Day 7 of our TRN Advent Calendar welcomes Steve Ward, an expert in social recruiting and talent attraction strategy. He’s weighing in on his predictions for what’s coming in 2018 for Recruitment, for what he describes as the most exciting year of his 24 year recruitment industry career.Day #7 of our TRN Advent Calendar welcomes Steve Ward, an expert in social recruiting and talent attraction strategy. He’s weighing in on his predictions for what’s coming in 2018 for Recruitment.
Steve:
2018 will be for me, the most exciting year of my 24 year recruitment industry career. Technology has reached a new level that genuinely changes the way recruitment agencies identify, engage, nurture and contact candidates and clients – and remove the excess of cold-call wastage. And the enforcement of GDPR, whilst generally considered an obstacle, is doing the industry a massive favour, and it needs embracing to enhance both the perception and the performance of the industry.
Having 50,000 inactive candidate records on your database does no-one any favours, and the new enforcement of a ruling that means we can both clean and then subsequent maintain quality relationships with mutually selected candidate and contact records, to me speaks of an opportunity to reduce waste and irrelevance. One of the greatest obstacles to progress in agency has always been cumbersome data management, and the time-loss of dated, irrelevant data – and hence the ignorance of the vision of data. This is our chance to embrace data as a focused lead generation exercise, and a branding opportunity.One agency in 2017, in a pilot scheme for talent pipelining software Candidate.ID, revived 28000 ‘dead’ candidates from their CRM into 1,300 active candidates (opt-in), 79 new conversations and 7 placements. Inside a 6 week content programme. A great exercise to validate a stale database pre-GDPR, but also an even greater exercise of fee generation, so long as your recruiters are good enough to maximise the openings this creates. Content + Tech + Good Recruiters = 7 placements from dead data, inside 6 weeks. Plus now a 1,300 strong validated GDPR compliant database.
And yes, I said Content. It’s a dirty word for most recruiters, and with good cause. Why should a desk recruiter care about written content, branding and knowledge sharing, when their primary goal is to place jobs asap to meet core objectives? But new technology means content should be a fee generator at most, and a lead generator at least. How exciting is the opportunity that now presents itself, that we can identify who is reading which piece of content, which portion of our website, and which or our leaders’ LinkedIn profiles, precisely when they are doing it. The journey towards personalisation through part-automation, and digital content, is complete. The net result? The recruiter knows who to call, who is secretly warm, and who to leave aside for the more speculative communications – both in candidate engagement, and client acquisition.
The next year appears a little intrepid for many, but I am excited. For years I have strived and promoted efficiency in recruitment agencies, to ensure that every interaction we make, is one of value, rather than unfocused sales patter to anyone who will listen. Tech never supported that, and we were allowed inefficiency repetition. The opportunity for clear air and greater razor-sharp focus that GDPR forces us to embrace, is one to grasp with both hands to gain competitive edge.
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