We're recruiting at the moment. That means trying to find the best people, and try to persuade them to join us - which got me thinking about how social tools are changing what has been the predominant IT recruitment model.
Historically, the IT recruitment market has been dominated by agencies - they're your classic intermediaries, which the internet was meant to get rid of. Their effectiveness ranges enormously - at the top end, it's like having an extra member of your team dedicated to finding the right person. At the bottom end, they're little more than sharks who lacked the ethics to hack it in estate agency.
It's relatively rare that we deal with recruitment agencies, although that's not for want of their trying. Our recruitment efforts typically starts by asking our friends and connections for recommendations, because these are inherently qualified leads. No-one is going to recommend an idiot to work with them.
Skills *are* important, but they can be learned - much more important is how your new hire is going to fit into the existing team, and that's incredibly difficult to judge on the basis of a 2-page CV and a couple of hours of face-to-face interviews. So having potential hires pre-qualified by people who know the qualities that make a successful member of the team short-cuts a lot of the risk.
Once the leads are found, it's almost trivially easy to check someone out, particularly when you're looking for designers or developers using the technologies that we use.
They're going to have profiles on all the common networks to start with, and more importantly they'll have profiles in the places where there's relevance. A Rails developer without a Github profile is unusual, for example - and what better way of assessing their capabilities than actually seeing code that they've written?
This is something of a minefield to some people - is it ethical to check out prospective hires ahead of talking to them, and how far can you take this?
To my mind, there *are* limits - Facebook is probably a step too far, but personally I'd expect a potential employer to at least google me, which means that my blog and Flickr stream and LinkedIn profile and Github code and so on are going to show up. Far from being an intrusion into my privacy, I'd see this as just as much of an opportunity to sell myself in a more three-dimensional way than a CV could ever do. There is a theoretical risk that a potential employer could see something in say, my Flickr stream that puts them off - but if they're so sensitive as to be put off by something that I'd consider fine for the rest of the world to see, doesn't that count as a lucky escape on my part?
The new landscape of social tools has implications for both recruitment agencies and their candidates, though.
For agencies, the first impact is that the traditional recruitment model is adding less and less value as time goes on. Much of the value of the agent is in the pre-qualification that they are supposed to do - and as a hiring manager I now have access to the same tools as they do. More importantly, I'm generally better qualified to judge a candidate's suitability than they are because I'm a specialist in my own field.
Neither are agencies any longer the primary source of candidates - social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter make it trivially easy to reach a huge pool of potential hires, and do so in a way that actually adds value to the recruitment process.
I'm not sure what this is going to mean for most of the mainstream agencies - sheer inertia on the part of most organisations is going to keep them around for a while longer, but once the majority of the hiring managers come from a generation used to social tools, I think they're going to find their market shrinking.
For the potential employee, it's more important than ever to make sure that your online presence accurately represents you. This goes deeper than just ensuring that you've taken down the embarrassing Facebook photos. It means making sure that your online persona matches your stated one - if you're a designer, at least part of your portfolio should be online. If you're a Ruby rockstar, your Github profile will be checked out. If you're a Linux guru, then you should show up in the newsgroups and discussion forums.
It goes back to what I said earlier - rather than looking at an online presence as a potential negative that needs to be controlled, it can equally work for your advantage. Working in the wrong job is just as traumatic for the employee as hiring the wrong person is for the employer - so anything that improves the chances of a better match has to be a good thing.
And in the same way as recruiters can reach out, so can you as a candidate - there are various statistics about how many positions are filled before they are ever advertised, but it's a significant number. Accessing an organisation through your contacts means you get the true picture of the place - every organisation will claim that their people are their most important asset, but how many actually live up to that claim day-to-day? If you've got the unvarnished truth as well as the glossy brochures and shiny website, you're in a position to make a balanced judgement about whether it's the right place for you.
If you're a recruitment agency trying to cold-sell me your services, it's becoming increasingly difficult for you to come up with a convincing argument around why I should pay for your services. And if you're a potential member of the Headshift team, then just drop me a line. We don't bite, and we're only too happy to hear from smart people who have something to offer.
