I've got your talent, right here.

Sometimes I think the one big safety-pin that’s holding the 3rd party recruitment industry together is the widely-held belief that the best candidates (aka “talent”) are currently doing the same job for a similar company.

Let's be honest here – what’s really attractive about candidates already doing the same job somewhere else is that they’re seen as potential employees who won’t really need to be assessed, trained or managed.

Hiring someone who doesn’t need to be assessed, trained or managed seems to have become the holy grail for many risk averse managers. And if recruitment agencies have one skill, it’s knowing how to feed the insecurities of their target market.

Whenever a candidate is described as “talent”, invariably one of the people involved in that conversation is a hiring manager. The other is an agency recruiter.

If the hiring manager is working for a large corporate and they aren't lazy or naive, then the chances are they’ve become imbued with a disease that inflicts all very large businesses eventually.

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