Jobs in Recruiting

It has only been a few years since the responsibilities of a single recruiter encompassed the complete value chain of the process, both on the candidate and the client sides (internal clients in case of the corporate recruiter).

Thus, consultants were accountable for tasks such as job ad writing, employment pre-screening, interviewing, on one hand; as well as client relationship development, account management, billing and administration on the other. That would have made for a chunky role description, for those lucky enough to have one.

In the search for efficiencies derived from specialization, agencies and corporate recruitment teams broke down responsibilities along the lines of audience and process steps. Candidate-facing professionals divvied up tasks into sourcing, interviewing, etc; whilst client focused personnel segregated business development activities from say, existing relationship management tasks.

As candidates and customers have increasingly sophisticated terms of engagement, brought about the economic cycle, the supply and demand of labor's own dynamics, and other influencing macro trends (e.g. demographics); it appears that further atomization in the responsibilities of recruiters is required to drive their effectiveness up once again.

Specifically, with recruiting jobs this atomization may be performed along three dimensions:

Value a chain component; that is, breaking down the process steps and derive efficiency from focus and repetition (e.g. creating candidate leads from job fairs, writing candidate reports, inducting new employees). This is a cost-centered strategy

Skills set requirements: whether they are web-related (career site optimization), marketing and ancillary (ads writing, candidate program management, employer branding), etc; all in addition to the core HR know-how. This is a value-centered strategy.

A combination of the Value-chain and Skill set dimensions. This matrix approach would see marketing professionals joining the recruitment team and applying their tools and practice to the appropriate recruitment process steps (manage the employee value proposition using the product lifecycle management model, for example).

Similarly, technology-trained professionals can make use of the expertise to enrich tasks such as the usability of the company career (or agency) website, or perhaps even contribute with some of the process overarching aspects (e.g. optimizing the lead output from the company's ATS).

Multidiscipline teams such as this have the potential of not only produce efficiencies with their 'outside' skills, but also to challenge and overhaul the online recruitment process.