A Welcome From Gary Watson

We are delighted to welcome you to TheJobPost. We’d like to offer you our perspective on how recruitment has changed and why we think the time is right for a new type of recruitment service.

The way it used to be

The recruitment industry has changed a lot over the last 25 years. Back then, the majority of companies used direct advertising to recruit staff. There were very few dedicated in-house recruitment departments; no recruitment process outsourcers (RPOs); no preferred supplier lists; and obviously no on-line job boards or CV databases.

As the market evolved, specialist recruitment firms emerged offering candidates' advice on their CV, interview technique and career; and for employers they offered an alternative to traditional advertising, which was often very slow and ineffective. The right recruitment consultant could give a client a shortlist of relevant, available and interested candidates within hours of receiving a vacancy. HR benefited from the same consultant expertise in drawing up the job and person specification together with the right salary package. In those days, submitting six CVs meant six candidate interviews.

Communication between hiring managers, HR and recruitment consultants was open and simple, since HR didn’t need to repel a flood of speculative approaches from thousands of recruiters because there were so few. Recruitment was fast, good value for money and personal.

The position we’re in now

Growth in the recruitment industry has created a chaotic level of competition, to the extent that recruiters now spend more time marketing themselves to potential clients than they spend actually recruiting.

Today, RPOs and in-house recruitment teams are tasked with reducing the use of consultancies and increasing direct hiring; meanwhile, a critical breakdown in the working relationship between the line manager and the recruitment consultant has occurred.

Cost control is vital, but consider this: consultancies who agree to work at 10% or less in the professional staffing sector, may take several months to fill a job, or fail completely, while others operating at say 20% could fill the same job in a fraction of the time. Who is measuring that opportunity cost? The answer is, in virtually every case, no one. But the effects are borne by organisations and their staff in terms of missed profits, overworked employees, disputes, stress, sickness and ultimately more staffing issues.

Our research into the effectiveness of today's preferred supplier agreements produced startling statistics. Many organisations using online supplier management systems had a conversion rate of CVs submitted to interview requests as low as one in six. The recruitment industry, employers, recruitment consultancies and candidates have, to some extent, been trapped by technology and the promise of control and data access which it offers, while the recruitment process has steadily lost the human touch and in real terms, become less efficient.

The future

So where does TheJobPost fit in? TheJobPost provides a revolutionary recruitment service which we believe will become the standard model for recruitment over the next decade. We connect hundreds of recruitment consultancies with thousands of employers through a unique candidate matching platform, which maximises human intelligence and motivation. Our service fills vacancies faster, with better quality candidates at best value, using the vast candidate reach of hundreds of recruitment firms. Our system refines the level of employer/recruiter contact to a relevance basis; employers only talk to a recruiter who has a candidate they need; recruiters only talk to an employer where they have a genuine opportunity to place a candidate – no one's time is wasted.

Against the back-drop of the perceived advantages of job boards, CV databases and social networking, we believe that the time has come to reunite the recruitment community with qualities that have been lost and in so doing, bring back the personal touch that makes all the difference. Welcome to 21st century recruitment.

Gary Watson
Chairman
TheJobPost

For more information, please call 0800 862 0044