A central candidate hub is an interesting idea.
Would a candidate hub work?
A recruitment industry friend of mine and I were chatting about how recruiters are or aren’t changing to survive the challenges in the recruitment marketplace. He mentioned that one of the top reasons some recruiters are better than others is that they can locate job seekers that others cannot. I agreed this is the case when headhunting, but other than that argued that candidates have access to all the jobs now and so should recruiters each have access to all the candidates, as levelling this playing field would expose the best and worst recruiters really quickly.
How would it work?
All recruiters would have access to a large and central database of candidates who have willingly given access to the information about them that is relevant and necessary for recruitment (such as the standard information on a CV or that which is given to a job board on a job seeker’s profile). In many ways, this already exists as LinkedIn, together with the various candidate databases from job portals.
But who would control and manage it?
This was the issue we came up with that most bothered us. Those in control could make mistakes or abuse power. On the other hand, such a system could be mostly open source (again similar to LinkedIn) and monitored and owned by all that use it. Wouldn’t companies, recruiters and job seekers all benefit?
A candidate hub sounds fantastic in many ways, but most recruiters would not want it to exist. Some candidates may also have privacy issues with it. As mentioned, in a sense it exists as a few separate hubs per location or industry, plus websites like LinkedIn. My opinion on the matter merely was, to really know if a recruiter is worth their salt, they would not show this through reach, but by process.
