Last October, I resigned from my job as a Manager at a Global Recruitment Firm to create a business. A Recruitment business, but not another agency. A business with an entirely new model. One that I truly believe could reinvent the way Employers engage with Recruiters.

Recruiters are often given a bad rap and that negativity seems to have intensified over the last few years.

A recent study by Inavero in the US, found that between 2010 and 2015, the NPS score for the Recruitment Industry dropped from +33 to -3.

For the first time, there were more detractors than promoters of Recruiters. If the same study was conducted in Australia, I believe we would see a similar trend.

However, I’m a big advocate of Recruiters. I was one. I truly believe connecting with the right Recruiter is key to finding the best talent.

If I think back to my time as a consultant, it was fair to say I was a good mid to senior retail operations recruiter. Yet I often tried to pick up work at an executive level with mixed results. And there were competitors who were great executive retail recruiters trying their hand at Regional Managers! There were times when we both had jobs that I knew the other was better placed to support, yet we battled away trying to find candidates when neither of us had the right network for the roles.

And this got me thinking. Whilst I believe Employers partnering with the right Recruiter is key to securing the best talent, therein lies the problem…

Employers are not connecting with the right Recruiters.

My previous MD often talked about ‘going deep’, referring to the strategy of becoming an absolute expert in a specific niche. Whilst this is something I completely agree with, the problem is clients have a wide variety of needs and they don’t want to spend their time constantly searching for new recruiters. And from an Employers perspective, it’s hard to truly gauge what specific niche each Recruiter specialises in.

Employers need a way to leverage the networks of multiple Recruiters to ensure they’re getting the very best talent available.

I think we would all agree that the Recruitment Industry has reached maturity. There is a real density of Recruiters working across multiple verticals, seniorities, geographies and I dare say between them, they’ve done a very good job of covering the market. They’ve also done a good job of trying to claim exclusivity over candidates. For those not in the know, this is where a Recruiter asks a Candidate to work solely with them and no other Recruiters.  So, here’s another problem.

Recruitment today is like a giant game of hide and seek with everyone wearing a blindfold.

Picture this. You have 5 Employers with a job each. You have 5 recruiters with a gun candidate each and each one of those candidates is perfect for one of those jobs. In the example below, Recruiter B has the perfect Candidate for Employer 2, but Employer 2 is working with Recruiter A. Employer 1 should be talking to Recruiter A, but they’re talking to Recruiter C.

Now multiply that out by the thousands and thousands of jobs tendered out to agency each year and you start to see the problem. If only we could connect each Employer with each Recruiter seamlessly, we could match each candidate with their perfect job.

This isn’t just a problem for Employers and Candidates. Recruiters are losing out too.

The 2016 Bullhorn Recruitment Survey showed the Permanent Fill Rate dropped to 44%!

Forty-four per cent!! Permanent Recruiters fill less than half of the jobs they pick up! Let’s combine that with a rough average of 50% of time spent on business development – that means that almost 75% of the activities a Recruiter does generate no revenue. Zero.

Recruiters are still spending their days tirelessly cold calling, which recent stats have shown has around a 1% conversion rate. The industry has become highly inefficient and ineffective.

But I still believe Recruiters are key to finding the best talent. When you have a genuine specialist with a substantial network in their specific niche it’s hard to beat that. Sure, there is a ton of ‘Rec Tech’ on its way for some competition, but we’re a long, long way from algorithms being able to accurately assess cultural fit.

Recruiters are the key, we just need to find a better way to connect them with Employers.

And I believe that’s what this platform can do.

Find out more at sourcr.com and together, let’s reinvent recruitment.