room for variation.
