Milan Novak: My journey from Rolodex to Social Media

When I started looking around for a job after graduating from University, I was invited for an interview by a recruitment agency and to my surprise, they offered me a job as a recruitment consultant. How lucky was I?! From day one, I have been absorbed by the recruitment / staffing industry and I immediately fell in love with my job. Finding the right match between candidates and companies, designing the right candidate attraction strategies, optimising recruitment processes and mainly helping people realise their potential and setting them on their way to achieve great things is such a purposeful goal in life.

I was fortunate to spend 13 years in Grafton Recruitment where I learned so much from my colleagues, bosses and owners. Through various roles such as Recruitment Consultant, Branch Manager, Country Manager and finally Regional CEO, I became fascinated by people management and leadership and I realized that it is a life-long and never-ending journey to become a leader and industry expert.

In 2014 I met with Josef Kadlec, was impressed by his desire to change the industry stereotypes and we started a new venture together. I dedicated my professional career to recruitment and people management, so I felt strongly that we need to constantly innovate and disrupt the ever-changing market place. I became a founding and majority shareholder of GoodCall, Recruitment Academy and Datacruit and I designed a business model where we combine practical Sourcing and Recruitment, Education and Technology with Data and Analytics.

We started GoodCall to reflect on the current market needs and changing talent behaviour. The low unemployment, shortages of skills and demographic development makes it very difficult to find the right talent. While database agencies, job boards and traditional recruitment practices still play an important part in today’s market, our purpose was to bring an alternative concept to life by embracing the passive candidate market.

It is clear that companies need to be much more pro-active when attracting talent these days. Having said that, we still meet many “old school” managers who are puzzled why there are no lines of candidates waiting at the door to work for them.

It is great that we live in such a period where companies need to reinvent their market position with respect to employees they need to hire and retain. It’s positive because it puts more pressure on people management and leadership because as we all know: people work for people and they leave managers, not companies.

Being a rapidly growing start-up, it is important to say that we’ve also learned a lot along the way. We sometimes make mistakes but that’s what is exciting about creating new ways to connect people and companies.

Today, I wish to share my initial learnings working primarily on the passive candidate market:

1. EVP is not always EVP. Although many companies claim that they have their EVP (Employee Value Proposition) defined, it is often not the case – for example many global companies have a very foreign EVP that doesn’t relate much to the local market. Having clarity on your EVP is critical for building the right employer branding strategy. It is impossible to build a social media campaign without an accurate EVP.

2. Direct Sourcing is only part of the strategy. It is wrong to assume that by implementing direct sourcing on LinkedIn without having a clear talent attraction strategy, you will have candidates knocking on your door. When you find candidates, you need to be able to tell them the right story to engage them in further conversation.

3. It is not all about LinkedIn. Don’t get me wrong, I think LinkedIn is a great tool and it completely changed the lives of recruiters (and I love it!). At the same time, it is essential to combine other tools and media to truly find and attract talent. Facebook, Mobile, Google+, Whatsapp, personal meetings, networking events, they all play their part.

4. Building Relationships. One of the first lessons I learned as a young recruiter from my bosses was that recruitment is about building relationships and managing your network of contacts. Yes, it used to be about managing my rolodex back then but now… How important it is now when you can build networks and relationships via multi-channel platforms. You need to become tech savvy.

5. Have a digital footprint. To be able to build relationships in the on-line world we live in, recruiters need to be even more aware what type of digital footprint they leave behind. You need to start caring about your personal brand, about the content that you publish, like and share. You need to add value through the content that you provide to your network.

6. Dear Recruiters, we are living in a very exciting time. We can make a difference and step up in the organisations as strategic partners. But we can only achieve it if we work on our self-development and constantly educate ourselves. The new major competence of a successful recruiter? READING – articles, blogs, books, market insights and data. Do you have reading time allocated in your busy schedules?

Milan Novák – Co-Founder of GoodCall, Recruitment Academy and Datacruit.