The Return of Recruiters
Will staffing professionals be the first or last to be hired as the economy recovers?

Amid accumulating signs that the Great Recession is moderating, companies that believe their core business is improving may begin to restore the employee positions they shed over the last several months.

Has the hiring begun? More to the point, are these companies building up their depleted cadres of staffing professionals in anticipation of employee hiring? Could the hiring of recruiters be, in the terminology of The Conference Board’s monthly national report, a leading economic indicator?

Experts’ opinions vary, but taken together their answers present a vision of workplace recruiting operations after the recession that will be quite different from the staffing models of a few years ago.


Help Wanted?

Angie Salmon, senior vice president of the executive recruiting firm EFL Associates in Leawood, Kan., says some organizations are starting to hire "because they feel more confident about the market and their businesses."

A recent survey by recruitment consulting company DoubleStar of West Chester, Pa., bears this out. Asked late last year whether they planned to increase hiring activity in the first quarter of 2010, 27 percent of respondents—representing organizations in the Mid-Atlantic states—said yes. This represented "a pretty good bump" over the 13 percent who indicated such plans for the fourth quarter of 2009, according to CEO Harry Griendling.

And the Society for Human Resource Management’s latest Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) report, released in March, revealed that hiring was up on an annual basis for the fifth straight month. The percentage of companies hiring in manufacturing will reach a level not seen since June 2008, according to the report, and the percentage of companies hiring in the service sector is the highest since July 2007. The LINE report is based on a monthly survey of private-sector HR professionals at more than 500 manufacturing and 500 service-sector companies.

Mitch Beck, president of Crossroads Consulting in Monroe, Conn., has seen hiring pick up but notes that some companies are keeping quiet about it. "What I’m finding is that more companies are starting to hire back but don’t want people to know they’re hiring back, because they don’t want to get inundated" with applications, he says.

Not everyone is optimistic, however, that economic recovery will translate into more jobs. Scott Craighead, general manager, Americas, of Bluesky Executive Search in Fairfield, Conn., says that, in general, "Economic recovery has occurred without hiring increases, as companies have focused on staff cuts to yield profits."

Even if they aren’t cutting staff, companies may not be bringing new hires on board. For example, "Smaller hedge funds that need to hire are standing on the sidelines," says Ev Nucci, owner of Nucci Consulting Group of Gwynedd Valley, Pa., a retained search firm serving the hard-hit asset management industry. "A friend of mine who owns a hedge fund needs four or five people but is holding off" because of concerns about the economy, she explains.

Still, companies with skeleton crews can’t operate that way much longer, says executive search consultant Kevin Palisi of Norwalk, Conn. "You’re going to see more hiring because [companies] can’t squeeze any more blood out of the [surviving] workforce, from a productivity standpoint."


Leading or Lagging Indicator?

"This recession has decimated HR departments and, along with it, recruiting departments," Griendling observes.

Are reinforcements on the way?

Those who think companies plan to increase overall hiring in the near term believe so. For example, Mark Mehler, principal of CareerXroads, a staffing strategy consultancy in Kendall Park, N.J., says certain online companies "are hiring in volume." Those companies—and others wishing to add to employment rolls—must first hire recruiters, he explains, noting that "Recruiting is a bellwether for the economy."

Palisi also believes that organizations "are interested in bringing in recruiters in the near term, the anticipation being they will hire more staff in 2010." He adds that companies "need to hire recruiters six months ahead of the curve."

Others say companies will continue to make do with the resources they have on hand for a while and that an increase in recruiter hiring could actually be a lagging indicator of recovery.

"Usually the first person to get fired and last person to get hired back in a recession is the recruiter," says Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite, a Burlingame, Calif.-based marketer of technology for recruiting via online social networks. "Many companies will actually not hire recruiters right away and be forced to recruit with a smaller recruiting team."

He cites a client—an online retailer—that hired 60 employees in six months during 2009. "They tripled [the workforce] and did it with one recruiter," he says.

