sboj.com > real innovation in recruitment tech.

Patrick Morgan (co-founder & Director of SBOJ) writes;

In recent years we’ve seen some technologies come in and chip away at improving parts of the recruitment process, whilst others have bitten big chunks out of problems like; attracting applications, tracking recruitment activities, identifying candidates, collaborating with colleagues and a whole host of other stuff.

Most, if not all of these, have addressed the problems of recruitment in ways that conform to the prevailing idea of how recruitment markets work.

Whilst some of these tools have unquestionably made elements of recruitment easier, more accessible or more engaging, we’d argue that innovation in recruitment technology in the last decade has largely failed to provide employers with a model or system that is feasible, reliable, and sustainable; one that can cut their costs and, crucially, one that will ensure they can still recruit effectively both now and in the longer term.

Here’s a FACT: Employers finance all of the other transactions in recruitment markets. From web publishers through to the scores of agency recruiters, web developers, software companies and so on.

But when you look in detail at some of the processes at work in recruitment markets you can’t help but wonder if the current paradigm really helps employers at all. The forces at work governing relationships in these markets are most definitely stacked against employers looking to attract and recruit candidates.

Examples of this are too numerous to touch upon here (and a bit too revealing before we’ve completely finished our technical development), but any of you who have worked in recruitment will no doubt be thinking about some of them whilst reading this. These issues give rise to some interesting questions that are far harder to answer. To give one simple example - How can companies efficiently solicit, receive and process speculative applications, the modus operandi of agency recruiters?

These are the questions innovators in recruitment should be asking. Don’t get us wrong, we think that some of the products that touch on parts of the recruitment process are fantastic; video CVs, social recruitment platforms and talent communities are all great ideas in their own right.

Innovators in the recruitment space in the last decade have seemingly forgotten about that employers are the key driver of these billion dollar markets and focussed most of their entrepreneurial powers toward making money out of recruitment consultants or improving one small part of the recruitment process.

It’s time someone came up with a step change in the model of how recruitment works and that’s what SBOJ.com is going to do. We’ve been painstakingly thinking through these problems for the past two years and we’re very pleased to say that our conclusions are very close to becoming a fully formed web application.

We will be regularly updating our blog from now on as we approach our beta launch in the Summer. We’ll keep posting more specific information about exactly what we’re doing as we get closer to the launch date, so please keep checking back if you’re interested in hearing more about what we are doing.

In the meantime if you have any questions about www.sboj.com then drop an email to patrick@sboj.com or nick@sboj.com – we’ll be happy to help out.

Patrick Morgan (co-founder & Director of SBOJ) writes;

Over the course of the last decade, we’ve seen innovation in the tools that are ubiquitously available to the three groups of stakeholders that exist in any recruitment process - employers, agency recruiters and direct applicants.

Let’s take a look at the problems each stakeholder has with the current recruitment situation and think about how some other web products have helped answer these problems;

LinkedIn

LI is surely the biggest thing in recruitment in the last 10 years. We all know that in one way or another, LinkedIn makes the majority of its income from recruitment services, advertising jobs and charging recruiters for inmails. On the face of it, LI seems like a great solution. Employers can easily identify suitable candidates, recruiters use LI to build up their own database of candidates and direct applicants can apply directly to job postings from real companies. So, all is seemingly well.

Here at SBOJ.COM, we’re not convinced. I’d be willing to bet that for every in-house recruiter using LI, there are probably 50 agency recruiters looking to place the same LI user at another company that will earn them a fee. LI has no emphasis on supporting employers in preference to agency recruiters in their business model and even direct job postings from employers are swallowed up in the chaos of ads and messages from agency recruiters on each job page of every LI group.

By allowing agency recruiters access to the same pool of users, if by chance an employer sources an individual on LI who is actually looking for a job, the chances are that they will compete with a huge number of agency recruiters who will look to place that person with any other employer who will pay a fee. So as much as LinkedIn allows simple identification of individuals who might potentially be suitable for a job, it also gives every agency recruiter access to the same people.

