This week we have an awesome special offer for all of you cool, savvy and switched-on Whiteboard readers. The company that brought the much talked about RHUB to New Zealand last year are bringing the first ever Sourcing Summit #SOSUNZ to Auckland in just a couple of weeks’ time and there’s a pretty awesome line up of speakers for the event.
What’s interesting though is that 90% of the attendees signed up so far are internal recruiters, rather than their agency counterparts. Now I do get it. I realise that corporate recruitment teams often have bigger budgets for investing in sourcing technologies like LinkedIn Recruiter, more intelligent ATS, or dedicated sourcing consultants. But shouldn’t agencies be seeking to immerse themselves in these developing trends too, if only to remain relevant as a value-add service to the internal recruitment function? Or maybe just for networking purposes?
Or is the gift of the gab really all agencies have left?
I feel us agencies still have plenty more to offer than the traditional recruitment process, but I do fear that ignoring these trends, technologies, events and developments will push us ever more towards obscurity.
I was sent a thought-provoking article that came out of the US this week, and it really highlights how specialised and technical sourcing is now becoming. It really is becoming something of a science, increasingly easy to regard as a distinct function of recruitment in much the same way recruitment is becoming an increasingly independent, leaving-home-and-going-on-OE function of broader HR. Well actually I think it’s time recruitment started peeling away from HR altogether but that’s a blog post for another day…
The article reveals how one US business has turned away from reading CV’s for work histories and is ignoring even referrals and recommendations from past employers (after all, how many of you have taken a surprisingly effusive reference for a candidate you were 50/50 on that turned out to be a calculated effort to wash their hands of the employee and make them someone else’s problem?) This firm, seeking out some massively in-demand Programmers, jumped onto the Big Data bandwagon and developed a way of crunching data to reveal the best of the best:
“…trying to see whether these technologies can also be used to predict how well a programmer will perform in a job. The company scours the Internet for clues: Is his or her code well-regarded by other programmers? Does it get reused? How does the programmer communicate ideas? How does he or she relate on social media sites?”
This is futuristic stuff for us in New Zealand, and still to be categorically proven to have wider-reaching appeal and application beyond the world of ones and zeroes in Silicon Valley, but it is out there, and will no doubt appear here one day.
So get involved. Learn what’s working right here and now in New Zealand, and learn from people far more knowledgeable than me about what’s in store for our industry in the future. As loyal readers of The Whiteboard you can also click on the image above to get a cool $100 off the ticket price, along with other offers.
Righto that’s it for this week, have a good one and I’ll look forward to seeing lots of you, internal and agency, at the pre-Conference drinks here at Generator on 22nd May.
Cheers!