Historically, the IT recruitment market has been dominated by agencies - they're your classic intermediaries, which the internet was meant to get rid of. Their effectiveness ranges enormously - at the top end, it's like having an extra member of your team dedicated to finding the right person. At the bottom end, they're little more than sharks who lacked the ethics to hack it in estate agency.
It's relatively rare that we deal with recruitment agencies, although that's not for want of their trying. Our recruitment efforts typically starts by asking our friends and connections for recommendations, because these are inherently qualified leads. No-one is going to recommend an idiot to work with them.
Skills *are* important, but they can be learned - much more important is how your new hire is going to fit into the existing team, and that's incredibly difficult to judge on the basis of a 2-page CV and a couple of hours of face-to-face interviews. So having potential hires pre-qualified by people who know the qualities that make a successful member of the team short-cuts a lot of the risk.
Once the leads are found, it's almost trivially easy to check someone out, particularly when you're looking for designers or developers using the technologies that we use.
They're going to have profiles on all the common networks to start with, and more importantly they'll have profiles in the places where there's relevance. A Rails developer without a Github profile is unusual, for example - and what better way of assessing their capabilities than actually seeing code that they've written?
This is something of a minefield to some people - is it ethical to check out prospective hires ahead of talking to them, and how far can you take this?
To my mind, there *are* limits - Facebook is probably a step too far, but personally I'd expect a potential employer to at least google me, which means that my blog and Flickr stream and LinkedIn profile and Github code and so on are going to show up. Far from being an intrusion into my privacy, I'd see this as just as much of an opportunity to sell myself in a more three-dimensional way than a CV could ever do. There is a theoretical risk that a potential employer could see something in say, my Flickr stream that puts them off - but if they're so sensitive as to be put off by something that I'd consider fine for the rest of the world to see, doesn't that count as a lucky escape on my part?
The new landscape of social tools has implications for both recruitment agencies and their candidates, though.
For agencies, the first impact is that the traditional recruitment model is adding less and less value as time goes on. Much of the value of the agent is in the pre-qualification that they are supposed to do - and as a hiring manager I now have access to the same tools as they do. More importantly, I'm generally better qualified to judge a candidate's suitability than they are because I'm a specialist in my own field.
Neither are agencies any longer the primary source of candidates - social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter make it trivially easy to reach a huge pool of potential hires, and do so in a way that actually adds value to the recruitment process.
I'm not sure what this is going to mean for most of the mainstream agencies - sheer inertia on the part of most organisations is going to keep them around for a while longer, but once the majority of the hiring managers come from a generation used to social tools, I think they're going to find their market shrinking.
For the potential employee, it's more important than ever to make sure that your online presence accurately represents you. This goes deeper than just ensuring that you've taken down the embarrassing Facebook photos. It means making sure that your online persona matches your stated one - if you're a designer, at least part of your portfolio should be online. If you're a Ruby rockstar, your Github profile will be checked out. If you're a Linux guru, then you should show up in the newsgroups and discussion forums.
It goes back to what I said earlier - rather than looking at an online presence as a potential negative that needs to be controlled, it can equally work for your advantage. Working in the wrong job is just as traumatic for the employee as hiring the wrong person is for the employer - so anything that improves the chances of a better match has to be a good thing.
And in the same way as recruiters can reach out, so can you as a candidate - there are various statistics about how many positions are filled before they are ever advertised, but it's a significant number. Accessing an organisation through your contacts means you get the true picture of the place - every organisation will claim that their people are their most important asset, but how many actually live up to that claim day-to-day? If you've got the unvarnished truth as well as the glossy brochures and shiny website, you're in a position to make a balanced judgement about whether it's the right place for you.
If you're a recruitment agency trying to cold-sell me your services, it's becoming increasingly difficult for you to come up with a convincing argument around why I should pay for your services. And if you're a potential member of the Headshift team, then just drop me a line. We don't bite, and we're only too happy to hear from smart people who have something to offer.
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