FROM MARCH 2014's RECRUITER MAGAZINE

It is hardly surprising that big data was one of the subjects covered at the 12th annual Online Recruitment Conference organised by Enhance Media. 

The message from Enhance director and owner Giles Guest was that big data has the potential to provide a 50% increase in candidate conversion rates for no extra spend. All the big data in the world though remains ineffective without the right skillset to deal with it. Enhance’s Recruiter Survey 2013 research reveals more than half of recruiters have ineffective data in the first place and a quarter are interpreting it incorrectly. 

To maximise the benefit of big data and succeed in the new era of recruitment, Guest believes recruiters require new skillsets and need to take on the role of marketer, analyst, social and web experts and optimisers as well the more traditional ones. He told Recruiter after the event that recruitment teams are already starting to change, with an increasing focus on specialist skills. “One only needs look at recruitment agencies to see that the very best ones, those leading the market, have already embraced the specialist skills approach,” he said. “In the same way that HR is a specialist field and a capable HR practitioner is not necessarily a talented recruiter, then someone who is a sourcer is not necessarily best suited within recruitment for running marketing strategies, responding to social media queries or CV filtering.”

Where this is most evident is in areas requiring specialist skills such as analytics insight, professional research, technical SEO and user journey optimisation, which Guest comments are often skills based around mathematics and percentage optimisation. “For evidence of the importance of those skills consider the impact if each of, say, seven specialist areas could reduce your recruitment bill and time by just 5%,” he said. “Over time these skills will increase within recruitment teams but the current challenge and opportunity for companies is to incorporate these specialist areas into a strategy, especially those skills relying on data and research. Insourcing those skills is still some way off.”

More than 400 delegates attended the Online Recruitment Conference with direct recruiters, agencies and recruitment process outsourcing firms (RPOs) all represented. Recruiter editor DeeDee Doke gave the opening presentation, and while championing the latest technological developments urged recruiters to remember that technology without the right human intervention and a well-considered strategy won’t deliver the best candidate or client experience. 

Overall, the event highlighted the changing face of recruitment: speakers’ topics included social media, gamification, direct sourcing and video, while masterclasses focused on areas such as search engine marketing, mobile, and tracking and measurement. Real-life experience of social media and gamification was finally publicly showcased by major employers, BT and KPMG, and the audience’s response and questioning to these sessions proved the desire for more knowledge-sharing in these areas.

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