Let’s Hear It For The Resourcers

It’s still early days, but I’m starting to sense something of a power shift in the finely balanced egos and nuances of the recruitment agency hierarchy.  A quiet revolution is building, a revolution taken to the preening, strutting, client-facing business developers by the hitherto subservient candidate managers and resourcers.

Particularly in the job-heavy, talent-short industry sectors such as Technology and Engineering, the currency of an agency’s success is in the quality of the talent they are able to source for their clients.  Increasingly, the ability of a Resourcer to identify and engage with hard-to-find professionals in places like GitHub and Stack Overflow is held in equally high regard to a consultant who can pitch and sell an exclusive retainer.

So it was pleasing, but unsurprising, to attend a client visit earlier this week where the manager of the IT recruitment team was talking about designing an incentive scheme that would bring the remuneration levels of his resourcers up to the same level as his client-facing account managers.  Another regular client of ours also asked for advice on current market salaries and bonuses for IT candidate managers.

So it appears that awareness of this power imbalance is increasing, with acknowledgement starting to manifest itself in the potential for increased earnings for these trainspotters of the recruitment industry.

But that is where, I feel, recruitment leaders need to tread most carefully.  On the whole, they usually reached a position of leadership through historical sales results and billing success.  They are conditioned to be motivated by money.  But it would be wrong to assume that this will therefore always be the same thing to motivate the most adroit of sourcing ninjas.

To attract and retain this emerging class of invaluable skillsets, it’s going to become more and more important that they are treated on a par with your business generating recruitment consultants.  But whether or not that is achieved by aligning salaries and bonuses really depends on what drives them.  There are some footballers who glean more satisfaction from a perfectly weighted pass that leads to a goal scoring chance for the striker, rather than hitting the back of the net themselves.  They’re quite happy to avoid the post-match interview and back-page headlines, but their importance to the team as a whole should always be noted too.

So this blog post is in recognition to the wonderful Resourcers out there who possess the style, panache and chutzpah to attract and engage top talent.  Make sure you do the same.

Speaking of which Happy Birthday for tomorrow to our very own sourcing star Anastasia.  Happy Friday!