The year’s first HR and Management Club conference, organised in collaboration with five business Grandes Ecoles, was held on 15 March 2012. The lively and thought-provoking discussions on the impact of the new technologies in the recruitment process were developed by a Human Resource Director, a job-seeker and two headhunters.

The HR and Management Club held the conference on Edhec’s Parisian campus, installed in the magnificently renovated former head office of Crédit Lyonnais. The room was packed for the first conference of the year, given over to the impact of NT on recruitment. Claude Monnier, HRD of Monster for 10 years before moving on to manage a new job-hunt site linked to Facebook, got the evening off to a great start by recounting his own experience. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no question that the internet is now the main recruitment platform. One key figure says it all: 97% of jobs now go through the web. As Claude said, “it’s not on the job boards but through the network that you find a job.” This doesn’t just mean the digital network like Linkedin, but also Facebook, a notion that gave rise to some lively debate with the audience. The questions rained down after Claude Monnier’s astonishing talk.
Alexandre Mihailovich then explained how he found a job through the web. According to him, keeping updated on the social networks (Linkedin and Viadeo, the latter featuring the most ‘Frenchified’ profiles) allows you to be spotted, even if you’re not actively searching. He considers it essential to join these groups. Alexandre also recommends having a Facebook profile, which lets you keep in touch with people you might otherwise lose touch with, although, at the same time, you should limit access to your ‘friends’
The two headhunters, Dominique Baud-Bertrand and Grégoire Beaurain, ended the conference with a quick overview of today’s recruitment process. For Dominique, it’s not so much the recruitment process itself is pretty much the same but the tools used have changed. She insisted that job boards remain essential tools. Sending your CV to a CV database (CV Aden, APEC, Monster…) means you can be ‘web tracked’ as long as you choose the right keywords so you can be identified for the right job. “Does this mean that recruitment is industrialised and standardised?” one member of the audience asked. Dominique’s answer was an unequivocal “no”. “The first selection is just to identify skills. This will be followed by a face-to-face interview so that the recruiters can assess the applicants’ personality.”
Grégoire Beaurain concluded with a few recommendations for job seekers: don’t cheat on your CV (you’ll be found out in 24h with the Internet) and try to maintain intelligent the contact with the recruiters by sending them articles or useful information, for example. “This mean’s you’ll stay in the recruiter’s sights,” he explained.
The conference ended at 8.15 pm and the audience and speakers met over a drink to debrief and, of course, to network!

The next meeting is on the impact of NT on training. We ‘ll send you the date as soon as it’s confirmed.