Does Social Media Technology = Hasta la Vista to Third Party Recruiters?

This post originally appeared at www.sendouts.com.

In 1984, Sarah Connor narrowly escaped being terminated by a cyborg assassin from the future.

Are we in for another cyborg attack?

The job board giants, their niche job board counterparts, the usual social media suspects, new platforms like Google+, innovative ways to meet candidates like Twitter conferences:

Technology has made sourcing easier, and cheaper, for everyone.

Will third party recruiters be terminated by the rise of social media? Or will humanity rise up, take control this relatively new technology, and harness its power?

It really depends on who you ask - and everyone has an opinion. I asked the Recruiting Blogs community as well as LinkedIn:

As a recruiter, what challenges do you face as companies have increased access to job-filling technologies like job boards, VMS systems, and social media?

How do you convince companies that using a recruiter is the better route?

To sum up the responses:

The good news: Job boards haven’t killed recruiting. Just like the Kyle Reeses and human resistance fighters of the universe, recruiters who believe in their cause will achieve their objective. Third party recruiters who go beyond the job boards to find the best people/passive candidates will always be in demand.

The bad news: Cyborg alert! Savvy companies are using social media to find and seduce passive candidates. Social networks like Facebook make it easy for employers to tap into their network, announce they have openings, and receive referrals. Professional social media platforms, like LinkedIn, let anyone put their resume on display for the world to see. No matter what their status is - happily employed, ready for the next step in their career, or looking for work - professionals are making themselves approachable for networking and job opportunities by third party and internal recruiters/HR alike.

The better news: The human element prevails over technology. Sourcing isn’t the only benefit to using a third party recruiter. Having a list of candidates means nothing if you can’t sell the position to them, get them to sit down and interview with you, get their signature on an employment agreement, and get their foot in the door day one on the job. Sure, you can program a cyborg to create a Boolean string and search for resumes. But cyborgs can't appeal to a person’s emotions.

Excellent points:

Access to candidates isn’t always the problem. The inability to hire the right person without wasting a lot of time is a problem.

As an HR professional, I found that I could always find and hire excellent employees (at all professional levels, including physicians and the highest level executives) without using recruiters. The tools and techniques recruiters use can all be replicated by internal teams. At the risk of being controversial, I think that recruiters may be on their way to extinction.

-Jocelyn Clark

If the internal system is working just fine, thank you very much, probably not much reason to chase that business. If they're consistently losing top candidates, unable to get people in the door, or there's no urgency, then you speak to how you solve those problems. Access to candidates doesn't have a damn thing to do with real recruiting as far as I'm concerned.

-Amy Ala

Some organizations have the resources to get by just fine without using an external recruiter, as indicated by Clark. But not all companies have an internal hiring system that results in great hires. These are the scenarios in which competent recruiters can excel.

Yes, everyone has access to more candidates. But when everyone has the same level of access, the competition for top talent grows.

So how do you convince a candidate to join your firm vs. another? How do you reach desired candidates faster than your competition, and negotiate a better offer than the other company?

-Lisa Zee

Zee goes on to say that because everyone has increased access to candidates, companies will begin experiencing more turnovers, unless their employees are not desirable, or they have clout as the best company in town. She says that higher turnovers in addition to shortage of top talent will heighten the demand of professional recruiters. I think she makes an excellent point.

Intuitively, it may seem that increased technology dehumanizes the hiring process, making sales and negotiating skills obsolete. However, the reverse is true in this scenario. Third party recruiters with the ability to close the hire are still an excellent asset.

Contingency recruiters can help companies manage time and the bottom line.

Cost of paying an external recruiter versus hiring an in-house recruiter. Your own trusted talent scout that costs you nothing. How cool is that?

-John Comyn

Results-driven recruiters can get the right person for the job in the door fast. Companies pay a fee, but only for the right person. They have not wasted internal resources on sifting through hundreds of resumes and turning away unqualified applicants. Instead, they get a good hire to work right away, keeping productivity and profits at a max.

Technology cannot convey the passion a client has for their company, or a candidate has for their work. People still like working with people.

When a technology can look a candidate in the eye and dig out their deepest ambitions and motivations, and call a candidate who did not apply for any role and convince them to consider new opportunities - that is when I will start worrying about becoming extinct to technology.

