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The 2016 Australasian Talent Conference was another high quality event from Trevor Vas, Kevin Wheeler and the ATC team. I took a lot away from the two days of listening to speakers, exploring exhibitor offerings and extending my network in the local talent community.

I attended a very informative session by CEB Executive Advisor in HR Practice Aadil Abbas about the trend in hiring ‘health measures’ between 2010 and 2015 as assessed by CEB’s annual global surveys of hiring managers and recruiters. CEB is a global best practice insight and technology company.

The (corporate recruitment) statistics told a very sobering story:

Health measure 2010 2015
Time to fill* 42 days 63 days
Quality of hire# 7.97 8.03
No. of open jobs (average/recruiter) 20 25

*business days from job opening to candidate starting (median)

# new hire performance rating (1-10) as assessed by hiring manager (mean)

In five short years we have seen a 50% increase in the time to fill and a negligible increase in quality of hire. While at the same time internal recruiters have a 25% higher workload.

How sustainable do you think this is?

Not at all sustainable, according to Kevin Wheeler, who closed the ATC with his traditional Fearless Forecast. One of Kevin’s six 2017 predictions included:

‘More outsourcing of corporate recruitment functions’

This prediction just reinforced a long held view of Kevin’s. Here’s what we wrote over five years ago:

As the years have rolled by I have become increasingly aware of how poorly internal recruiting functions perform when compared to recruitment process outsourcing organizations or agencies. 

Given the state of recruiting functions today there are few compelling factors to recommend retaining an internal function.

The CEB data only reinforces how right Kevin was, and remains.

What a fantastic opportunity for effective recruitment agencies to take advantage of this trend.

As a friend and former boss of mine said so emphatically 17 months ago; Hurrah for the new ‘Golden Era’ of Agency recruitment!

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Alan Whitford

Hi Ross
Thanks for the insights. Not that I would ever contradict the legend that is Kevin Wheeler 🙂 but isn't the answer not to outsource in-house recruitment, but for companies to actually take responsibility and run it like a business unit the same as any other function? Stop treating it like the unwanted child of HR. Have it report directly to the Board – or even better, be represented on the Board. Then, and only then, will Talent Acquistion get the funding and the oversight that it needs to improve those appalling metrics.

Alan

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