Many employers still think using a recruitment agency is the only viable way to find staff. Most smaller employers don’t have a full time recruiter in-house, many don’t even have a dedicated HR Director, so using a recruitment agency is often seen as the only option. But there is now a cost effective alternative which employers may want to consider.

What’s the problem with recruitment agencies?

The biggest problem of course is recruitment agencies like to charge you a small fortune for the privilege of introducing you to half a dozen of their “hand picked”, “carefully selected” candidates. The truth however is the majority of agencies won’t have even meet the candidates they are recommending to you, let alone fully vetting and assessed them as suitable for the vacancy you’re looking to fill. Most simply search a database of CVs before sending a list of ‘matching’ candidates.

In addition to charging you anything up to 25% of your new employee’s first year’s salary, there is another potentially even greater problem. Because you’re only seeing a shortlist of candidates from a recruitment consultant who probably hasn’t even met them, there’s no guarantee any of these individuals will be the best fit for the job or your business. Unfortunately, this is reflected by the high percentage of new employees that last less than 18 months in a new job. A study in the US conducted by Leadership IQ showed 46% of new hires failed within the first 18 months, but interestingly only 11% of those were due to a lack of skills.

Now of course this is not true for every recruitment agency, however with the increasing pressure on consultants to hit targets and make placements, few now have the time or skills to fully assess whether a candidate is right for your role.

Why not simply advertise on a job board?

The proliferation of job boards over recent years now means getting your job vacancy in front of thousands, even millions of job seekers is both easy and relatively inexpensive. However, with so many people looking for work at the moment, you can expect to receive hundreds, maybe thousands of applications, many from candidates without the required education, skills or experience. While experienced recruiters are able to skim read CVs and quickly accept or decline candidates in a matter of a few seconds, for the rest of us reading all these CVs and covering letters can take hours, even days.

Another option which is increasingly popular is to use flat free recruiters who typically charge between £200 – £700 to advertise your vacancy on the job boards then filter the applications received and send you a short list of candidates. Yet this approach is really just the same as traditional recruitment agencies, albeit you’re not paying as much for the same less than satisfactory service.

It’s time for a change of direction

Firstly, I believe the recruitment process is in need of fundamental change as it’s obvious the current model is failing both employers and candidates. For employers the cost of recruiting is expensive, time consuming and full of risks, while for candidates the experience is often drawn out, stressful and for many ultimately disheartening.

The process of inviting candidates to apply for a job by completing an online application form or sending in a CV and covering letter, then filtering and screening these applications to create a shortlist of candidates the hiring manager interviews is both inefficient and offers no guarantee you’ll spot the best candidate for that role.

Recruitment is all about communication, giving a candidate a chance to sell themselves in an interview and for the hiring manager to see and hear the candidate. It’s only with this interaction can we get a true sense of whether a candidate is going to be a good fit for the role, or from the candidates perspective, is this an employer they can see themselves working for. But of course it’s not viable for hiring managers to interview every candidate that applies for a job face to face. So we need to improve the initial screening and selection of candidates for interview so the best are given their chance to convince the hiring manager they should be given the job.

What’s the alternative?

I’m sure you’ve already guessed I’m going to suggest you use video interviews, but in fact it’s not that straightforward. With so many different types of role and employers, there is never going to be a one size fits all solution. Yet I think for a great many employers, a significant proportion of their recruitment could be improved by adopting the following approach.

Using a careers website, job board advert or via social media the employer advertises their vacancy in much the same way as they do currently. However, rather than getting the candidate to apply for the role by completing an online form or sending in their CV with a covering letter, they are redirected via a hyperlink to the employer’s Tazio interview. The candidate logs in using just their name and email address to register and is first asked three simple filter questions set by the employer. These could be something as simple as “Do you have the right to work in the UK?” or “Do you have a degree in XYZ?”.

Assuming the candidate answers these questions as required, they are then asked to complete an online video interview. The process is very simple and easy to follow. They can be shown a video introduction from the recruiter or hiring manager explaining what it’s like to work here and what the role is all about. They then record their answers, using their webcam, to maybe 2 or 3 generic questions and then a further 5 or 6 questions specific to that role. At the end of the interview you can give them the opportunity to upload a CV or include links to their profile on social sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter, or links to their own website or online portfolio.