-Sarah Calverley

We can't totally discount the machines. In the new climate, speed and effectiveness will keep third party recruiters in demand. A good recruiting software will help you manage the technological aspects of recruiting so that you can focus your efforts on the human elements that keep great recruiters in demand. Automated VMS solutions, social media buttons, a mobile app, and a business rules engine are just a few of the features a great ATS will offer to help you find and connect with top talent. Have a passion for your work, use your intuitive match-making ability, and the machines just can’t win.

Comment by Andrew Hally on August 25, 2011 at 1:04pm: Putting on my "hiring manager" hat: we have a great in-house recruiter who fills some rolls for us here at Bullhorn and we also work with a number of 3rd party firms. The TPRs often have deep, specialized domain expertise and networks that provide real value in many cases and hence make placement fees well worth it. It's hard for an in-house recruiter to be deep across all the functions and domains that even a medium-sized firm like ours has. My guess is that any negative impact from the spread of social media will be felt more by generalist TPRs.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 25, 2011 at 2:29pm: I would disagree with that Andrew. I am a generalist. Most of my clients are medium size companies who have some internal recruiters but not a full contingent. We have placed in engineering, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, IT and agribusiness over the summer in multiple states. Social media seems to have little inpact on the size company i work for nor much impact on us for generating real candidates. Unless you consider Linkedin and job boards social media. We are spending less time on social media than we did earlier in the year. It may shake out as the mess matures but for us right now social media is a sound and a fury signifying some fun and some advertising but not worthwhile in terms of candidate generation.

Comment by James Todd on August 25, 2011 at 3:26pm: There is always going to be a need for TPR's as long as we have business cycles and hiring has peaks and valleys within an organization. Any company that has an internal recruiting team big enough to handle hiring peaks is going to have a tremendous amount of spare capacity most of the time, which would be a tremendous waste of money. Regardless of whether candidates are found via social media or smoke signals it rarely makes sense to have an internal recruiting team big enough to handle all projects. I think a big reason why many of us have been so busy this year is that comanies have remained very lean and have been reluctant to hire internal recruiters.

Comment by Mike Hard on August 25, 2011 at 3:29pm: Sandra! Anyone who can artfully use spanish, potty puns and macbeth in her comments deserves the last word....you win.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 25, 2011 at 3:34pm: LOL, there is never the last word or i would have died long ago. MacBeth in Spanish suffers a bit if a native speaker gets on my case. If anybody ever won in the world of words it would become boring indeed, n'est pas?

Comment by Steve Jenkins on August 26, 2011 at 3:09pm: Of all the discussions regarding recruiting, the ones I enjoy the most are the ones informing us of our demise. Reminds me of the Monty Python skit, "Bring out your dead". Alas, we TPRs have a macabre sense of humor. TPR's will, as Sandra, Todd, Andrew (and every recruiter I know), be around for a while longer, methinks.

Case in point. A month ago one of my best friends, a COO for a well known franchise company called and asked if I could find several IT experts for him. He mentioned that their internal recruiters had been running ads, putting the opportunity on FB, LI, etc. For 6 months. In the 6 moths, they had interviewed 15 people and no one met their requirements. Hey, he's a very dear friend so I accepted the challenge. Macabre. The result? Last Friday, 3 WEEKS after we started the search, they hired one of our candidates . You do the math.

The COO called and asked why it took us only 3 weeks to do what his people could not do in 6 MONTHS. Not knowing how to respond (and knowing my sense of humor) I asked him, "How long is a piece of string"?

Oh, and they have an offer to another of our candidates, as well.

He wanted to know if he should fire his internal recruiters. This is a question I have been asked scores of times, every year by clients, for the past 25 years.

And I always answer the same way. With a question. It is this, "How often do your internal recruiters/hr take action on an idea even if it is 3 in the morning?" Maybe that's why so many TPRs are sleep deprived.

My guess is that (aside from my astronomically sized ego, and being second born) one of the things that keeps me in the game this long, is the same as many recruiters: My passion for finding the right person is, more often than not, eclipsed only by the Hiring Authority whose next promotion or ascension is on the line; based on the success of the person hired.

Comment by Jeremy Spring on August 30, 2011 at 2:03pm: One problem working in 3PR's favor is that internal recruiters get so busy assembling interchangeable staffing parts that they just can't effectively aggressively recruit top talent stakeholders. Job boards and social job marketplace venues are great for resume farming, but nobody will coax Steve Jobs out of retirement while sifting through hundreds of resume submissions for a receptionist.