How do we overcome the worldwide shortage of good recruitment professionals?

It is true, worryingly there is a global shortage of many skilled and experienced professionals and with that includes a shortage of experienced professional recruiters at the Consultant, Senior Consultant and Manager levels. When the business world most needs assistance in filling skills gaps and increasing vacancies, where can the recruitment industry look to fill its own vacancies?

Recruitment agencies are renowned at looking after their client requirements first, putting their own internal recruitment needs lower down their list of priorities. However, it is that old ‘chicken and egg’ question again. So which should take priority – finding a team of good recruiters to look after client needs? Or trying to look after their needs with not enough resources?

Video pic 5 officeMost recruitment agencies are just not good enough at recruiting for themselves! When you focus every day on the hiring needs of other companies you can lose sight of the long-term plan for your own business and therefore forget to reinvest resources back into your workplace.


Why is there a global recruiter shortage?

The worldwide financial recession and the downturn in the oil and gas industry had a massive impact on many recruitment companies, which ultimately stopped or reduced hiring new staff. As a result, recruiters struggled to find roles and many left the profession, leaving a skills gap. As things have picked up, there are now more vacancies in recruitment and not enough experienced consultants to fill them.

Three key solutions to finding new recruiters:

 

1) Train new consultants

This has obvious plus and minus points. It will take a new consultant longer to get up and running and producing a return. There is an element of risk that this is not the industry for them and a lot of time can be invested in training to find that out. Whoever does the training will need to allocate time to train rather than doing what they normally do. If it is an individual’s first time in recruitment they can be more vulnerable to being headhunted away because the grass may always seem greener until they try elsewhere. On the positive side, the person hired will learn to do everything the way you like things to be done and it is easier to find an untrained recruiter than an experienced one.

2) Hire experienced recruiters from across the globe

It is likely that you have exhausted the local market by speaking with and advertising to most the small pool of experienced recruiters. Looking further afield can open up so many more options and create an attractive prospect for a recruiter to live and work in another country.

3) Hire a trainee recruiter/resourcer with 3 months+ experience.

By this point, they will have a track record of performance and show that they have made the decision that recruitment is a sector they would like to work in.

 

If you would like further advice on recruitment or would like to talk us about finding the next generation of talent for your organisation then contact us here.