Implant recruiters?! any takers... Many takers!!

A speaker, a head of human resources at a large telecom software major, was the keynote speaker in a recent day long seminar on emerging trends in recruitment. Outlining the emerging trends crisply, he also averred that in the changing times, he was looking at recruitment consulting companies as strategic partners, who would not be just bio-data suppliers, but someone who really understood the strategic intent and depth of their human resource requirements, and work in all earnest to genuinely be a vendor of crucial importance in mutual interest.

The speaker added emphatically that his organisation was even willing to invest to train vendor recruiters on the intricate details of the technology worked on, the professional competencies and skills sought for etc, to facilitate the search companies to ensure optimal delivery of desired manpower. (offcourse, with an assurance that these 'recruiters' would stay on?!)

In today's clutter of recruitment advisories, and the scramble for a pie of the client’s recruitment spend, such a thought is indeed a blessing in disguise for vendors seeking to differentiate them amongst the tens of bio-data pushers, whom the speaker was referring to - albeit in a bit of frustration. How does, the much needed differentiation happen, when all advisories have access to almost the same resources – portals, headhunting skills, industry and candidate mapping and be what it may?

Whilst there may be a host of methods by which each vendor will try to position itself as a strategic player, one trend which will make a surefire success for the vendor and the organisation would be to seek and place ‘implants’ in the client organisation.

The word might sound ominous and disturbing at the outset, but such is a trend is indeed common in the recruitment industry abroad. Recruiter implants in the client organisation will enable the vendor to best understand the criticality of the human resource needs.

By offering such implants an insight into the larger canvas of the organization’s goals, and also the function wise short term (quarterly/half yearly/annual) and long term (3/5/10 year), there will be a necessary alignment of the service quality by the vendor and also the strategic HR function.

An agreement on implants in the hr department will also ensure that there is a great amount of commitment on the part of the vendor and the organisation using the services as well. Such a commitment will necessarily be for a stipulated time frame – a minimum of one or two years – which in essence will also save a lot of valuable man-hours and other allied resources for the organisation.

The organisation, by working on such a model, can also steer clear of so called bio-data pusher vendors, who get in the fray with just an ability to churn in numbers rather than offer any quality services, which the customer may expect.

Implant recruiters, when it may become fairly successful given the evident advantages will also be a sort of 'capability maturity model' for the host of recruitment companies. Only serious and committed recruitment firms, be it large or small will have the wherewithal to offer such a value add, when demanded for by the organisation.

Any takers, comments.... please write......