Welcome to our video series, The Experts. In the series, we interview staffing and recruitment leaders to hear their perspectives on industry trends, lessons they’ve learned in the careers, and their leadership philosophies.
In this clip, Roger Mills, co-founder and owner of Think IT Recruitment, explains why he believes regulations like GDPR present recruiters with the opportunity to build real and authentic relationships with candidates versus viewing them merely as transactional means to an end.
What’s one of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the recruitment industry?
Roger Mills: One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the recruitment industry in the last 20 years is around regulation. There wasn’t much when I started. The word “cowboy” was probably used quite well back in those days, so for me, it’s been good to see more regulation come into the industry. We tend to deal with a lot of financial service companies, so regulation has always been a big factor with those organizations. I’ve never seen it as a negative for regulation to come in.
GDPR – I know there was a lot of hype about it and I don’t think it’s [going to have] the huge impact that people believe. For us, it was an opportunity to look at our practices and to look at how we were operating. I have to admit, I was shocked to discover some of the ways we were operating. I felt like we moved away from the more people-centric way of operating. In recruitment in the 1990s, we had phones and that was it, so it’s allowed us to rely less on technology, in some respects, and actually get back to basics and to forming relationships rather than just relying on our CRM and doing email campaigns. With that regulation, we’ve had to tighten up our data, discard a lot of data, and we now look at that data probably with a bit more respect. It’s about utilizing that [data] rather than just relying on it for email campaigns.
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