WHY CERTIFY?
Simple. To immediately differentiate your services and working style while signaling to
candidates and clients your commitment to ethically-grounded professional behavior.
candidates and clients your commitment to ethically-grounded professional behavior.
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We've often said before that recruiting and executive search is an exciting and challenging field which can also provide a very lucrative and rewarding career in both psychic and financial terms.
However, there can be no denying that recruiting and executive search is also a very dynamic field which in turn employs a large number of often "colorful" if not sometimes outright "shady" characters. We'd be lying if we didn't point that out. And we all know it. Recruiters and search consultants know it, Candidates know it. Clients know it. And you're fooling yourself if you think they don't. At times in the past, recruiting and executive search, which is known to be a rough and tumble industry in the best of circumstances, has been its own worst enemy in this regard by creating, nurturing or even rewarding “fly by night” recruiting firms or individual "fast buck" recruiters. Taken together and tracked over time, this has had a massive, deleterious effect on the collective reputation of recruiters as well as the entire recruiting industry. |
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Obviously, this state of affairs is not healthy, positive nor beneficial -- not to candidates, not to clients and not to search consultants.
Worse, this globally poor reputation is continuing while the entire recruiting industry is being up-ended through disintermediation. For instance, although LinkedIn is playing nice with recruiters now, their long term intent is clear -- connect candidates directly with the hiring companies cutting the recruiter out of the picture and taking some of that money off the table for themselves. Another example would be the rapid drive of more established firms to develop an in-house recruiting practice which has many benefits for the firm.
In each of these cases, it is the agency recruiters in particular, who are going to and will continue to get hit hardest.
It needs to change but how?
One approach would be to track and report on the unethical and unprofessional recruiters.
That could work well if these so-called "bad eggs" were only a small minority of recruiters but even then that would not be an efficient or effective approach
For this reason, we've taken a different approached and flipping the model to go the other way in that we make the assumption that the entire recruiting industry is radioactive unless they are ERA-certified.
So rather trying to contain or quarantine the "bad recruiters", we are focused on building a platform, an oasis for the "good recruiters" while simply keeping the "bad" ones out.
That doesn't mean that there aren't fantastic recruiters out there who are both ethical and professional. There surely are. We've met them. We've worked with them. However, from the candidate's and client's perspective (industry outsiders), it's both extremely difficult and time consuming for these folks to find, test and assess and filter these recruiters.
And at the same time recruiters have posed this question to us:
"How can I, the ethically-grounded recruiting professional, quickly and effectively communicate and signal this fact to candidates and clients?"
The answer is simple.
By joining and becoming certified by the ERA, an industry organization, that makes selecting and working with recruiters as well as the recruiting process itself less opaque and more transparent. The ERA also levels if not removes many of the informational asymmetries which are inherent in the current recruiting process.
And to this end, we've committed our resources to help drive what we see are the needed reforms from within the industry, through a bottom-up, grass roots effort to find, identify and certify only ethically-grounded professional recruiters and recruiting agencies.
Worse, this globally poor reputation is continuing while the entire recruiting industry is being up-ended through disintermediation. For instance, although LinkedIn is playing nice with recruiters now, their long term intent is clear -- connect candidates directly with the hiring companies cutting the recruiter out of the picture and taking some of that money off the table for themselves. Another example would be the rapid drive of more established firms to develop an in-house recruiting practice which has many benefits for the firm.
In each of these cases, it is the agency recruiters in particular, who are going to and will continue to get hit hardest.
It needs to change but how?
One approach would be to track and report on the unethical and unprofessional recruiters.
That could work well if these so-called "bad eggs" were only a small minority of recruiters but even then that would not be an efficient or effective approach
For this reason, we've taken a different approached and flipping the model to go the other way in that we make the assumption that the entire recruiting industry is radioactive unless they are ERA-certified.
So rather trying to contain or quarantine the "bad recruiters", we are focused on building a platform, an oasis for the "good recruiters" while simply keeping the "bad" ones out.
That doesn't mean that there aren't fantastic recruiters out there who are both ethical and professional. There surely are. We've met them. We've worked with them. However, from the candidate's and client's perspective (industry outsiders), it's both extremely difficult and time consuming for these folks to find, test and assess and filter these recruiters.
And at the same time recruiters have posed this question to us:
"How can I, the ethically-grounded recruiting professional, quickly and effectively communicate and signal this fact to candidates and clients?"
The answer is simple.
By joining and becoming certified by the ERA, an industry organization, that makes selecting and working with recruiters as well as the recruiting process itself less opaque and more transparent. The ERA also levels if not removes many of the informational asymmetries which are inherent in the current recruiting process.
And to this end, we've committed our resources to help drive what we see are the needed reforms from within the industry, through a bottom-up, grass roots effort to find, identify and certify only ethically-grounded professional recruiters and recruiting agencies.
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"How can I, the ethically-grounded recruiting professional, quickly and effectively communicate and signal this fact to candidates and clients?" The answer is simple. By joining and becoming certified by the ERA, an industry organization, that makes selecting and working with recruiters as well as the recruiting process itself less opaque and more transparent. The ERA also levels if not removes many of the informational asymmetries which are inherent in the current recruiting process. And to this end, we've committed our resources to help drive what we see are the needed reforms from within the industry, through a bottom-up, grass roots effort to find, identify and certify only ethically-grounded professional recruiters and recruiting agencies. |
Ethically-grounded, Recruiting Professional
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