Of the three areas of employment that have some intersection with MOOCs and free learning, recruitment seems to be the one in which MOOC providers are taking the most direct interest.
When I recently talked about screening processes required to hone hundreds or thousands of job applicants down to a manageable stack, that might have left the impression that the only problems facing employers is how to best select from hoards of qualified candidates that can be counted on to apply for any position. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The key word that clarifies this seeming conundrum is “qualified.” For employers go to great lengths (and pay professionals big money) to see that the pool of people they are selecting from is filled with top talent. And when it comes to certain types of professional positions (such as computer programmers or designers) or executive jobs (especially in sales and senior levels of management), the assumption is often that the best people are not ones who have the time and inclination to respond to job listings.
That’s why a professional recruiter’s life is not spent trolling through resumes that come in from Monster.com, but is rather spent cultivating individuals who may not even know they are in the employment market. This can include people who already have a job who might be convinced to leave for another one, even if they are not ready to initiate a job hunt on their own. The rotating cast of senior executives at start-up firms, for example, is generally driven by recruiters specializing in swiping the leadership from one company on behalf of another.
The best recruiters also find ways of searching out top talent that might not yet have a home, by participating in online communities where recent graduates with skills and energy but skimpy resumes might congregate, for example. Imagination is usually a key differentiator between a top recruiter and a mediocre one, which is why the decent ones are paid big bucks to search for people where others are not looking.
For instance, I’ve known recruiters who specialized in placing military veterans, recruiters with a strong grasp of where the abilities and discipline required for success in the armed forces might match up with civilian job titles. And other employment professionals focus on finding talent overseas or within niche communities of specialists.
Given how many people work as contractors and consultants these days, whole segments of the employment industry live and die based on their ability to recruit and retain large pools of people who don’t want a full time job but do want to be endlessly placed in high-paying gigs with interesting assignments without having to handle the self-marketing and paperwork associated with self employment.
Given how much recruitment is turning into detective work, there seems to be an opening for people with unusual backgrounds (such as a non-traditional educational history) to stand out from the more conventional job-seeking mob. Which may be why companies like Coursera and Udacity have reached out to employers in their ongoing search for revenue-producing business models.
But if MOOC educators want to start flirting with the employment industry, why can’t employers decide to get into the MOOC game? If that sounds fanciful, consider the latest organization to hang a MOOC sign on their door: the creative/technical staffing firm Aquent with their new Gymnasium program (the leadership of which will be joining us tomorrow for the first Degree of Freedom podcast of the season).
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