“LinkedIn is killing agency recruiters.”
“LinkedIn is NOT a recruiter’s friend.”
“How much damage has LinkedIn caused your recruiting business?”
These are all phrases I’ve recently heard from agency recruiters. There seems to be a growing concern that LinkedIn is intent on eliminating the need for third-party recruiters and that it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
Does anyone remember the similar sentiment about Monster? Or job boards? Or the Internet? What about the fax machine?
All of these tools were “game-changers” in the recruiting business, for sure. They were radical new tools that changed how recruiting got done. Monster, especially, was viewed as the “enemy” of agency recruiters and likely DID drive some recruiters — those who “specialized” in low-hanging fruit — out of business. But the best recruiters adapted to the changes, adopted some of the tools, and moved on. The angst over LinkedIn sounds to me like more of the “same old, same old.”
Here are five reasons why agency recruiters don’t need to fear LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn does not magically turn anyone into a recruiter. As I’ve said before, having a hammer at your disposal doesn’t make you a carpenter. Yes, there are “dime a dozen” jobs that don’t require particularly special skills. Some companies, especially larger companies, won’t use agency recruiters to fill these roles. They can likely use LinkedIn or other tools to find suitable candidates who don’t need to be wooed away from their current employer. If those types of roles have been your primary focus, you will need to adapt. Strategic roles, jobs with a unique skill set, or roles that employ an emerging technology, are still extremely difficult (and slow) to fill.
- Recruiting ≠ Sourcing. Having access to a list of names is not the same as recruiting. If it was, the phone book would have put all the agency recruiters out of business back in the “old days.” Even if the names have been keyword-qualified, they have not yet been recruited.
- Recruiting is an art, not a science. It requires persuasion, sales, and other soft skills to successfully convert a name into a candidate, broker the offer, make sure the candidate’s family supports the change, help with relocation, and guard against counteroffers, among other things. No matter how great LinkedIn is as a tool, it CAN’T do any of those other things.
- Lots of people don’t use LinkedIn. Having a LinkedIn profile isn’t the same as being highly engaged on LinkedIn. A lot of people have outdated LinkedIn profiles. There are a lot of other people who don’t even HAVE LinkedIn profiles. No one, whether an agency recruiter, a corporate recruiter, or a hiring manager, will ever find EVERY candidate for EVERY role on LinkedIn.
- Jobs and skills evolve more rapidly than recruiting tools. Employers are hiring people for jobs that didn’t exist five years ago. The jobs include using tools that didn’t exist 18 months ago. There are many instances where there isn’t an existing talent pool that can be easily found and tapped. If you are keyword searching for a word that isn’t included in a profile, you aren’t going to find the profile. Period.
If you need more convincing that agency recruiters aren’t facing imminent death, here is another great read.
What are YOUR thoughts about how LinkedIn is changing recruiting? Please comment below, and share this blog with others.
LinkedIn is a great “tool” to have in your recruiter toolbox but if that’s all you have your recruiting career could be short lived.
Right on, Russ!
Awesome post Veronica!
Let me hasten to add too..we recruiters too stand to gain enormously if we master Linkedin :)!
– It is not about connections, it is about the relationships.
Surely it is a great tool to build, nurture, engage and influence others..
-It is not just about finding candidates..it is also about ‘being found’ by those who want to know about the best practitioners!
-Visibility leads to Credibility. Have you realised that most searches on google throw up Linkedin results the most?
-And yes, unlike other searches..on google or any job portal, the search results one gets..for the same set of keywords..are entirely different.
As the intellectual economy gives way to the ‘connected’ economy..it is not just whom we know…but ‘who knows us’!!
-And yes, it is no more about ‘cost of hire’ -but the ‘quality of hire’!!
We at NPA are lucky to be able to add the local human touch..to the power of technology!
AK
NPA8613
AK…. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes! It is no longer a matter of who has the most names in their database… but whether or not you have an actual relationship with a person. LI might make it easier to find the names, but you still have to do all the work of forming & maintaining relationships.
