Computers don''t make good headhunters

Successful headhunters-professionals whose success is traced to their personal networking skills--have had a stormy history with technology. In the good ''ol days of recruiting, computers and technology were considered useless. However, in the early to mid ''90s, headhunters had no choice but to face the title waves of the Internet and job boards. Many who made their livings finding clients for a fee found the technology to be a threat. That, too, has changed, however, as many have learned to use technology, including job boards and application tracking systems, allowing technology to become a means in their search for top candidates.

Technology has become an essential tool, but human interaction is the key to a search consultant''s success, says Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO, MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets job seekers and HR Professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, health care and science. Technology can actually handicap the recruiter who tries to replace personal interaction with a computer. It''s those who integrate the power of automation into their networking skills that achieve the greatest success.

Recruiting''s essence

Paul A. Hawkinson, publisher and editor, The Fordyce Letter, an international newsletter for headhunters and recruiting professionals, says the recruiter''s mission, in most cases, is to supply clients with only oysters with pearls. And those headhunters who search the job boards-especially the general boards-find they have to shuck a lot of smelly oysters to get that one pearl.

According to Hawkinson, the niche boards are much more useful to recruiters than the general job boards because the general job boards are too big a haystack to find the needles. Still, he says, most superstar recruiters who specialize in securing hard-to-find people only use the Internet as a backup. [They depend on] their networking abilities-- the spheres of influence that they''ve been working in for years and years. They know where the bodies are buried, Hawkinson says.

The essence of recruiting remains in picking up the phone and talking with people, says Steve Finkel, of Professional Search Seminars, a firm that specializes in improving the skill level of recruiters and managers of recruiting firms. Finkel, who wrote the best-selling industry book Breakthrough! How to explode the production of recruiters, says that headhunters who depend on job boards and recruiting technology for finding candidates don''t last too long in the business. The difficulty with the job boards, he says, is the best people are not activity looking to make a change. The person you''d love to see probably is not on a job board.

Dr. Heasley, a former recruiter, says the top search consultants are networking experts, and use databases and the internet to augment those talents. Many recruiters have also found that the best candidates, those who are employed and not really looking for jobs elsewhere, are finding that the most effective use of their time is to post a resume on a niche board or two, and then let the recruiters find them.

Recruiters and applicant tracking systems: use at arm''s length

The advent of technology, including applicant tracking software, has really done nothing to the core of the business accept it automates certain parts of it, Hawkinson says.

Automation is important, says Dr. Heasley, as long as recruiters don''t place too much emphasis on it (as many have done in recent years). Some recruiters have tended to drift out of touch with their candidate base, and to depend more and more on automated screening and applicant tracking systems, Heasley says.

According to Finkel, applicant tracking systems and key word searches don''t tell headhunters about winners. While the technology might help a recruiter hone in on a pharmacist with acute care experience, it won''t tell the recruiter about the pharmacist who reduced medication errors by 25% in one year.

Like everything else, successful use of technology comes in moderation. In the current paradigm, successful recruiters use the internet effectively as both a candidate resource and a networking tool, Dr. Heasley says. Many of the same principles apply to the internet as other media. As with print media, simply running a job ad on the net still tends to find candidates who are actively looking for jobs, while database access and other automated networking strategies that are more proactive tend to identify the more passive job seekers.


About MedZilla.com
Established in mid 1994, MedZilla is the original web site to serve career and hiring needs for professionals and employers in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, science and healthcare. MedZilla databases contain about 10,000 open positions and 10,000 resumes from candidates actively seeking new positions. These resources have been characterized as the largest, most comprehensive databases of their kind on the web in the industries served.