Transcript
Speaker: to Recruitment News Australia. I'm Alex, your AI co-host. ah RNA has had so much fun with our guest hosts, most popular question reruns and summarized news over the past few weeks.
Speaker: However, the usual format will commence from next week when Ross returns and we look forward to hearing all about his travels. In the meantime, sit back and relax while I play you one of our more controversial questions.
Speaker: How would you recruit without all the recruitment tools we have today? This was a lot of fun and worth a re-listen now. Question of the week. Has old school recruiting become new school?
Speaker: Okay. So what's this and where's it coming from, Adele? This is from a post that I saw on LinkedIn this week from Peter Knoblet from Sentinel Collective who talked about a question that he asks recruiters in their day-to-day work. What would they do if they walked in tomorrow and they had none of the tools available that they currently have that help them do their job. So there's no LinkedIn, no seek, no lusher, no sales nav, your CRM's gone, you walk in tomorrow and there is nothing and you need to do your job. And it's a question that he poses to people to get them to ponder what they would do and what the real skills are.
Speaker: I find this really interesting. It's kind of a bit of ah a time travel situation or time travel question of going back into history and thinking about what it might be like. But we don't have to imagine it, do we, Ross? because ah That was your early days in recruitment, right? Correct. Correct, Adele. That's right. I've been around so long, so long that when I started, there was no computer on my desk. In fact, there wasn't even a computer in the consulting space. The receptionist had one to word process resumes. And in fact, people could still smoke in the office mean i when I joined the reg recruitment industry. going tell me you had pens and paper though, right? you're not on a tablet with a chisel or something, right? We definitely had pens and paper. But... For the first three, I'm going to say four years, I did not have a computer on my desk, relied on those four by six index cards. And then after getting a computer on my desk, I could only access the data database. There was no commercially available internet.
Speaker: for I'm going to say another three or four years. So it was probably only year seven in my recruitment career that emails turned up.
Speaker: Well, see, this might surprise people to think about this, right? Because you think in today's current age of all of the tech we've got available to us and all of it moving so fast, You know, this is not that long ago, but tell us then what you did. What did you do when you walked in? You've got no computer. So so imagine this, listeners, you've got no computer on your desk. You've got a phone and a pen and paper.
Speaker: What did you actually do? How did you recruit with that? Well, I mean, that is exactly what it was like for me. We had manila folders full of ah resumes and then we had another manila folder that was full of jobs.
Speaker: And you needed to pick up the phone and call, call candidates or call clients. If you were not on the phone, then what were you doing? Like there literally wasn't anything else to do. Oh, of course, unless you were interviewing a candidate or seeing a client, certainly interviewing a candidate was common. Seeing a client face-to-face in London in 1989 when I started was very uncommon.
Speaker: And my boss rightfully looked at you and if you were not on the phone, it's like, well, what are you doing, Ross? Like that that's how you indicated you were working by talking on the phone.
Speaker: No wonder they were smoking as well. I can just imagine. that yeah some Okay. so So, you're on the phone, yeah you're calling companies to try and solicit work from them. How are you, like that's a tough gig, obviously, but how are you doing that? How are you finding these companies? How do you know who to call?
Speaker: Okay. So, to be clear, when I started the beginning of 89 in London, we didn't need to know or need to do business development, the jobs just poured in and the client either phoned the office directly and then a consultant took the job. And the major technique that you were taught as when you were talking to the client, sorry, this is permanent accounting recruitment I'm talking here. So as you're talking to the client and asking them details about the job, you are then thinking about who of your candidates you can propose in the same conversation.
Speaker: Because the goal, and certainly what we were trained to do, was not only to take the job, but to also book in confirmed interviews. So that was the segue. And the goal then of the consultant who took the job was to book in however many candidates were. that they had that was suitable. And then another consultant would overhear and then this is what would happen. They'd click their fingers and mouth to everyone, pointing, say, I'm the consultant, the client's taking, the client's taking. And when the the phrase the client's taking meant that the client was accepting candidates and
Speaker: through a verbal referral and booking in interviews. Now, of course- Okay, before you go on from this, I just want to i just want to um visualize this because I'm imagining this on the phone, this sitting, standing, this clicking of fingers, the pointing. This has got full wolf you know Wall Street wolf vibes going on for me. Is that the right picture? Seriously, this is the this is exactly this is exactly what it was because this how- Internally competitive it was at accountancy personnel now, Hayes, was that you wanted to completely book up the client's allocated time for interviews because when the job was registered, so what that meant was the other officers got access to the job.
Speaker: You didn't want them to book in their candidates because you didn't want another office to potentially get the fee. You wanted your office to get the fee. So that was the whole point of cramming the client's interview schedule with the candidates from your office to prevent not...
