Regional Talent Acquisition Leaders Meet to Discuss the Optimisation of the 'Modern-Day' In-House Recruitment Team

In short, there is no ‘quick fix’ to the debate about scalability, and all the participants agreed that it’s the nature of the beast that the same recruitment teams that are so invaluable during times of growth are the first to get winnowed down when their services are no longer in demand. The only thing that can be done is to try to find top recruiters other jobs elsewhere in the business during these times. In one example, the business realised that in-house recruiters can make excellent direct sales people, so they could be reapportioned to sales teams relatively easily. In another example, there were M&A projects that recruitment practitioners could be redeployed on. However in both of these examples, there still remains the problem of bringing them back into the recruitment
organisation once they’ve proven themselves invaluable in those other fields! So there were no magic solutions presented to this conundrum.

The Career Path of the Modern-Day Recruiter

This subject of redeployment of Recruitment talent led the conversation naturally into the theme of internal career paths for modern-day in-house recruiters. How to keep a successful recruitment team intact, motivated, and moving forward is just as thorny an issue as hiring the right people for your team in the first place.

In more than one organisation represented around the table, talented recruitment professionals could be retained within the organisation by creating exciting international career paths for them. Doing the same role but in a different country, with a different team and with entirely new market conditions, can be just as rewarding to a recruitment professional as in rotating them into another specialisation in HR or in the wider business.

In another organisation, the company was able to see four types of recruiters, and could deploy them into roles that played to their strengths and passions. So long as they were kept focussed on their key areas of interest, they could be retained for longer periods of time. These types were as follows :

1. The technology-focused sourcing types, who can be given a job description and can data mine for the ideal candidate;
2. The Account-Manager types, who like nothing more than to meet with internal clients and network with external potential hires to successfully fill open positions;
3. The operational types, who enjoy more of the process management and systems
   optimisation work to help bring greater efficiencies into the recruitment team; and
4. The employee branding types, who like to work on marketing and advertising initiatives to help build the overall corporate profile.

However, the most creative solution to the longer-term career path of the in-house recruiter was simply by devising a rich and lucrative variable bonus plan. In this example company, in-house recruiters were motivated to stay within the profession by offering them access to very similar bonus potential to that of external agency recruitment consultants. Using a smart system of matrices that takes into account the seniority and complexity of successful hires, the cost savings attributed to every hire, and the customer satisfaction of the internal hiring manager, each recruiter could be set a transparent target and could be kept motivated by offering high incentives to outperform it. While this was not proffered as a fail-safe model to motivate in-house recruiters indefinitely, it does allow them to envision a long-term lucrative specialist career that could, depending on the breadth of coverage, offer them both variety and increasing financial reward in the future.

Still a Rare Breed

In conclusion, it was still hard to come up with an archetypal structure that can be defined as ‘best in breed’ in the world of recruitment, and still harder to find recruitment practitioners who truly fit the mould of what companies need both in the present and the future. As recruitment technologies and online social networking sites continue to shape the future, the Talent Acquisition Leaders left the meeting by chatting about how to best utilise these tools without getting lost in the distractions of websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as other online job sites. Perhaps the true future of the recruitment function will be in the wholesale redeployment of physical recruitment teams into the remote world of online technology. We’ll have to make this the subject of another Recruitment lunch in the future.