Vodcast: Rehumanising Recruitment ~ Recruiters Versus Tech

I recently had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with a true recruitment "myth and legend," Keith Southern.

For those who don't know Keith, he was the seventh person to join Progressive - the company that eventually became the global powerhouse S3.

With a career spanning back to the early 90s, he has seen it all: the highs, the recessions, and the technological revolutions.

Today, Keith leads The Power Hive, a community of over 170 recruitment leaders dedicated to helping agency owners move from just working in their business to working on it.

Over a speedy 19minutes, we dove deep into why the "old school" ways, coupled with data, automation, and AI, might actually be the key to every recruitment leaders' future.

Beyond ROI: The Power of "Return on Effort"

We started by discussing a concept close to both of our hearts: Return on Effort (ROE). In an industry obsessed with the next shiny recruitment tech tool, many recruitment leaders are accidentally building what we called "Frankenstein tech stacks" - collections of expensive tools and data that don't talk to each other and often create "integration debt" and more admin than they solve. (I call this "Admin Tax".)

We talked about how many sales floors today are eerily quiet because recruiters are hiding behind CRMs and marketing tech instead of picking up the phone, and Kevin's ideas for:

• Using recruitment tech to free your consultants up to have more human conversations (and removing the "admin tax").

• Auditing your tech stack to see if you’re actually using what you’re paying for, or whether you're actually in "integration debt".

Turning Old Data into Gold

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was about the "gold nuggets" sitting right under our noses. Your "old to gold" could be data, processes, tech, people...

Keith argues that most agencies already have 95% of the data they need in their own CRM, yet they continue to spend a fortune on expensive external job boards and LinkedIn licenses.

We discussed "rehumanising" the process by using technology to lift the heavy weights so that recruiters can focus on building resilience and genuine relationships.

We chatted about how to:

• Preventing your recruiters heading straight to LinkedIn / Job Boards to resource instead of looking "back home" at your own database.

• Training your recruiters to master the fundamental tasks, like a perfect candidate interview prep, before moving to the next part of the process.

Are You the Recruiter Your Website Says You Are?

We ended with a challenge for the industry. Many agencies claim to be "at the heart of their sector" on their websites, but the reality is often a messy database and a reliance on reactive advertising. Keith’s advice for this year is simple: stop the abdication to technology and start driving your business with strategy again.

This vodcast was a masterclass in recruitment leadership. Watch it to hear more about Keith's "war stories" from the S3 days and how to weaponise the data, systems, and people you already have.

Ready to put the world to rights with us? Watch the full 19minute vodcast now.

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