Transformation of the Recruiting Industry During COVID-19
The Coronavirus has impacted the world, businesses, and has had a major effect on the global economy. What is known as the troika of economic growth: investment, consumption, and export, has been deeply affected. More companies are focused on keeping their business alive during this time. As overall demand shrinks, the executive search industry as a link in the corporate recruitment chain has also been negatively affected.
Many recruiting companies have faced unprecedented challenges. Since the beginning of 2019, the search industry had evolved gradually. The integration and volatility of various industries had continued to increase, the customer requirements for talent were also becoming more demanding, and recruiters submit-to-offer ratios had been steadily dropping before the COVID-19 pandemic. Recruiters who relied solely on online search platforms were facing elimination. The Corona Pandemic has greatly accelerated all of these seeds of change. The true value of the industry as a consultative partner is returning. Only by becoming an industry expert could recruiters’ roles be sustained. As our industry is being reshuffled, we must change and improve our core competitiveness to provide better services to more customers in need.
Our Customer and Client Needs
The majority of experienced headhunting and recruiting companies organize their teams by industry practice. In the past few years, we have found an interesting phenomenon. A handful of traditional internet companies have entered into the automotive industry and are now recruiting high-end automotive talents. A few traditional automotive companies are transitioning to build high-tech products and hence begun to recruit high-tech talent. More frequent crossovers and integrations have begun to appear between many other industries as well. We also see that as these fields start to comingle, delivery of staffing resources often become misaligned. Our customers have needs, and our recruiters have suitable candidates, but due to the improper alignment of the service team, we miss the opportunity to make the proper match in a timely manner, which adversely affects the efficiency of delivery. The economy in the future will be ever more dynamic and the crossover and integration of various industries will be more prevalent. In order to adapt to a rapidly evolving world, our industry needs better tools to help improve internal efficiency and solve the problem of resource misalignment. As search & place is one of our premier total talent solutions, Comrise also faces the same challenges. We have taken three measures to combat the above challenges.
Internal Sharing Platform
As the cross-industry misalignments and consolidations began occurring amongst search agencies, Comrise looked for solutions. After much thought and research, we developed an internal sharing platform. On the internal sharing platform, our industry teams can share overflow job positions or those not in their area of expertise with the rest of the delivery team in real-time. If a recruiter on another team has suitable candidate resources, he/she could make the submittal right away. At the same time, with our patented machine learning and data analytics algorithm to prioritize the top matching candidates, we achieve a much higher level of accuracy.
Project Team-Based Approach
Over the years, Comrise has been recognized by our clients for our consultative approach to talent. Most mature consulting firms have adopted a project-based delivery model due to high efficiency and adaptability that can best match the needs of their clients with the greatest quality and speed. In recruiting and search, a project-based model has the following advantages:
- Maximize the deployment efficiencies of manpower.
- The delivery goals of the project team are well aligned with the needs of its customers, hence higher levels of customer satisfaction can be achieved.
- A flexible organization with an agile structure according to business needs.
- Ease of management with stronger performance and predictive control.
- Create more opportunities for team members to grow into various roles within the organization such as project managers, subject matter experts, and business developers.
- Better resource integration. The establishment of a project team is the process of bringing together the best possible team to satisfy a customer’s custom talent expansion needs.
Developing Recruiters to Become Professional Consultants
The professional capabilities of recruiters will play a vital role in the survival of future search and staffing companies. Consulting, which is the true value of traditional headhunting, is returning. Although the technological innovation of AI and other internet-based systems have reduced the difficulty of obtaining information, technology can never replace the value of a true professional consultant. Search agencies should increase the training of industry-specific knowledge, pay closer attention to developing talent mapping skills and talent maps, and cultivate the ability of consultants to communicate with senior candidates and attract top-notch talent. Only when we become professional consultants and industry experts can we deliver to our clients the true value of talent search and total talent solutions.
Original article publication:
猎头大咖专访|疫情下猎头行业的反思与转型
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