Yesterday I received an email from a trusted colleague...it was written by a NAPS member; I've removed all references that would give a reasonably skilled recruiter the ability to identify the writer.

This is one of the best things I’ve seen written about why Linked In won’t replace hard core recruiters.

Disintermediation. Get rid of the middleman. Monster tried it, CB followed, now LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook. We don't recruit 'resumes'. We recruit people. The recruiters who use 'resume banks' (which includes LinkedIn) aren't doing what 'recruiters' do; which is recruit. I understand that LinkedIn provides a communication medium that is better than Monster and thereby HR-friendly, but it's still all in the delivery of the message.

I have LinkedIn, too but you know what I do more than anything else? Name Gather. How boring and antiquated and mind-numbing; oh and productive, too.

as an example, I name gathered 120 operations managers in [town] in my niche. It took me a day to do that. I've called 90 of them and found 6 candidates who are fits. NONE of them are on LinkedIn, Monster or getmeajob.com. Of the 6 NONE had a current resume, ALL had been blissfully employed in their current company for a minimum of 6 years and one for 19 years. My client is willingly paying me $50,000 to get these guys. and I think they made a great investment.

HR weenies don't name gather, they blast email and read resumes. I don't read resumes until after I already like the guy.

Recruiters only account for about 5% of all placements and the number has held fairly constant throughout all of the above electronic miracles. Clients pay us our ridiculous fees because we do what they can't do... recruit and find people who aren't responsive to Monster, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever...

gotta put my soap box back and market; by name gathering and cold calling...

This is what I emailed back...

LinkedIn was never meant to replace hardcore recruiters. For that matter, neither was Spoke, Jigsaw, Ryze, Plaxo, Doostang, Unyk, Twitter, blogging, or any of the other forms of social media and online networking. From my point of view and experience (including two lovely days spent at Kennedy’s Executive Search Summit last November as well as far too many to count speaking engagements), the most fervent anti-social media movement is headed by those recruiters who believe that only relationships fostered and maintained through the phone and 3 X 5 index cards are valid. Can we say elitist?

Neither LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or for that matter most social networking sites are resume banks. Monster sure is and I won’t argue that pulling resumes of resume boards is in itself a relationship building activity. However, since most third party agencies measure success by closing job orders, I don’t see how closing a job order constitutes a relationship building exercise: If the relationship were the goal, the language of closure would be substantively different. But it isn’t.

While it is true “…that LinkedIn provides a communication medium that is better than Monster and thereby HR-friendly, but it's still all in the delivery of the message” Monster was never created to be a networking tool while LinkedIn was. What you call “mind numbing” so many more call finding a piece that is part of a larger puzzle; the single piece of the puzzle is only the entire puzzle when you believe that you’ve tapped into the entire talent pool. The fact that none of the “final” ops managers in Chicago were on LinkedIn simply says that based upon your search criterion and how you vetted the slate, LinkedIn produced limited results. Incidentally, to make a better statement you might want to vet the final 30 and see how they fall into LinkedIn. Further, the fact that none of the six had a resume has nothing to do with LinkedIn as a whole – do you know how many on LinkedIn have a current resume? I know one user who doesn’t…me.

I never realized that I was a weenie for reading the resume first…whether you like first and read second or read first and like second has nothing to do with one’s skill as a recruiter but more about one’s comfort zone. There are many reasons for reading a resume first – my reason is to know something about the person’s professional background so the conversation can evolve in a semi-formed manner. But I’ve also met plenty of people without a resume; if you’re intimating that reading the resume first biases the recruiter then I’d wonder if what you’re really saying is that you won’t like a person if you dislike their resume. Is this competent recruiting?

Just like there are many sources of hire – like the ones showing external recruiter use to be 3.3% in a CareerXRoads 2008 survey – there are many sources of sources. Clients pay us fees because of how we use the information, not where we get it from. In the end, LinkedIn is but one of many tools we should be using.

What do you think?