betasam's Journal: Job Recruitment Firms and Future Recruitment Trends

The recent trend with Job recruitment firms at least in India is quite disturbing. They catch resumés on the internet and just bombard their clientele with them. Whenever someone makes a hire from such a lot, they take a brokerage. A model suitable for companies that can't afford HR firms. But I find that small companies require people with a special niche most of the time and someone who understand the environment with the risks. So they rarely benefit from these firms. That leaves the medium sized ones which can optionally afford their HR departments to throw up an ad and spend time in a long winded process.

The Monster and Naukri do claim to provide a certain quality of service but there are no strong definitions here because the requirement is to specify the quality or skillset of an individual. Hence quality of the provided contact is almost always measured in "experience years" rather than in true capability or skillset. I know many firms for whom such a method didn't work. More so, there are even smaller firms that cater to both medium and large sized companies following the same model. The only catch is they may be a shade cheaper and may pull out more CVs in lesser time than a HR department. Ultimately the whole process ends up on the head of the team recruiting and he has to meticulously judge each recruit. Leaving the entire process to HR as far as the IT industry is concerned is still not a smart option.

I believe that firms like Orkut or Hi5 who establish networks will soon get into the business of providing job listings and contacts. A social networking technique is bound to work with a little more success than one that is purely based on published CVs or such information. The possibility is there, and I believe this will be a stronger method than going to a firm with millions of resumés in different sectors. That serves not the purpose and consumes precious time, both of which are usually too difficult to spare under recruitment pressure.

The other issue that is most disturbing is inaccurate listings. Either ask for people who know everything in the world or ask for people with illogical experience times (12 years experience in .Net would be an example - and I ain't kidding.) Worse still non-tech jobs asking for people to know XML, Java, 5 years experience in using Office 2000 which sounds ridiculous. Such listings are also very common. So the issue goes both ways, the job seeker has to wade through nonsense, the recruiter has to wade through nonsense. I see a huge opportunity for someone to come up with a smart idea to help both the job-seeker and the people-seeker. The approach of using people networks would however require one to perceive people as asset/resources rather than salaried liabilities on a financial perspective. This would ultimately be the path to grow in a "Knowledge Economy", a transition step from older approaches that still continue from the "Industrial Economy".