From Gatekeepers to Strategic Advisors: Redefining the Recruiter's Role

Eight Stages of Recruiting Evolution

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The future belongs to recruiters who disrupt the status quo. This is challenging and not for the faint-hearted. It belongs to those who de-emphasize traditional recruitment skills.

The new recruiter must convince managers to recalibrate qualifications to enable more realistic and affordable hires, determine how to use the contingent workforce more effectively, harness automation to serve their needs, and hire diverse workers.

Focusing on, searching for, and hiring those with a long and deep list of credentials and skills is a zero-sum game. No one wins because there are so few of them. Chasing these people is a game of musical chairs, where someone will always lose unless they act differently.

We need to convince more managers to think differently. We need a new perspective on the composition of the workforce and a better measure of what skills matter.

Our traditional view of the workforce is a monolith of full-time workers. We have an embedded view that all workers should be permanent and that working hours and the place of work should be fixed. We hire deep functional experts in the hope that they will develop the next great product or help us become more competitive. Yet the decades of constantly increasing hiring requirements and scouring the world for the most elite have not paid very big dividends.

Many of the most successful startups have been founded by misfits and mavericks who fit no hiring requirements. They could harness teams of people to achieve the goals that made them successful.

A more useful view of the workforce is to see it as an ecosystem made up of the skills and knowledge found within teams of permanent and gig workers, contractors, part-time and full-time workers, customers, service providers, strategic partners, and remote workers partnered with automated tools, augmented with A.I.

The Shamrock Organization & Workforce Emerges
In 1989, Charles Handy, a management theorist, wrote a very prescient book called The Age of Unreason. In it, he described what he called the "Shamrock Organization." The book outlined a future of how organizations and work would be structured, which was hard to imagine in the 1990s but one that is clearly coming into focus today.

He advocated that an organization should be a network rather than a hierarchy. It would comprise three types of workers, which he described as the three leaves of a shamrock.

The first leaf comprised a small number of permanent executives and professionals who conceived new products or services maintained the culture and set the strategic direction.

The second leaf was a diverse group of contractors and consultants who built the products or developed the services through a series of flexibly staffed projects.

The third leaf, the flexible, transient, contingent workforce, assisted them. This workforce was used as needed to support the projects or to provide an on-demand source of skills as needs waxed and waned.

The fourth was those services outsourced to a third party; if he were updating the book today, he would most likely include artificial intelligence and automation. AI is already a critical part of the workforce and will continue to replace less-skilled, routine jobs and augment higher-level ones.

The figure below shows a modern interpretation of his model.