Karen Lance and being the perfect candidate
As we turn a page on career ’ s month we thought it would be interesting to reverse the lens , step back and listen to what the person on the other side of the table has to say . Karen Lance has been in the recruitment industry for over two decades and seen the winds of change shake up the way hiring is carried out in terms of how new technologies are leveraged to finding the talent in demand .
Interview by Divya Mathai and Varun Khanna MBA , 2017
What are the major shifts you have seen in your 30 years in the recruitment industry ?
When I started in the recruitment industry we had a card system . We had no computers . We had two phones on our desks . So obviously internet and computer technology has been the biggest shift . Email made a huge difference . We used to actually send resumes via courier to companies . Of course , email changed all that massively .
Advertising was the next big thing . Our spend in The Sydney Morning Herald was thousands and thousands per month . And of course with Seek that completely changed . Seek was going to be the end of the recruitment industry . Clearly it wasn ’ t ; it just changed the way we did things . And obviously over the last few years , Hired , which is specifically for the IT industry , has made an impact . I don ’ t know what sort of an impact Hired specifically has made , but there are a lot of new technologies coming out right now . Indeed , the job aggregator , have announced they are going into the recruitment business . Monster is setting up a recruitment site . I mean , every week there ’ s something new coming . We ’ re still standing . Most of the major globals are still standing . LinkedIn is another huge one , huge interrupter obviously . So whilst it impacts what we do , it just changes how we do it sometimes . I think there will always be room for us , but maybe just in different formats and we ’ ll become more specialised perhaps .
4 AGSM
Karen ’ s career in the recruitment industry spans 30 years . Having started her career with Drake International ( including a stint in Monaco as PA to the Company Founder ), Karen went on to join a boutique business specialising in business support where she progressed to GM and subsequently founded qube . recruit . consult – a Sydney based recruitment firm specialising in temporary and permanent placements for business support , sales & marketing and corporate retail roles .
What do you think are the most sought after skills in 2016 ?
This has been the same for the last few years : technology , anything IT related , is going to put you on the forefront . In the last few years , we ’ ve seen big data , which has been massive , and such a skills shortage in that area , and that ’ s where you see people coming in from overseas .
I think the emerging industries are going to be in healthcare and aged care and those areas . It ’ s fluid , changes all the time .
The digital space , of course , has emerged over the last ten years . That has made a massive difference specifically to marketing . New industries have come out of that : social media .
Photo credit : Provided by author