Right now, your star brokers are being courted by the competition.
It may be an unwelcome truth, but right now, your star brokers are being courted by the competition – and if you’re relying on the so-called passive candidate pool to fill your vacancies, so too is the entire industry.
Talent poaching has always been a card in your back pocket. However, with the advent of LinkedIn and other social mediums, the face of recruitment has been changed forever. Seeking passive jobseekers for new hires is, in effect, poaching on a grand scale, and it’s a notion backed by many in the industry.
Alan Hemmings, general manager of Oxygen Home Loans, recently lamented the lack of new brokers coming into the industry, saying it lead to industry battles over a select few candidates.
"What is happening is a lot of the groups like ours are looking for existing brokers and offering that increase in volume, and therefore we're all fighting for the same brokers essentially."
Yet other employment experts are warning that in the face of “social recruitment", retention is an obvious casualty, and in fact, the trend in looking to employed candidates over unemployed candidates may be putting your entire talent pool up for grabs.
While typically the trend to hire the already employed is followed but not spoken, mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson made the policy explicit in its recruitment policy – the unemployed are simply ruled out. What’s more, according to a poll of senior human resources executives in the US, some 90% said recruiting passive candidates is central to the HR strategy.
According to Jerome Ternyck from SmartRecruiters, there appears to be an unwritten rule that unemployed candidates aren’t qualified. “Our survey revealed that 55% of recruiters and HR managers have ‘personally experienced resistance’ when presenting qualified yet unemployed candidates to clients/colleagues,” Ternyck said. The survey also showed that 29% of hiring managers believed that unemployed job seekers are “unemployed for a reason” and 23% said unemployed job seekers are “probably not qualified”.
Owner and director of Benz Communications, Isabelle Englund-Geiger, said she interviews unemployed candidates for every available position. “Discarding currently-unemployed candidates is very short-sighted. If we didn’t equally evaluate unemployed candidates, we would have missed out on many of our most successful hires, including our office manager, a senior-level bi-lingual writer and some of our top consultants,” Englund-Geiger said.
