Outage Outrage! 💻🤬

My virtual butler Alexa is a good egg. She keeps me abreast of the latest news, weather and accurately calculates my commute. I contemplated giving her the promotion of a lifetime, chief lighting officer once we get hold of some smart bulbs. That was the plan, till last week when we experienced a global IT outage. Suddenly, my virtual Woman Friday was rendered useless. Incapable of answering the simplest of questions such as, what’s the population of Norway? Or when were the Olympics first held? It’s undermined my confidence in creating House V2.0 and what’s more, exposed my dependency on tech at all levels. For us, it was a case of streaming services being down for the night but in other parts of the world, it was a little more debilitating. Airports, healthcare facilities, and emergency services all plunged into panic due to a faulty update to anti-virus software. Which is exactly the excuse I would give, if AI had become self-aware and had just fired a warning shot. I was relatively calm until I got a message from JobAdder saying it was experiencing problems. That’s when the old familiar itch to buy every bit of toilet paper in a 5-mile. It got me thinking, where would we be without the technological advancements of the last 30 years? More importantly, what would the recruitment landscape look like?

Instead of transporting to a dystopian future for the answer, one in which Skynet triumphs forcing us to live off-grid. I’m setting the time machine to 30 years in the past, a time before the internet. For this, I contacted two recruiters whom I admire greatly and have a deep respect for. I'll keep their identities a secret as they're far removed from their past scoundrel ways plus they don't want to feel ancient. Recruiter #1 got his start sourcing chimney sweeps and lamp lighters in foggy London town while Recruiter #2 placed the snake that tempted Eve. I kid, but they were 360 recruiters back in the early to mid-nighties whilst I was still figuring out how to get my nose back from my old fella. They were able to give me some insight into recruitment at a time when the on-ramp to the Information Superhighway was still under construction. Providing a valuable heads-up on what recruitment could look like if a Y2K-type event were to take place.

Gatekeepers

Nowadays, we have numerous unmanned gates to breeze through to speak to a potential candidate. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, E-mail, Mobile etc. Back in the day, you had one gate, and it was guarded by a secretarial bouncer and if your name wasn’t down you weren’t coming in. Rec #1 & #2 both concurred that the ends justified the means and if you had to pretend to be a doctor or relative of the candidate, so be it.

Tools

With no option to video chat in these dark times, candidates are met in person or not at all. They are also housed in a contraption called a Rolodex, a revolving index that lives on your desk. Databases were clunky and often ignored in their infancy I’m told. The OS was DOS which was famously stubborn and difficult to use which makes me think, DOS thou protest too much. Presenting a candidate's CV, that was either done in person or using the cutting-edge tech of the time, the fax machine.

Business Development

To directly quote Rec #1 on this: “We would bribe someone at the weekly Marketing Magazine to give us the job listings before they went to print. They would photocopy them and fax it over to us. That would give us a day to canvass the market so that when the job did come out, we already had candidates to present to the client.”  - Genius! With just a hint of corruption.

Paper

Bloody everywhere! The pieces that were most revered though, were your top lists. As in your top candidates and top clients which were always in reach and ever-changing. A CV wasn’t as big of a requisite back in the day by the sounds of things. You were selling the person not the profile. Most desks now are blank canvases but there's something to be said for visulisation.

Market Knowledge

No websites so there were no easily accessible About Us or Meet The Team sections for you to feign accountability for presenting this particular option to a candidate. Also, companies couldn’t brand themselves as hip and down to earth with the help of an Instagram profile. You were reliant on your recruiter for insight into the companies’ profile in the market and their history.

Advertising

It’s always been expensive by the sounds of things. Instead of being charged for a pack you were charged per line making them short and sweet “labourer wanted, immediate start.” The aptly called lineage ad would be taken out in the Evening Standard for example and cost around $200 in today's money per line. It would hopefully be seen by potential candidates but more likely someone enjoying their fish supper the following day.

It was a bit of an eye-opener listening to their tales. Tech has certainly made our jobs easier, but has it made us lazier as recruiters? Probably, what’s more, it’s made the whole thing less personable. You can run a process now where all parties have never been in the same room.  They both reminded me of a thing I learned when I joined the industry 10+ years ago; get the interview while on the phone! There seemed more finesse, more skill, more urgency. Was it a little more devious back in the day? I would say cheekier for sure. If you drop today's recruiter with all the accoutrements of the modern age into 1995’s market they’re going to struggle. If you thaw out a mid-90s recruiter into today's market, they’ll definitely ruffle a few feathers but I Imagine a lot more would be done by EOP.