Well, sorry but guys the article and the comments are very low level. it is like a horse breeder in the 1900 asking if the car industry wil kill the transportion industry. It is hilarious all these article asking if LK will kill the rec industry to conclude “No, off course” with no nuances except that you need to have a good network blabala… Guys, let’s be honest ;-)
@Jo … thanks for the comment! This post is purely intended to provide some context by comparing the “noise” about LinkedIn to the same/similar noises about ‘competing’ products/services we have previously seen. I’m curious about your analogy of horses & cars, because I think it’s pretty clear that cars have eliminated the need for people to travel by horse. Yet I don’t believe that LinkedIn has (or will) eliminated the need for agency recruiters. Do you? Why is that?
Great article Veronica. I can see 5 reasons LinkedIn is limited in the degree to which it will “eat” the recruitment agency industry, shared below. But before listing those points, I should also highlight that LinkedIn itself recently released figures that show recruitment agencies (and job boards) are still highly rated by recruiters on LinkedIn – so their own data doesn’t support the headlines we’ve all seen appearing so frequently of late.
In terms of reasons that LinkedIn will only have a limited impact on the agency market, I would point to its shortcomings:
Shortcoming #1 – LinkedIn has only partial coverage and recruiters can’t limit themselves to considering only a portion of the talent out there.
Shortcoming #2 – LinkedIn candidates are “unresponsive”. If approached via InMails, a high proportion will not respond – and certainly not in the timely manner needed for a recruiting requirement to be acted upon. So it works for scattergun approaches eliminating fees paid for “low hanging fruit” type recruiting, but less so for the higher value-added work.
Shortcoming #3 – LinkedIn is capacity-constrained. Speak to any recruiter using LinkedIn and you’ll hear that the responsiveness of candidates to their approaches is diminishing. Put simply, LinkedIn is saturating the market by overselling its services and thereby reducing the effectiveness of those services.
Shortcoming #4 – Companies need to own their assets. Companies like to minimise risk, so putting all their eggs in the LinkedIn basket – in a database and a “follower” base they don’t own – is not going to sit well.
Shortcoming #5 – Employers like contingent fees and the variable cost / flexibility that recruitment agents bring to their business. Only a portion of hiring capacity is going to be fulfilled by having the high fixed costs associated with an internal recruiter and the accompanying LinkedIn licence fee.
Interested to hear your observations on these points!
Tony, thanks for chiming in! I agree with your points, especially related to partial coverage and low-hanging fruit. Certainly ALL of the talent for ALL of the jobs is not hanging out on LinkedIn. Recruiters who ‘specialize’ in low-hanging fruit are in trouble, in my opinion. There is not enough value-add in that space, and there are too many other ways for employers to find those candidates.
Love your point about companies needing to own their assets. In fact, it gives me the opportunity to say “Never build on rented land” twice in a week’s time! ;-) I tend to agree with Bill Boorman that data is no longer valuable in and of itself – too many people have access to the same data, and none of it is owned. Absolutely critical to own your assets, and LI doesn’t allow for that.
LinkedIn is a great tool. I think recruiters are smart to use it, but I also think it’s foolish to treat it as the “be all and end all” of recruiting.
I use linked-in recruiter as one of many tools to recruit–just received a letter from them today saying as of 1/14, recruiter will not allow recruiters to send inmails to candidates they aren’t linked to–one of the major selling points of recruiter. I think this is going to be a tough sell for them, but they are trying to balance the negative reactions they get from linked-in members who haven’t changed their settings to not allow in-mails. I don’t think I am the only person who is upset about spending several thousand dollars at the end of 2013 and being told one of the main features is being discontinued in a week.
It seems to me that LinkedIn is making changes on a weekly basis. If you run groups and use other features, there is not a week that goes by that the functionality doesn’t change or a feature you once had disappears or moves or reappears.
At the end of the day I have found that LinkedIn as an organization succeeds in spite of their short comings on communication, strategy, customer focus, and fair pricing.
They have a good tool that recruiter value and candidates don’t really understand. I have come in contact with many LinkedIn personnel at this point and I can honestly say that even they have a hard time explaining the different services and prices in a way that is sensible.
If I were you I would down grade your service until LinkedIn figures it out!!!