As soon as the candidate has finished their interview, you will be emailed to say a new interview has been completed. You can choose to review their interview straight away, or wait until after the closing date you’ve set for applications and then compare and contrast each candidate’s responses in one go. Watching the first answer may well be all you need to decide whether or not the candidate is going to be a fit, if not you can simply move on to the next. Once you’ve reviewed all the candidate’s videos you can create your shortlist to invite into a face to face interview. Unsuccessful candidates can be rejected and sent a personalised “with regret” email.

You can also send a link to the shortlisted candidate’s interviews, for the hiring manager or other colleagues to review before they interview them. This way, the hiring manager has already seen and heard the candidate’s answers to basic questions, they can concentrate on areas of concern or probe further where clarification is needed in the face to face interview.

So how do the numbers stack up?

Well lets assume you’re recruiting someone on £25,000 pa, around the national average, then a recruitment agency is going to charge you anything from £2,500 to £6,250. In contrast, using a job board or flat rate recruiter to advertise your role and then using Tazio to screen candidates and create a shortlist is going to cost you as little as a few hundred pounds. And as I’ve outlined above, I believe you will have a better chance of identifying the best candidate for your role, which could save you tens of thousands in the longer term.

In conclusion, recruitment is too important to get wrong, yet many of us still entrust a third party to find and recommend potential employees, many of whom they’ve never met or even spoken to. Bringing recruitment in house offers the chance for employers to control the complete recruitment process and by using technology, save them money, time and improve the quality of new hires.

We are really excited to be involved with Interview Club, (www.interviewclub.co.uk) the new initiative aimed at helping young people in the UK gain valuable interview experience.

The objective of Interview Club is to provide a free online resource for school or college leavers and graduates where they can do job / role specific interviews before they even start applying for jobs. This should give them a better understanding of what type of questions they will asked and what employers are really looking for, building self confidence and giving them a better chance of getting the job they want.

In addition to the virtual interviews, Interview Club is looking to create an employer/recruitment agency directory so job seekers can easily find links to employers recruiting for entry level positions. It is also hoped that recruiters will access the database of recorded interviews when they are looking for candidates. This would be a real win win situation as the recruiter gets access to a pool of talent new to the job market and candidates could potentially be spotted for a role before it is even advertised.

If you’re an employer or recruitment agency recruiting school leavers and graduates, please have a look at the site and lend your support if you can.

In this video, Tom shares his thoughts on the future of the CV

What’s wrong with the CV?

The CV or Resume has been around for hundreds of years, well at least according to Wikipedia, so are they still appropriate in the modern world?

Many employers and most recruitment agencies still ask candidates to send in a CV with a covering letter to apply for a job or register with them. Typically a recruiter will then screen the CVs against certain criteria and dismiss those that don’t meet the benchmark.

Yet to my mind this process is completely flawed for a number of important reasons; A CV may be missing information, laid out badly or not well written, and CV’s come in all shapes and sizes, styles and formats and if poorly presented can instantly lead a recruiter to reject that candidate. Most recruiters are under time pressure so only skim CVs making it easy to overlook a potentially strong candidate. CV’s focus on what you’ve done in the past, and as we all know ‘past performance is no guarantee of future returns”. And let’s be honest who’s going to write a personal statement that doesn’t exaggerate the positive and gloss over the negative?

Now some may argue that if a candidate isn’t prepared to spend time, or even money, on creating a professional looking CV they don’t deserve the job, but that’s just rubbish. Surely, the most important part of a recruiter’s job should be finding and recruiting the best person for their employer or client. Just because someone sends in a CV that doesn’t grab a recruiter’s attention, does this make them automatically no good for the role, I think not.

Can we replace our reliance on the CV?

With the rise of LinkedIn more of us now have a digital profile, however in many ways this creates just as many problems as a CV. A LinkedIn profile is created by the candidate, so the quality and level of detail varies widely and the focus is still on where you’ve worked, your education and what you’ve done in the past. For recruiters it’s still extremely difficult to get an accurate sense of a candidate from just their LinkedIn profile.

The best way to really find out what a candidate is like and whether or not they’re going to be a good fit for your role is to meet them face to face and interview them. But of course this is both time consuming and totally impractical if you receive hundreds or even thousands of applications. Furthermore, attending an interview can be difficult for a candidate that’s working and off putting for passive candidates.

Is there a better way?

Recruiters need to be bold and rethink the way they recruit because, as the high level of new hires that fail testifies, the current approach simply doesn’t work as well as it should. Obviously, there’s no one size fits all solution, however I believe for a great many roles it’s perfectly possible to utilise new technology to deliver better recruitment outcomes and improve candidate experiences.