Speaker: Not the competitors, not Reid or Michael Page or ah Harrison Willis from booking in interviews, but from and the offers that might have been one street away the AP network from getting a chance to fill the job. Wow. So competitive. And what I also heard in there was you talk about as the client is telling you the job brief, you're thinking about candidates that you know in your network that in your database, which is actually your head. so this is the ultimate, this is this is h i never mind ai This is human intelligence. This is you using your brain and memory and recalling people and referring them on the spot. so completely
Speaker: there is a really different skill set there, but this is what I'm asking the question about. Has all of that become new again? Should we be looking at honing those skills? Absolutely. Well, there's no doubt to me with the advances that I'm seeing in large language models, and no doubt you're seeing it even more so because you've been a little bit closer to it than me recently, that all of the, let's call it um behind the scenes work, largely um those large language models will be able to do or do a substantial amount of it. So it's freeing up your time. What are you freeing up that time for? Well, ultimately, it should be for what I spent as much as time as possible ah when I started, which is having a conversation with a client or a candidate, whether it's in person or over the phone.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it also emphasises that human interaction around being able to build confidence in people. ah create influential conversations with both clients and candidates. And I actually recall this early in my career and I started a little bit after you, but i did I didn't have card files. I did actually have a computer, but I do recall starting in one role and I worked for Sue Healy. It was actually one of her earlier businesses in office support. And I walked into the office and there was literally nothing in that system, in the CRM. There was no candidates. There were no clients. We had to literally start from scratch.
Speaker: And I had to sit there and think about, well, how am I going to do that? I did have access to the internet, but there was no Google. So you didn't know, you couldn't search for things. You had to know the the website you were looking at. But I had to try and find where people were. And I had to do that physically. So it was quite literally getting out of my chair and going to events, going to breakfast, going to things where I could bump into people, being out in the street, going out at lunch in Melbourne on Collins Street, you know, back in the 90s was a means of business development. Because you bumped into people and you met people or you, you know, spoke to someone in the coffee shop and and asked about what they did and and picked up a candidate. So there was this idea of being openly connected to the community and to your network around you. it made it perhaps a little less global, I suppose, but it allowed you to, you know, have a real tangible asset that you were building
Speaker: And I'm not sure I got that personally early in my career. I remember going to some of those things thinking, what am I doing? Or what a big waste of time. I went there for three or four hours and i picked up two names. Who cares? um And this was pre-LinkedIn. So I picked up names, meaning I picked up cards, actually, people's business cards, and had to follow them up. But it wasn't until about 10 years into my recruitment career that I started to learn the value of the network. The network that I had started to build and the reputation and the name had started to start had started to pay me back. So I had calls from candidates I had previously placed that were coming back to me. I had clients who remembered me and and took me to another company when they moved.
Speaker: So that was really powerful. But I realized that probably really late in my career. As I said, I was a good 10 years in. Had I known that, if I could talk to my younger self, that's what I would would do as a newer recruiter now. I would be networking so that I could build that reputation earlier and more definitively earlier in the career, so it would pay back earlier as well.
Speaker: And certainly what you've just said has prompted me to think clearly that was very apparent to me when I started was scarcity. You had a scarcity of candidates, maybe not for me right the beginning scarcity of jobs, but because you couldn't post an ad on the internet because it didn't exist, the only way could get candidates was to run an ad and there was only one day of the week that would reliably generate candidates from ad response. So that meant you had to really work your existing candidates. You couldn't just
Speaker: easily get others or go into your database. It was just the manual files. And for anyone who wants a fantastic cinematic example of the value of scarcity, go and watch Glengarry Glen Ross.
Speaker: ah That is a fantastic movie about old school sales. It's about land sales in the US and it features Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful, as well, it's a wonderful movie, but it's just a wonderful example of old school sales on the phone.
Speaker: So people listening to this might say, well, that's crazy. Why would we do all these things the hard way when there's tools now that make life easier? We're going to use, you know, it isn't ah this time travel situation. We're not going back in time. We're moving forward.
Speaker: i think there is a blandness now that's come out of that though. We've started to see obviously things, particularly email and outreaches that have started to become very vanilla in their style and they're not having the impact, they're not having the influence. So i guess what we're saying in this question of has you know old school become new school, you've got to go back to the raw basics of this job and influence is always going to be the number one difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter. Without any doubt, that if that if you had to encapsulate what do the very best recruiters do at a much higher level than the average or above average is that they're masterful at influencing.
Speaker: And that remains and I think will remain for a long time to come, a skill that AI won't be able to supersede.
Speaker: So it's only taken 30 years, Ross, but you're back in fashion. Certainly what I learnt ah back in 1989 was is, i look, i think it's always been important, but the elevated importance now, I think, is very clear. And it will be, to me, very obvious who has got those skills, because in five years' time, if you don't have those skills, there will not be a job for you in agency recruitment, because all of those other, let's call it back office type roles will be done by ai
