Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

With more and more Tier 1 companies setting policies outlawing candidates listed on job boards from consideration through search firms, it points up a fundamental flaw in logic about the 21st Century staffing model: That, somehow, there is a WRONG way to source the right candidate.

In addition to budget pressures, HR departments are creating an even more potentially competitive and adversarial deployment of the various resources: Direct recruiting, print ads, internet ads, job boards, in-house ‘recruiters’, temp services, contract employees. A thought: Would anything ever get built in a manufacturing plant if the Dept. Heads sent every buyer out to buy everything on the Bill of Materials at the lowest price, in open competition with each other? Or if Operations tasked the production lines to ‘just do it’ without regard to all the other departments and processes dependent on steady continuous workflow? Nothing would ever be built.

However, the current staffing model is exactly that: HR uses its internal resources to ‘beat’ the contingency and retained firms to the candidate, rather than integrating that effort. They assign in-house recruiters or internet recruiters to farm the same land as the headhunters. Duplication and overlap? You bet. They spend good dollars on Monster passwords, internet ads, print ads, job fairs and career days at colleges, only to send contingency recruiters to find the same candidates. Whatever an individual company’s personal success rate is with this model, it’s fundamentally flawed.

Why can’t we all just get along? There’s a viable place for all of those resources and they CAN be combined in a unified, integrated process. Some positions are best served by ad response candidates. Some searches simply need to be done by outside recruiters. Managing the staffing assets wisely will become the principal step forward in the evolution of company staffing.

How do we do it? The paradigm caused by the Internet and job boards has shifted. They’re all here to stay. And they are valid and valuable tools. But they replaced nothing. A Monster password isn’t a recruiter. It never identifies anyone. Someone still has to make the connection—internally, externally, somehow.

Next, attitudes toward human capital and the job boards must change. Companies are inch by inch devaluing great professionals simply for having access to the boards as a way to meet them and us, the recruiters. Why the same person is untouchable if he has his resume posted, but of supreme value if he knew a recruiter and didn’t is ludicrous. It’s simply flawed logic.

Why can’t we all just get along? We can. Let’s just keep our eye on the goal: We all want to find the best person for the job, as effectively as we can. Let’s work together to integrate our resources to build and sustain careers and companies. It can be done!