Recently I highlighted a new breed of recruiter who will thrive as technology and shifting customer attitudes disrupt the recruiting world like never before. I called these guys ‘drinkers’, although I later realised what I really meant was DRINKAE’s

But what about the profile of the redundant recruiter? The one who has not adapted to the reinvention of everything. What are the habits, behaviors and attitudes of a recruiting dinosaur, resisting evolution?

Or worse, an antediluvian recruiter, who does not voice disagreement, but just avoids or ignores any new tactic or advice.

This breed of recruiter is everywhere. I call them OINCs, which has no porcine connotation, but stands for ‘Only In Name Consultants’.

They have “Consultant” on their business card, but they provide zero consultation, and indeed would not understand the concept.

Now this may be a bit uncomfortable because you may recognise yourself. Or your staff. Or your colleagues.

But that’s OK… there is just time to adapt. Maybe.

Here are some OINC characteristics and behaviors. Seek them out and hunt them down and eliminate them. Or else you and your company are like that prisoner on death row, waiting for the inevitable. You will be a ‘Dead Recruiter Walking’.

• OINCs hide behind email. They avoid real life conversations. They attach shortlists to email and wait for the client to respond. They brief candidates about jobs via email. They even bicker with their colleagues via email.
• OINCs only focus on ‘active’ candidates. In fact, to an OINC, a person is only a ‘candidate’ if that person ‘applies’ to them. OINCs don’t network, headhunt, source, seduce or seek out talent. They wait for it to come. And soon that will be a very lonely wait indeed.
• OINCS are often Job Board addicts. Their knee-jerk reaction to a new order – is to run an Ad. Why not? It’s “what we have always done”, after all.
• OINCs are world champion net-surfers. Typing and mousing and clicking away. Doing what, God only knows, but they are ‘screen-facing’ all day long. Usually to look busy without doing any actual work. Better they ‘people-faced’ a bit more.
• OINCS are experts at the time-honoured recruiter practice of ‘spray and pray’. Using email, ‘let me get this resume out everywhere!’ And maybe I will let the candidate know later too…
• OINCs love meetings. The longer the better. And if we can discuss internal administration and process for most of that time, even better. Because admin and process is not threatening. Like calling a client for example.
• Woven into the DNA of an OINC is lack of initiative. Worse than that actually. OINCs won’t think of a fresh new, risky, heart pumping way to do anything. They will also actively resist any ideas on that front.
• OINC are squarely ‘Social-media-phobes’ happy to opine that social media is ‘trivial’. Or they embrace social loudly, only to waste time clicking through Facebook, or posting inane tweets all day.  That is NOT social recruiting.
• OINCs resist change, wherever and whenever they can. They are always looking backwards, scoff at training sessions, and maintain excel spreadsheets of candidates or hard-copy résumés in their bottom drawers.
• OINCs like to dismiss success by newcomers with fresh ideas, as ‘luck’, and complain that new technology, designed to help them become more efficient, merely  ‘gives them more admin to do’.

If this sounds like you, or where you work, wake up!

If the rate of change externally exceeds the rate of change internally, you are a dead recruiter walking.