It’s only natural that recruitment has evolved the way it has.

Look at every step, and you can enhance that step through optimisation and technology.

Service built on previous foundations, iterating time and time again.

If the goal is speed and volume, that iteration leads to faster and higher volume.

Automation, CRMs, ATS, AI, or further back CV databases, job boards, emails, faxes.

All of these serve the same purpose - better efficiency for existing steps.

While service orients around the facilities available to us.

Looking much the same, despite better tech and the passage of time.

Fees are also much the same. In contingency recruitment, has that fee model changed since the 50s?

Or has it been minor adjustments by increment?

‘No win, no fee.’

These days the counterpunch that is retained has become more popular.

Pay us up front, and we’ll give you a better service.

However, while contingency has the consequence of systemically poor experience for the individual, retained isn’t without its issues.

“Oh, we tried retained and it was a waste of money.”

But the real issue is that, in many cases, service is the consequence of the fee model.

Shouldn’t what you pay be a consequence of what you get?

The first question many employers ask of their recruiters is ‘Can you match 15%’ because that’s all that matters, irrespective of whether a service might be fundamentally different.

In the last newsletter, I speculated how I might recruit within an employer, if the recruitment industry didn’t exist. You can read it here , if you missed it.

What if we did that same exercise as a recruitment agency?

With all the technology available, if we weren’t bound by the legacy of iterations, how might we go back to square one, and invent a recruitment service from scratch?

Ironically, I would iterate to invent recruitment, but it would be from other professional service industries.

Any company can employ accountants, HR practitioners, marketing teams, and so on. But there’s good reason to retain the services of 3rd party experts, whether for transactional or transformational work.

How can we steal their concepts to create a recruitment service that has the best impact for its stakeholders?

All of these service types are sold with various components - projects, advice, audits, ongoing support and so on.

A key different between them and us though is letters.

CIPD, ACCA, CIM. Chartered.

REC is hardly the same, nor are the other burgeoning membership bodies.

Should there be a charter for recruitment?

In 2008 I left recruitment for a few years.

We were planning to move to Canada, and I felt I needed to freshen up my commercial skills in a different sector, to enable a fresh start in a new country.

We didn’t move in the end - negative equity, children, Dad’s cancer, all conspired to change our perspective on what’s important.

I took a role as Commercial Manager at Workplace Law in Cambridge, leading business development of their training and consulting services.

It was a brilliant role in many ways and sharpened many aspects of my career, not least of which was how to design, propose, sell and onboard bespoke solutions for employers.

We invented an ‘annual support contract’ where we acted as part, or all, of a client’s HR or SHE team.

Working closely with the practice leads, I got to see what good looks like in a range of employers, from strategy work with cool Cambridge tech startups, through to transactional support to global corporations.

Our process was to map out their context and needs, against our capability, so that they go exactly what they needed, and we agreed services that gave us a 50% profit margin against our actual and notional costs.

In 2011, following a story for another time, I was sacked for ‘some other substantial reason’ (I think it was my good looks, or maybe what they felt was an insurmountable conflict of interest).

It proved a good thing, despite the stress of it, for which I am now grateful.

I took these experiences into starting Bircham Wyatt Recruitment.

Why should I have to follow suit with a transactional market?

Why do we do the things we do in recruitment? How can we do them differently to benefit our stakeholders - candidates and employers?

Why couldn’t I apply what I’d learnt at WPL in running my business?

What do projects, advice, audits, ongoing support look like in recruitment?

How could we make a strategic impact or drive operational improvements?

What does transformational look like in recruitment?

How might a transactional service be built from grass roots?

If a transactional industry lets individuals down, which let’s be honest we all know it does, how could we rebuild recruitment to leave candidates with an excellent experience, while in service of our work with employers?

It’s genuinely an exciting proposition to create opportunities that fly in the face of commonly accepted practice.

The only issue is one of expectation. Sometimes what is is what is expected, and it doesn’t seem broke so doesn’t seem to need fixing.

In an industry that should be built on relationships and trust, should we compromise on challenging the status quo if it allows working with people we want to help?

For me, it’s left a mix of services - from the traditional, if wonky, pricing of standard models, to opportunities to help in more unusual ways.

Nothing prescriptive, all oriented around employers, presuming they meet my needs of

Can I help?

Do I want to help?

Can I afford to help?

I just think that if we want to do something genuinely different, it has to be done with intention, not with the habits of others.

Or if you just want to do better, adopting frameworks that reach the outcomes you desire, could be good enough.

What would you do?

Regards,

Greg

P.S. you’ll have noticed these newsletters are free. If you find them valuable, rather than pay for them, why not sponsor my Manchester Marathon efforts - I’m raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support. Here’s the link.