If every company has an internal recruitment team, how will consultancies play their role and how will they survive?

Well, I sometimes think that Now a days every small, large or medium size for that sake, companies, when we call them for recruitment services, they say.."We have our internal recruitment team and they source candidates for us, we don't want vendors".

As recruitment is one of the most important and sensitive part of Human resources. It is not each an every HR person will be great in doing it. And also its a fact that HR people are very busy people in the entire organisation. And again in there hectic schedule to add recruitment, makes them more crazy. Wherein other side a Recruitment consultant is only made for Recruitment job, and he knows that these is the job he will be doing every day and every hour, so he develops his own skills in it.

When each companies are developing their own internal recruitment team to work on the position, then where will be the number of recruitment companies will do. Will they change their own profile or will they get vanished?

Please Discuss.

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Permalink Reply by Carl on July 27, 2013 at 1:06am

This is a very interesting topic about the relationship between Corporate Recruiters and Third Party Recruiters.

The way I see it is third party agencies used to have a major competitive advantage over in house departments because they had large networks, databases and pools of candidates to draw on and teams of recruiters to connect their clients with those candidates. However, today thanks to LinkedIn and other social networks and groups the database advantage of third party agencies has eroded. Corporate recruiters have the exact same access to candidates as TPRs, who are now forced to compete purely on service.

This is great for employers because they can save on TPR costs by building in house teams. For TPRs to be successful they'll need to deliver outstanding service and recruit faster and bring better candidates than these in house teams are doing. Unfortunately for TPRs it's hard to prove to clients you're better / faster objectively which results in a lot of business being through referrals and word of mouth.

I think what's also shifting is that instead of these TPRs having strong footholds with large clients that have consistent recruiting needs, they're going to be pursuing smaller companies that only hire sporadically and can't justify building their own internal recruiting teams. This makes it more difficult to find business because you have to find 10 small companies to equal what used to be one large account.

I think these factors combined will make it very difficult for TPRs to exist as they did even several years ago. I may be biased though as I'm the founder of One Fine Hire, a marketplace that connects employers with freelance recruiters. Employers post their jobs on our site and recruiters competitively bid to work on them. What's unique is the transparency we offer about how successful our recruiters are. Because candidates are submitted through our system we're able to identify how successful recruiters are and which ones justify the placement fees they ask for.

Sorry for the shameless plug (check us out at http://www.onefinehire.com), but I think it's a very interesting time in the recruiting industry.

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Permalink Reply by bill josephson on July 27, 2013 at 8:36am

Recruiting industry is in interesting times as you mentioned, Carl.

To address some of your points based on my experience it's clear technology, offshore outsourcing/H1B insourcing, and an overall poor jobs economy has leveled the international and national playing field.

Technology enables Corporate Recruiters to deliver candidates negating what had once been the advantageous passive/invisible TPR candidate database/network. Offshore outsosurcing combined with technology enables companies to go to where the cheapest, intelligent, and most cost effective profitable international destination is. H1B visa insourcing enables companies access to cheaper foreign technology professionals here. Technology enables recruiting transparency and company access to cheap labor globally both putting fee/income intense downward pressure on TPR's.

The poor jobs environment just naturally increases resistance to working with TPR's as it's always classically done in previous recessions--no new phenomena, so no need to discuss.

As I'd tried--perhaps not very well--to explain to Amy here it's irrelevant to even attempt to prove, Carl, a TPR is faster or better at recruiting. It doesn't matter. All that matters is the Corporate Recruiter is getting the job done finding hireable candidates to the satisfaction of their employer. If so, there's no reason to pit a TPR with fee attached in competition with a Corporate Recruiter as it isn't cost effective using a TPR.

A steady stream of business--pipeline--is what me and about all TPR's strive for. That's what's hard to attain for the reasons you mentioned. Big companies with their armies of internal recruiters and small/medium sized companies with sporadic openings for a TPR to work on increasingly able to take advantage directly with technology finding people on their own. The assignments received, typically have a major problem explaining why it was released to a TPR.

Sounds like your system is kind of like a combination of an insurance company driving the price of services down, if doctors want their services covered by the insurance companies' benefits they need to lower their cost to meet the insurance companies' price guidelines or not be allowed to participate meaning patients won't be covered when seeing them.

And a cannibalization environment for TPR's, like being stuck in a mine disaster, with recruiters literally competitively eating each other driving their price down in a race to the bottom for economic survival.

This what it's really come down to, Carl. Recruiters in the Roman Coliseum?

The battle is finding market relevance. What service today and in the future can a TPR provide justifying their existence. What can we do Corporate can't? If there are no tangible answers there'll continue to be pockets of TPRs doing okay, but an erosion of TPR's in the industry and/or those remaining earning a fraction of what one could once earn engaged in your process, Carl.

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Permalink Reply by Brian K. Johnston on July 27, 2013 at 2:01pm

Yikes... Everything We Say Online Will Be Passed Along To Your Great Grandchildren's Grandchildren (With One Click Of A Button Or Maybe Even A Thought), Then They Will Do A Google Search (Or Whatever Search Is Then) And Assess If Your Comments Were Relevant.. How Will They View Your Comments?

Recruiters Are Agents/Matchmakers...When They Are Performing At Their Peak, Easily And Effortlessly Influence And Persuade People In An Ethical/Moral Way, So Everybody Wins. (Candidate, Corporation, Recruiter)

Amy And Sandra Consistently Make Sense To Me, And Peeps I Would LOVE To Meet Someday. (They Get It, And I Don't Care What Side Of The Tracks They Recruit In..)

