Why do we think sourced candidates are superior? Because a candidate who is sourced doesn’t get the chance to lie to us.
I know that’s harsh, but it’s what a hiring manager said to us. A softer way to say this? It’s because we see the candidate’s real-world achievements before they’ve polished their resume specifically for us.
Recruiting and hiring a candidate who was ‘sourced’ is an emotional charge… like a first-time hunter bagging a 20-point buck.
But sometimes the reality is like a friend of mine, who once told me about his first hunt and the buck he bagged… in his backyard, in a neighborhood no less, with neighbor kids and parents witnessing the carnage! Their faces, he said, as he remembers it, were like those Munchian Scream masks.
It can be that easy and that ugly, all at the same time. But most of the time, it ain’t easy. Or it hasn’t been.
A couple of years ago, we had a CFO who didn’t want to pay the full fee for a senior controller search because he thought it was too easy for us. It took us less than 2 weeks – like a buck in our own backyard. It was really easy. But long before that search, it wasn’t.
What the CFO discounted were the years of work to get to that point – building the skills, the network, mastering the tools, making the mistakes, and developing the abilities needed to land a candidate like that at that time. Yeah, we made it look easy because we’d been practicing for years. Kind of like a doctor.
You don’t pay a surgeon less because she made removing your appendix look easy. You pay her for all the appendectomies she’d done up to that point (plus yours), which almost guaranteed yours was routine. It’s the same with recruiters who can source and help hiring managers land hard-to-recruit candidates. Surgery or (surgical) recruitment sourcing – it’s never really easy.
(By the way, the CFO did pay after we helped him understand the same analogy.)
But here’s where we are in the recruitment game today:
The new recruiter on the block, AI, will drive costs down. It will make the recruiter’s job not only look easier, but it will actually be easier. It will source passive candidates and qualify active applicants exponentially faster than humans, at scale.
So, where does this go?
I believe recruiters won’t be needed for the tedious tasks of recruitment. Instead, they’ll be (should be) elevated to engage at the most meaningful parts of the process – relationships, guidance, and advisement nurturing both candidate and hiring manager across the finish line together.
That tedious time-consuming stuff:
- Finding, getting contact information, and outreaching
- Eyeballs on resumes
- Pre-qualifying, ranking
- Messaging, scheduling
- Manual review to ensure good candidate quality
- Judging a candidate’s communication style rather than just relying on a resume
- Candidate presentation to clients
- Research to provide strategic-level advice regarding job descriptions, base salary bands, and optimizing the interview process to maximize speed and great candidate experience
- And many more
Chime in?
–What would you like to have off your recruitment plate?
–What would you like to do less of?
–What do you want to do more of?
AI will be a recruiter’s assistant. It’s like a really smart intern, but it will still need guidance. That’s Recruiter-in-the-Loop (RITL). Experienced recruiters will be “context monitors,” ensuring consistency, QC on bias checking, and checking the AI’s math.
There’s much more to say and attempt to predict, and we all want to bag the big AI buck. If we focus on extreme value-creation and dollar-impact while also improving candidate experience, then the agency of the (near) future wins.
By the way, we’re creating the agency of the (near) future. This shift we’re going through, it’s exactly why we built Field of Talent.
Come and see the #1 business model for recruitment for an AI world – Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) by Field of Talent.
Sow, Grow, Harvest,
Dave
