Changing a recruitment company and why it won't work.

I recently attended a HR and recruitment forum and listened to speaker, Carron Hinton , talk about Change management. I've never really though about this topic before and as I listened it dawned on me that I really wished I had.

Carron talked about the differences between Operational Management and Change or Project management. It occurred to me that the normal management style of my customers (recruitment agency managers) is that all about Operations management and nothing to do with Project management. That is, the normal day to day life of a recruiter is quite similar to every other day. Yes, every new vacancy has its own challenges but with every new vacancy the same approach is used of sourcing and resourcing and negotiating and searching high and low for a decent candidate. As a manager the process needs monitored and should anything divert from the normal flow of events then minor corrective action can be taken to ensure the process gets back on track.

This of course is nothing like project management. With a project, everything is new and it is your ability to see problems in advance and avoid them is the key to success. If an operational approach is taken to a project then exception reporting and minor corrective action develops in to desperate fire fighting and a disastrously implemented project.

This is when a light bulb came on in my head. All my customers are operating in an operational style until the time they contact me wanting to implement a new information management system. This implementation is a project and quite a challenging and fundamental project at that. All too often managers rush in without fully considering all the possibilities of what should be done and what can go wrong. As a result of this light bulb moment I have now started documenting the complexity of the problems ahead and hope that I can encourage my customers to choose the right management style for the job.