In The Meantime, I Am Going To Recruit In The Big Blue Ocean, In An Uncontested Market Space and Continue To Make Competition Irrelevant...

Love And Light!

Your Inbound Recruiter-

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Permalink Reply by bill josephson on July 28, 2013 at 9:54am

Brian, if Amy states she uses TPR's extremely rarely not needing to pay fees while when encorporating a TPR the job she releases to them she's not sure it's even fillable, and Sandra states corporate TPR assignments are abundant absent fee resistance "only dodo's can't secure them" how is it possible they can both "make sense" to you?

It's like saying you agree with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

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Permalink Reply by Brian K. Johnston on July 28, 2013 at 10:59am

Bill- they believe in themselves and what they bring to the market

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Permalink Reply by Brian K. Johnston on July 28, 2013 at 10:59am

Marketplace... That's attractive t

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Permalink Reply by Brian K. Johnston on July 28, 2013 at 11:05am

To me (typiing from iPhone) my ego is not involved here... IIt's about Non-judgement... Progressive leaders behave have this ability.... I am in the business of changing the world vs. changing my own world for the better, and leaders must accepts viewpoint from both sides... In the meantime I fish in the blue ocean with no competition....

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Permalink Reply by bill josephson on July 28, 2013 at 11:13am

Brian, overview philosophical rhapsodizing not withstanding, if you believe both Sandra and Amy that jobs concurrently are both no big deal and difficult (within her company) for TPR's to secure then that's head scratching.

Good luck in the ocean

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Permalink Reply by Amy Ala Miller on July 29, 2013 at 12:44pm

First of all thank you Brian and Bill for the thoughtful responses and Rahul for starting the conversation. I've been staying away from the topic as I'm not sure what more I could really add, but I do want to say one last thing.

Stop trying to be better than corporate recruiters. You're fighting a losing battle, IMO. You can be specialists in a particular area. You can have a lock on the executive / retained search market. You can specialize in high volume contract placements. There are many, many things of value you can offer a client that are valuable and worth every dime of your placement fee. Being better than me and my colleagues doesn't need to be one of them. When you're framing the argument that way (Better! Faster! Superior! all words used in comments here) you've already lost. Meanwhile, I'll just be over attending weekly meetings with my hiring managers, working closely with my HR counterparts (I am NOT HR, but we do both partner with the hiring managers from different angles) and making placements.

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Permalink Reply by bill josephson on July 29, 2013 at 1:28pm

Amy, you've made your valid points. There probably wasn't more you needed to add.

Your point of trying to be a better recruiter than you won't change the TPR business equation for as long as you're getting the job done for your company, that's all that matters--agree with you

Finding a vibrant niche remains the TPR goal that Corporate HR doesn't have covered--agree with you. You rarely need to encorporate TPR's as you have your area well covered--a recurring daily theme I hear. So the TPR goal remains the same as always, finding a client in need willing to pay for your services.

The argument/discussion is over whether it's business as usual out there and difficulty attaining those opportunities negatively reflects on a recruiter's ability.
Or, if assignments are getting increasingly tougher to attain as Corporate Recruiters are increasingly able to do what previously TPR's did accessing candidates requiring much less need for TPR's reflecting a corporate recruiting strategic approach change?

Recruiter talent/ability, or changing recruiting landscape?

I've read enough of your posts assessing your comments to be an accurate barometer of the general recruiting climate.

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Permalink Reply by Terence on July 31, 2013 at 4:08am

Hi,

Rahul in my experience most Internal Recruitment Teams are inadequate because they do not move fast enough especially at the moment in my industry where there is a massive skills gap and seem on the whole to think they are doing candidates a favour by giving them an opportunity to interview and not engaging with them as individuals examples are short notice interviews after a candidate has already told them they won't be available, changing venues for interviews at late notice, putting people in to the process who have far higher salary expectations than the job is paying then being surprised when an offer is declined.

Also they on the whole tend not to be sales orientated and whether you like it or not recruiting has a very large sales aspect when a top candidate is registered with me I will not rest until I have placed them in to a job they want and will do everything I can to make this happen as quickly as possible "Time is the killer of all deals" I don't push people in to jobs they don't want or push clients to hire unsuitable staff but once things start to come together I will make it happen, and I rate my chances of placing that candidate a whole load better after spending time to get to know them, being available 24/7, and knowing what it's going to take from both client and candidate to make the deal happen compare that against an HR or Internal Recruiter Dept working 9-5 with no real incentive to make anything happen and obsessed with ticking boxes and making sure their clients process is being adhered too I bet on me everytime !!

Sorry to all the people who don't fall in to this bracket but Internal Dept's will very rarely beat a highly skilled and connected recruiter with a big mortgage to pay

Have a good day everyone !!

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Goldman on August 3, 2013 at 9:01am

Guess what? I have actually trained internal recruiters. They do not perform in the same manner. During training, I've had them refuse to perform duties that all recruiters perform in my office. They REFUSED. So, I delivered my training, told the company (fortune 500) that it wasn't going to work. They might call themselves recruiters, but they aren't. They are HR people. They fill 97 percent of the jobs. It's only the 3 percent that they can't do, that's what we go after. Nothing has changed about those numbers in 30 years. Nothing. It's still HR. It's still a one-sided view of the world. I wonder why real estate isn't sold on line? All those sights trying to get rid of real estate brokers. Same thing. Not gonna happen. If you understood sales, and the difference in the roles, you'd get it. The only way to understand is to actually work inside, and then work third party. Make placements. YEP. very easy to see then. Whenever anyone writes about the death of recruiting, I know that they aren't on the desk.