With all the changes taking place across the digital recruitment landscape, employment agencies have been squeezed on all fronts for a few years now.

There are not many recruitment owners that have not felt the full impact of some of the fundamental changes that have been taking place

Lower salary jobs and generic roles are being pulled back in house at an alarming rate, as access to the online tools that were once exclusive to the agencies are now available for all to use and as companies look to reduce their recruitment expenditure.

Add in the rapid growth of fixed fee solutions and then, (take a deep breath) there is LinkedIn!

LinkedIn was once the best friend of the savvy executive search recruiter, but is now the gateway to ‘free to access candidates’ to their precious clients. Let’s face it, LinkedIn has helped to change the dynamics of the recruitment sector for good.

Job board advertising certainly doesn’t appear to have advanced much in the last few years, as talented candidates have become apathetic, realising that resourcers will come and find them.

That doesn’t mean that candidates are no longer registering their details onto job boards, it’s just that the good ones don’t bother adopting a pro active approach any more.

It does mean that the majority of a recruiters time is spent sifting through CV’s and then calling through prospect lists, networking and digging out leads.

Is it any wonder that the last generation of recruiters look at the visible activity levels of today’s recruiters and shake their heads with bewilderment, that they manage to turn a profit at all.

So is the tide about to turn, with the imminent launch of Its a Job Calling?

Anyone who is anyone in recruitment has probably already heard the jungle drums beating away for a few months on this project, as Chris Smith (previously of eCRM People) and his carefully assembled team, that includes 2M Tech, Hamilton Bradshaw and a number of credible NED’s, have joined forces with a telco carrier to launch a virtual telephone resourcer service that works in conjunction with a ‘free to access’ database, containing well over 1 million active candidates.

A number of job boards have already spotted the potential for this service and the team are in discussions to merge with one of the major players, that would see the size of the candidate pool dramatically increase to nearer 5 million sometime next year. The crux of the service, is that you can drop your search results into a prospect list, record your personal message and then let the system call everyone for you, for the cost of the telephone call. All the candidate needs to do after listening to the message is to press zero on their handset and they get a free call directly back to the recruiter. Obviously there will be an art to creating a compelling message that maximises candidate response, but doesn’t that exist already?

All the candidate needs to do after listening to the message is to press zero on their handset and they get a free call directly back to the recruiter.

Obviously there will be an art to creating a compelling message that maximises candidate response, but doesn’t that exist already?

Nobody is claiming that this will work for every vacancy, but I’m betting that over 50% of recruitment campaigns being worked each day, would have dramatically improved their results by utilising this service. And as a recruitment owner myself, I bet that the majority of other Recruitment owners across the country, would have liked to have seen more telephone activity from their recruiters today!

Is it a game changer? Well, if you consider the possibility of a completely free to access database and a telephony service or ‘virtual recruiter’, that costs the same as the telephone call that you would have made anyway, then it makes this service a virtual no brainer for every recruitment company in the country to adopt in some capacity. Find me just 1 recruitment owner that says he would not like to see efficiencies improved, in particular when it comes to telephone activity.

The Its a Job Calling team are taking applications to BETA the system when it goes live in January. You can go to their site and enter an email address to register your interest to participate.

Watch this space. I predict Its a Job Calling will become as familiar a name in the recruitment space as any job board is today.

Mark Stephens

The F10 Group