Perhaps, adding insult to injury, an employer’s existing staff also all register on LI and then become fodder for agency recruiters looking to fill roles. In this manner, we’d argue that the recruitment merry-go-round persists.  

LinkedIn can also be problematic for direct applicants who are actually looking for a job. We’ve all seen it - you log in and see that the person you sit next to has connected with a bunch of agency recruiters in the last few days. Needless to say your boss has a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Is that really in the best interests of the individual? On balance we’d argue that the majority of this information in the public domain isn’t actually in the best interests of most jobseekers (at least those who are currently employed!)

Job Boards

Have job boards actually changed at all in the last decade? Apart from becoming a bit snazzier and seemingly integrating with a range of social media platforms, has there been any step change in their functionality?

We don’t think so. 95% of job boards are littered with adverts written by agency recruiters, most of them generic and often you see the same job advertised by multiple recruiters (and perhaps occasionally even the actual employer) on the same job board.

Agency recruiters always pay a lot less (per posting) to advertise than employers, so they end up being full of hundreds of junk postings, which in turn means that direct applicants hardly ever look at them. Furthermore, job boards’ fundamental problem from an employer’s perspective is that when they pay to post an advert, they receive direct applicants, but often the same individuals then register in the job boards’ database (accessed by agency recruiters) or even then also apply directly to agency recruiters.

So, employers are paying to populate a database which is then available to agency recruiters who will compete to place a good candidate with any other of their clients?  Is this really in the interests of an employer paying more than an agency recruiter to attract jobseekers in the first place?

Direct applicants almost have no choice but to use agency recruiters – they don’t have the time (or can’t be bothered) to sift through hundreds of adverts, or find dull employer websites that they never get a response from anyway. They simply choose the path of least resistance, use agency recruiters and the recruitment merry-go-round persists.  

Social Media (which isn’t LinkedIn)

This section is going to be brief. Put simply, I can’t really see how social media (other than LinkedIn and perhaps even Twitter) can practically be boxed as anything other than a helpful tool for any company recruiting. Aside from Huge consumer brands like Nike or Coca-Cola, how can your average professional services firm realistically rely on social media to cover their recruitment? There’s some gaps in thinking around the practicalities of social media recruitment, particularly for companies in markets that don’t lend themselves to that kind promotion.

The basic fact remains that people tend not to want to advertise the fact that they’re looking for a new job. In some ways, the assumption that engineers are friends with other engineers on Facebook is, IMHO, an iffy starting point to practically structure a recruitment strategy on, unless maybe you’re in the business of finding a lot of people with not very specific skills or experience.

Aside from this, most social media profiles aren’t much use for job hunting and at best, given social media could potentially attract candidates into an application process, there’s still maybe 75% of the actual recruitment process to go through before they accept a role. It’s also worth pointing out that other social media platforms do nothing to assist employers in organising themselves through this process at all.

Social media recruitment solutions can clearly help employers to chip away at the problem of attracting ‘talent’ to apply to their jobs, but is it really the long-term, sustainable solution to reliable staffing? It can definitely help but we’re not so sure that in itself it is a complete answer and it certainly cannot stand alone as a tool for reliable recruitment at the moment.

Us

What the recruitment process needs is a new model, a way of ultimately levelling the playing field in favour of actual employers. Unlike a lot of others, here at SBOJ.com we think that agency recruiters are a necessary piece of the puzzle and that they often play an invaluable role.

There must be a better way, a more efficient model that can carry recruitment forward in a fair and equal way, where ultimately the financial and consequential costs of recruiting are more manageable for employers.

SBOJ.com is coming this Summer – we have some answers to these questions and have offered some solutions to problems we think the market hasn’t even considered yet.

We’ll tell you a bit more over the next couple of months - watch this space for some proper innovation.