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February 2009
Needle in a Haystack
With a glut of IT professionals looking for work, employers are having to find ways of screening large numbers of applications to find the optimum hire.
In the past six months, the world has changed significantly as a result of an unprecedented series of economic events. This isn’t exactly breaking news, as we’ve all seen on a daily basis more and more stories of government bail-outs for banks, companies collapsing and job losses.
More subtly, and less of a headline, has been the effect on the balance between demand and supply in the world’s labour markets.
Six months ago, as a job seeker, the world was at your feet. Employers, in what can only be termed as a wildly optimistic marketplace (the benefits of hindsight are great and many) were clamouring for talent. This talent, in the form of workers, was indeed fickle. It could choose where and when to work, which jobs to apply for, and how much it wanted to be paid.
To compete in this marketplace, there was a serious need to engage with powerful and competent professional recruitment organisations to pull the right talent from the right organisation to meet an almost unquenchable level of demand.
But what of now? We have all heard of huge layoffs of staff. There are more candidates on the market than ever before, and on my way to work recently even Radio 1 was commenting that job demand was plummeting at its fastest rate for over 10 years. This must mean as an employer looking for staff that the balance has shifted, and you are in the driving seat, doesn’t it?
Well, yes and no. It’s no lie to say that there are more workers on the market than ever before, but are they the right ones for your business? When times get tough, and you need to reduce headcount, where do most companies start? Not surprisingly, they begin with those people that they think are less than business critical, either due to capability, or simply because those tasks undertaken by the worker can be shelved for a period of time. This could well be seen as the “fat” in an organisation. As things get tougher still, the cuts become deeper, and some of the more critical or highly-prized members of the workforce are reluctantly let go.
Looking at the same employment climate from a potential candidate’s perspective, if you are worried about your job, do you run the risk of looking around and being found out by your current employer, or do you hold onto your CV and weather the economic storm whilst in the safe harbour of your current job?
These questions point to a bulk of people on the market, a mixture of those that organisations have regarded as “fat” and some real high-quality talent in a huge mixing pot of job-seekers. This presents a challenge that was unthinkable six months back – how do you find quality amongst potentially hundreds of applicants for a job?
There are employers that in their understandable quest to save costs are now relying on job-boards to try to undertake their own recruitment campaigns, but how easy is this? The answer is that looking for your next quality hire from the huge volume of job-seekers in the market today is like looking for the proverbial “needle in the haystack”. A recent advertisement run for a developer by a Modis consultant which, six months ago, would have yielded three or four responses, yielded a staggering 600 CVs. As an employer, how many of these would you speak to? How would you decide and how much time and money would it cost to filter?
As a question to a potential employer embarking on their own web campaign, what role does a recruitment consultancy play in this turmoil? The answer is professionalism, value and accuracy. A competent consultancy will have knowledge of capable workers that will add value to your business, along with processes and tools in place that allow an accurate search, coupled with background checks, technical testing and, if need be, headhunting to locate talent that is not even looking for work. This ensures that you get away from the needle in a haystack scenario, and are presented with a solid list of appropriately skilled, qualified and experienced people who will seamlessly match your needs.
Professional consultancies can help in other respects. Managing an interview process of two or three stages, along with negotiation on package, notice period and start dates, is something that is seen as normal for a consultancy, not to mention management of any potential counter-offers from employers keen not to lose their prize worker. It’s not core however to many in-house human resources teams, and can be one other challenge to face, whilst resource is stretched in many different directions at once.
In short, there is a lot of value to be had in making a key hire successful in even the most candidate-rich of markets. Do you search for your talent with the precision of a surgeons’ knife, or do you prepare to look for your own needle in an ever-growing haystack? We think the professional search that a high quality consultancy can offer is more important now than ever before and would welcome your thoughts.