INNERGISE!

In April’s poll, we wanted to get the industry’s perspective on how they felt the graduate population saw the recruitment industry as a whole. In other words, do graduates see the recruitment industry as a career of choice, or something that doesn’t necessarily register on their radar?

As with many of the recruitment organisations I consult with, there are very real objectives to grow over the next three to five years now the markets have really opened up again post-recession. 

However, these growth plans are all underpinned by a recruitment organisation’s ability to find good, quality talent to work directly in their businesses, and yet ominously there seems to be an ever emergent dearth of quality talent either available or even interested in working in the sector in the first place.

So why is this, and what can be done to resolve an issue that we have to resolve if the industry is to progress?

As we anticipated, this was a very active poll with many of our network having strong opinions, based on their personal experiences with targeting graduates and running their own directed recruitment campaigns:

The overriding concern from the results showed that the graduate population clearly do not see recruitment as a long term career of choice, but instead merely a quick way to earn money. 

We do, of course, appreciate how the Millennial Generation (aka Generation Y) are often very happy to switch jobs frequently anyway, which may underline a graduate’s reluctance to commit to any sector or industry in the 'long term'. A new graduate’s fear of being stifled by the routine and predictability of a single career pathway, with a single skillset, has been fuelled by their upbringing and education in a truly multi-dimensional world, linked via multi-dimensional networks. 

However, when recruitment organisations evolve from their traditional ways of working, something very special can happen with organisations being able to tap into a pool of skilled, technologically savvy, naturally networked and multi-faceted talent that can give any recruitment business a significant competitive edge in this new era of growth and opportunity.   Offering variety, clear prospects for growth, socially valuable outcomes, access to decision making processes, tangible rewards – these are the elements of an attractive employer for the currently evolving generation of job seekers and components that should make up a key part of a recruitment organisation’s talent management strategy.

The lessons from this pole, and from what we are seeing in the markets, I feel are very clear and should not be ignored.

Lesson one - if the industry is to evolve and recruitment organisations are able to continue supplying high value services to their customers (both clients and candidates) then we need to invest significantly into how we tap into the graduate market as a concentrated channel of talent.  

Lesson two – recruitment organisations need to adapt their talent management strategies to the current generations of talent that are being recruited, aligning best practice talent management processes and principles to the changing demands and cultural nuances of these so-called Millennials. This means first understanding how these graduates really think and what gets them engaged.

Lesson three – once a recruitment organisation has redefined these talent management principles, they need to showcase them to the graduate market in a way that they understand and engage with, and make is easy for a graduate to choose them as their next career path.

So, if we presume that what Confucius said was right, “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”, then it is imperative for the recruitment sector to become an industry of choice for Generation Y, and individual agencies to become employers of choice for the Millenials, if we are to tap into a pool of talent that are probably and quite unashamedly looking for that opportunity to never work a day in their lives!