The future of Executive Recruiting is hotly debated. There is a lot of prevailing opinions out there that the need for recruiters is going to decrease because of the abundance of online job boards, social media tools, referral programs, and direct hiring initiatives.
This may be true for well-resourced organizations who can benefit from these changes but what about the vast majority of the remaining companies?
There are seven good reasons why Executive Recruiting is entering into a major growth period:
1. The demand to find talent in a full employment economy is going to accelerate and it will make finding top talent more challenging. Candidates will now have more career options and will be in greater control of the search process. Organizations will then have to decide whether they want to proactively commit more and more resources to search. This may be something that they will be reluctant to pursue because it will take them away from the core mission of their business.
2. The changing technology landscape will call for innovative screening and selection tools that can identify and hire the talent in high demand fields. Recruiters are learning to employ more sophisticated assessment tools in their search so that they can better match quality candidates with the open positions.
3. We are still a long way from AI (artificial intelligence) taking over the search process. The human element is still vital for selection because talent selection still is an art and science. AI will make its way into talent acquisition but like a lot of innovations (driverless cars, Internet of things) it will take some time.
4. More and more organizations are taking the steps to outsource all non-mission critical functions in an effort to create a lean and flexible workplace. Outsourcing talent acquisition will be one of the outcomes of this transformation. As mentioned in reason # 1, the organizational focus is going to be more and more focused on the core mission that drives revenue and profit.
5. The external recruiter total cost to serve model (whether retained or contingency) is being continually optimized so that it can be more budget acceptable to more organizations. Recruiters understand that their clients are facing cost pressures at every turn and are more than willing to partner with them on how to optimize their costs.
6. HR leaders know that finding the right candidates is a lot more complicated than simply posting an ad on Indeed.com because what you get back is a flood of 200 resumes that need to be filtered into an applicant tracking systems that is already challenging to use. The outcome is an overworked talent acquisition staff and slower time to fill rates for the open positions.
7. There is going to be more demand to find the passive (happily employed but open to an opportunity) candidate as the market continues on its current improvement track. Finding passive candidates, a specialty of recruiters is time-consuming and something that all but a very few internal talent acquisition departments are prepared to do well.
I believe that the full growth economy that we are entering is going to be a growth period for Executive Recruiting. They are going to be able to more than prove their value by helping firms continue to fill their talent pipeline.
