Cast your mind back to 2005

Facebook is just over 1-year-old, LinkedIn has barely started, and Tom Cruise was jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa. Machine Learning was just a phrase the smart kids bandied about and RPO was just the world most famous orchestra.

The recruitment industry experienced unparalleled growth, and the future had never been brighter for dynamic, forward-thinking agencies.

Content, Communities, Events, Thought-Leadership and Blogging reign supreme in a post-sales future where ‘relationships’ and ‘consulting’ replaced angry sales directors waving wads of phone stats around.

Fast forward 10 years, and boy a lot has changed

Global financial meltdown aside, software owns the headlines. It has transformed our lives, and our ways of working. Uber is the largest taxi company in the world, but owns no cars. AirBnB is the world’s most successful travel firm, but has no properties and JustEat is the world’s biggest takeaway, yet owns not even as much as a frying pan.

The gig economy is here, and soon we’ll all be working for a company in Palo Alto from our back garden, or at least that’s what they said. The concept of Universal Basic Income in a post-labour world where we all work a 2-day week and spend the rest of our time at play is on every governments agenda, working to stave off social breakdown in a world where our job defines exactly who we are in so many ways.

For agencies, the landscape changed dramatically.

Newer, better tools became available to help you find candidates, but ironically candidates became easier to find than ever before. LinkedIn, once the nemesis of the professional recruiter, worked out that we’re the real customer opportunity, and now hoovers up more money from agencies than from anywhere else. That trend continues unabated.

So, what about 10 years from now? (or 10 months?)

Agencies must & will transform again, of that there is no doubt. In-house & RPO in some form is here to stay, despite the insane margin pressure that drives the ongoing race to the bottom where nobody wins.
Invariably, the constant attempts to ‘Uberise’ the industry will continue, and perhaps someone will get it right, who knows.

But, without doubt, the most pressing threat for the traditional agency is the increasing proliferation of automated and machine learning technologies that automatically generate candidates of interest, that in conjunction with LinkedIn, is going to completely transform our industry.

If your agency proposition relates entirely or in large part to your ‘unparalleled candidate reach’ within a specific niche, then frankly, your days are numbered. Your large database? Vertical Market specialists? World-class training? It won’t matter a jot.

Sending CVs is simply no longer enough.

To flourish, agencies must offer more than just a string of branded CVs with a paragraph about why this candidate is a ‘must-see’.

Hinterview is an online platform that allows Recruiters to deliver short, two-way (Recruiter <–> Candidate) videos to their clients, alongside their CV, answering their most important questions. In turn, this allows hiring managers to make more informed decisions about who they invite in for interview.

It’s not terribly complex, but then, neither as most things that work well.

We built Hinterview to enable recruitment agencies to move closer to their customers, work more closely, offer more, show more, manage more and ultimately earn more. The application suite allows to Recruiters to offer genuine candidate assessment, allowing you to offer more to your customers than ever before, in a way that matters most to them.