Let’s take a typical office based role, for example a new Accounts Assistant and we’re going to advertise the position on our own careers website and post an advert on a couple of job boards. Assuming a well written job advert and the job is located in a major population centre, we might reasonably expect to receive anything up to a few hundred applications. Unfortunately, of these a great many will be from candidates without the required standard of education or previous experience so let’s restrict applications by asking potential candidates a couple of simple questions before we even let them apply.

We’ve now reduced our number of applications by as much as 50%. Next we get them to complete an online interview, using Tazio of course, and we ask them a couple of general questions and five or six questions relevant to the role. We’ll loose a few more at this stage because those candidates not really interested in the role won’t do the interview and most of those that don’t have the required qualifications or experience, will soon realise they’re going to be found out and go no further. Finally, once they’ve completed the interview they can upload a copy of their CV and include links to their LinkedIn profile or other online sites.

Now instead of a couple of hundred CVs which we need to filter, we have maybe 50 completed video interviews to review. If we watch all 50 interviews in full it may take us a good few hours, but in reality we’ll watch each candidate’s first answer and decide whether or not they are good fit for the role, much the same as we would in a face to face interview, only here we don’t have to sit there for another 20 minutes out of politeness. Having reviewed all the video interviews we can create our shortlist of candidates for a face to face interviews. Importantly, because we’ve already had the chance to hear them respond to our general questions, when we meet face to face we can focus on more in depth questioning and probe further into any issues raised in the online interview.

From the candidate’s perspective, they have found a job they like the look of, they have applied and had the first interview within maybe 30 minutes. They have received an automated email outlining exactly what will happen next. Should they be lucky enough to be invited for an interview, they can be assured the recruiter is genuinely considering them for the role, reducing the number of no shows and giving candidates a far better feeling towards our brand.

While this approach isn’t going to work for every job, for many roles I believe this offers a far more effective way of screening and assessing candidates than simply skimming through CVs.

If you’d like the chance to demonstrate to your boss you’re think ahead, then give me a call and let’s discuss how we can help you improve the quality of your next hire, as well as saving a great deal of time and money in the process.

Finally, if you agree this may just be a better way of recruiting, why not be the first to share this link and tell all your friends and colleagues.

I was recently in a meeting with a large RPO provider that’s looking to deploy Tazio. It was really interesting to hear their take on the commercials behind the decision. It got me thinking, the benefits and potential savings offered by digital interviews are increasingly recognised, however how do the numbers, the financials, the cold, hard figures look, in short does the ROI stack up?

Well the first thing that came across loud and clear was the opportunity to reduce the time recruiters spend trawling through mountains of CV’s, then carrying out telephone screens or first interviews, many with candidate’s completely unsuited to the role advertised. For many of the big, well known employers the numbers can be simply staggering, some are getting literally thousands of applications within a matter of days. Furthermore, with applications now being made online, it’s easy for candidates to fire off a copy of their CV or complete an online application form in a matter of a few minutes.

So lets crunch some numbers and see how the figures look. If we assume a typical recruiter’s earning around £20k pa, with the other costs of employing them, let’s use an average of an extra 50% of their salary and the hourly rate for that recruiter works out at about £15.

Doing the maths based on an employer receiving 1,000 applications I reckon its going to take them around 130 hours to screen and filter that down to a shortlist of 10 candidates for the hiring manager to interview, at a cost of around £2,000. These figures don’t include any management time or reimbursing candidates expenses for attending first interviews.

By comparison the total cost of using Tazio to do an online interview which the recruiter uses to screen applications and create the same shortlist would be £900, or a saving of over 50%. What’s more, using Tazio means it only takes the recruiter a total of 20 hours to achieve the same result.

The other slightly more intangible benefits from an RPO or agency’s perspective is, by using digital interviews the recruitment process can be accelerated helping to identify and secure the best talent earlier in the process. We all understand the costs of recruiting the wrong person, so anything that makes it easier to spot the best person for a role as early as possible is going to deliver savings. Furthermore, there’s the commercial advantage of offering a better, more cost effective solution to a client that’s surely going to win you more business?

Of course there are very many variables that mean there’s not simple way to work out the cost per hire, but overall it would appear the ROI offered by digital interviews is potentially significant. I think it’s fair to say, for the vast majority of employers and agencies, the numbers mean they really need to at least consider digital interviews, before their CFO asks them some tough questions.