Griendling notes that after a recession, companies tend to test the waters by hiring temporary workers as opposed to regular full- or part-time employees. And, in fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 284,000 temporary-help jobs have been added nationwide since September 2009, including 48,000 in February. According to Griendling, it isn’t until later in a recovery, when companies start hiring non-temporary workers, that recruiters are brought on board.

Lisa Rowan, program director, HR, learning and talent strategies, for advisory services provider IDC in Framingham, Mass., expects hiring of temporary workers "to come up further before we see any surge in permanent employment."


Get in Line

Companies looking to grow their workforces may turn to transitional help, such as staffing agencies and freelancers, before hiring recruiters.

As piles of resumes roll into their headquarters, companies find it "easier to inundate an outside recruiter" such as an agency, according to Beck.

Staffing firms and consulting firms confirm the trend. Tracy Cutone, partner and general manager, Human Resources Divisions, of the staffing firm Winter, Wyman Cos. in Waltham, Mass., says demand for contract recruiters from its clients was up more than 85 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2009.

Griendling adds that his company, DoubleStar, was hired by four new clients in a recent 60-day period, and it has its "largest new business pipeline in the last year and a half."

Freelancers may be in line ahead of staff recruiters, too. "Small to mid-size firms are bringing the search function in-house [by] hiring ex-search consultants to be their in-house recruiter on a contract basis," Nucci says.


A New Model

Another strategy being used as companies try to do more with less: Many are asking hiring managers and employees to take on more staffing responsibilities. Some experts believe this trend could continue for some time, so even after some semblance of a professional recruiting operation is restored, veteran staffing professionals may not recognize it.

"The hiring manager will no longer just be the end of the road for hiring decisions, but also the person identifying talent," Finnigan says.

"Hiring managers, although not experts in recruiting, will be forced to be," Salmon agrees.

Also taking on more recruiting tasks, according to Salmon, are ordinary employees in other departments. "Responsibility for recruiting has been pushed out into the organization," she says.

Finnigan calls it a whole-company approach to recruitment. "Employees will be called upon to make referrals and publicize jobs. Even executives will need to be on the front lines. … Referral hiring is the nirvana of recruiting," but it’s not easy. So, he says, companies are asking employees to tap into their personal online social networks. Instead of posting and advertising job listings, businesses are seeing if they can get their first round of applicants through referrals.

What is lost with this strategy, Salmon notes, "is the expertise in recruiting, particularly the recruiting of passive candidates" by staffing experts who have built their own, focused networks and developed the skills to manipulate them efficiently.

Using professional recruiters is still "the best way to find the right people," Salmon says.


Recruiting Recruiters, Finally

Eventually, organizations will become too lean. "Once it gets to that point, companies are going to realize that their people are working 24/7 and are maxed out on productivity," Craighead says. "When people scream and say, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ they will have to hire."

He adds, however, that businesses are unlikely to rehire experienced recruiters back to pre-recession levels. "Companies will act cautiously in rehiring them," he says.

Finnigan concludes that companies are going to hire recruiters eventually, but not until after a lot of other things happen. "When you see that spike, you’ll know we’re in a recovery," he says.

In recovery, Finnigan predicts, the recession will leave a sharpened emphasis on the bottom line. "Before companies are going to build up recruiting staffs, they’re going to ask for the [return on investment] in doing so. … Before HR will get approval to hire more recruiters, they will have to answer the question, how much money must we spend?"

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Steve Taylor’s most recent article for Staffing Management magazine, “Sometimes More Is More,” appeared in the October-December 2009 issue.
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Reprinted with permission from the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) for inclusion July 15 - September 15, 2010. Taylor, Steve. "The Return of Recruiters". May 5, 2010. Accessed online at http://www.shrm.org/Publications/StaffingManagementMagazine/EditorialContent/Pages/0410taylor.aspx on July 15, 2010.