If you were going to cherry pick an industry to be a part of in 2012, I suspect most people wouldn’t choose Recruitment Marketing. Having survived the cliff dive of 2008/9, we now have a market running scared of the so-called ‘double dip’. And in the meantime many clients have taken a leaf out of Tom and Barbara Good (from the iconic sitcom ‘The Good Life’) and gone all self-sufficient.
There was a time when hearing the words ‘we’re moving to a direct hire model’ would have the agency’s media buyers rubbing their hands, as invariably it meant less money spent on recruitment consultants and more media bought direct (i.e. through the likes of us). Now, however, it often means ‘we’re going to hire our own recruiters and explore the delights of Linkedin’s search mechanisms’.
At the same time many jobsites and publishers have decided that the quickest way to win business is to bypass the agencies and target clients directly with cut price deals. We regularly find that clients have been seduced by a combination of price and sales skills to sign up direct without fully checking the stats (a service the agency provides as a matter of course). There are even occasions when we provide a schedule to a client with a jobsite quote, only to find that the same jobsite then phones the client direct offering a cheaper deal to gain the quick win – thereby undercutting themselves and reducing their own revenue!
So what’s an agency to do in 2012? Well actually, most agencies realised a long while back that we needed to ditch our reliance on media commission revenue and find alternative revenue streams. The ‘new’ Direct Hire model being adopted by some clients as illustrated above brings its own challenges for recruiters. As ever there’s that old favorite ‘employer brand’. It’s all very well appearing on jobsites, job search engines and aggregators for tuppence ha’penny – and you can twitter all you like – but good candidates are still hard to find and won’t move jobs without a good reason. If you’re perceived as a good place to work, then you have a massive recruitment advantage.
Another area we’ll be focusing on in 2012 is employee engagement and internal comms. With new good talent still hard to find, many of our clients are focusing on training and motivating their existing people to improve their skills and move up the career ladder. And to do that they need the right messages (i.e. pictures and words) and the right internal platforms with good content (i.e. web sites with fun and useful stuff).
So here’s to a 2012 of pictures, words and some fun web stuff.
mikejefferies
mikeheal
