Don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the line: “Rather than sift through mounds of online applications, they are going out to hunt for candidates themselves.”
You’re kidding, right? True Executive Recruiters have been “hunting” their entire careers. Just because a new form of social media has made it a bit easier to communicate doesn’t mean a paradigm shift in the good old fashioned hard work of Executive Search. The fact that some of these companies are just now getting on board is a bit, well, scary.
“Recruiters had to put in all this extra time to read applications but we didn’t get benefit from it,” she says. Now, the company is hiring different types of recruiters who specialize in headhunting, including finding candidates to poach from competitors, rather than those who are good at processing and filtering applications.
Uh, people who are “good at processing and filtering applications” aren’t recruiters, although they may carry that title. A true recruiter “recruits”, as in goes out and looks for the right talent for their client and opportunity. Having “new” technology (we’ve been on Linked In since 2005) to utilize doesn’t mean that talent search suddenly becomes easy or that anyone can do it. Low level screeners tasked with speaking with Executive level talent can damage your employer brand and lengthen the time to fill crucial positions. Professionals find professionals, not resumes.