Insider Media Limited

Many years ago when computers were called IBM and Microsoft Office was called Wang, I went to a conference where a man said “computers don’t solve problems, they simply accelerate them”. There are many other things about technology we should know.

In my 35 years of running a recruitment business technology has not improved the quality or the productivity of recruitment or recruitment companies. Cutting out the middle man has not cut costs. Sales margins, although under pressure, remain fundamentally where they were or better than 30 years ago, and profit margins are not under pressure from outside forces.

If this is true, why does anyone think that the best candidates are going to walk into the cheapest agencies, post their CVs on job boards, or talk to robots or people who are not allowed to deviate from the script?

Direct recruiters are using job boards more and more because they are fed up with agencies which simply mine CVs, spam what they find and charge a full service commission. Agencies with any sense of their competitive value to their clients have long ago stopped using job boards which are so pervasive they simply cancel each other out.

Job boards that work tend to be niche and the fundamental value is the quality of their relevance to the job seeker. We have come full circle - just as in 1980 some 60 per cent of the people we see come to us direct, or through our own job board. The quality of our stats stands out a mile from the next best job board we use.

All this means that there is an unsatisfactory situation which will not be solved by chasing the same old monster. Recruitment is not going to be computerised any more tomorrow than back in the 1980s.

I moderated a series of webinars recently, with the subject being why large corporates are being out-recruited by small and medium-sized enterprises. This is a trend which can be seen in Birmingham and is leading to some of our best young talent migrating out of the city. We believe that companies that either are, or behave like, small companies recruit better people - who add more value and stay longer - more cheaply than large companies.

There is a deep sense of mismatch and frustration in the world of recruitment between agencies, advertisers, websites, clients, and candidates and pretty much all of that disappointment finds outlet and expression in the financials of the relationships, particularly between client and agency.

Candidates are aware of it and are sometimes directly affected when the frustration breaks out into unintelligent and unprofessional behaviour.

But generally they are okay with letting dog eat dog. This reflects well on nobody but the frustration blinds so successfully that companies who spend millions on their client branding frequently ignore the value of their recruitment branding to their competitive cost.

Everything we know about recruitment screams at us but remains largely unheard when the experts start to re-engineer the logic of the process.

Human beings who care do it best. The opportunity and the environment must be progressive and the process must be thorough and welcoming. Technology must be helpful to the above.

When people do it properly, it’s called quality recruitment. It produces more effective and more lasting outcomes. It is more attractive to candidates and quicker in response time. It is significantly more profitable for all parties and more cost effective when the total costs of the recruitment process are considered.

John Mortimer is co-founder and CEO of the Angela Mortimer Group, which includes Katie Bard recruitment in Birmingham.