Stephen O'Donnell Spills the Beans

Stephen O'Donnell has been on the recruitment scene since shell suits were in fashion and mullets were all the rage. A friend of the Bean since it was just a tiny pod; the recruitment connoisseur can often be found propping up the bar at The Recruiters Network events no matter what region they're in.

We took a trip to see Mr O'Donnell at his Glasgow base to get the low down on AlljobsUK.com's recent acquisition by 1Job, found out what he thinks of Dave Mendoza, his opinions on using LinkedIn as a recruiting device and the secrets of how to recruit for a spectrometer salesperson!

Find a niche and be nosy!

Stephen has always been a salesman; he tried his hand at selling fax machines, cable TV and ad space before he found his forte in recruitment. 21 years on, the founder of AlljobsUK.com doesn't do much recruitment these days but he has fond memories of life as a recruitment consultant.
Stephen attributes much of his success to specialising in a market, he says,

"I found earlier on in recruitment that it was better to find a niche and make it your own. I tell recruitment consultants to discourage all other recruiters from covering that area because you're the guy who's the absolute authority on it."

"In the nineties I was the only person in Scotland who recruited in the plastics sector; Injection moulding was a real boom business so I was involved in every start up company. Any time another agency advertised a job in plastics I would make it my business to fill those jobs and make sure that they did not get that placement because if they did they would be encouraged to follow that sector."

As a specialist, Stephen had to fill some of the most obscure vacancies, including a spectrometer salesperson whose sales target was to sell one and a half machines a year!

Dedication and knowledge of his market helped him to fill the tough roles and kept the clients coming back."A good client, with ongoing recruitment requirements, will pay your mortgage for years to come if you serve them well."

Despite success with AlljobsUK.com, and more recently 1Job, Stephen admits that there will always be a place in his heart for recruitment.

"I do miss interviewing candidates because I'm a nosy parker."

"I really liked the part where you get to find out about people; as a recruiter you get to ask questions that an ordinary person wouldn't ask. You might not ask your friend "how much do you earn?" Or "how do you feel about your job?" But as a recruiter you can ask these questions and people will answer them. If I asked someone straight out "how much do you earn?" and I wasn't a recruiter I would probably get a punch up the bracket!"

Restrictions on the kind of questions that you can ask a candidate may have tightened in recent years but self-confessed snoop, Stephen, believes that there are ways round them.

"There are plenty of ways to know answers to questions without asking, candidates will offer that information. They will put their date of birth on their CVs even though they don't have to."

Over the years Stephen believes that attitudes have changed as well as laws.

"Employers and recruiters have become switched on to the idea that it's a really good thing to have women engineers or women Managing Directors. We all know that people can have several careers in a lifetime, which actually makes them a better candidate, and we also know that there's a huge benefit from recruiting someone who is over the age of 40."

The birth of AlljobsUK.com

After proudly writing the website for his recruitment agency, Stephen realised that there was no way for candidates to find the site.

"I thought surely there must be a directory, like a yellow pages for recruitment. The more I looked into it, the more I found there wasn't so I decided to set up AlljobsUK.com as a portal to recruitment agencies with the database of everyone in the country."

Since setting up in 2000, AlljobsUK.com now has the largest database of Recruiters and Employers and hosts the annual National Online Recruitment Awards (NORA). Last year, Direct Recruit, owners of 1Job, bought AlljobsUK.com and O'Donnell has stayed on as a director of the business.

"We never had a job search engine but always wanted to have one; 1Job is exactly that, so we complement one another perfectly. We do the portal things that they don't do and 1job has the aggregator and the vertical job search engine that AlljobsUK.com doesn't have."

"They are separate but compliment one another, both bringing candidates to where the vacancies are."

How tough times can benefit recruiters

 

Stephen has faced several slumps in the economy during his recruitment career and he believes that recruiters can take advantage of troubled times.

"In tough times recruitment usually does very well. If people are leaving jobs they'll vacate a position behind them and that vacancy then has to be replaced. Whenever there's a shortage of skilled candidates or a surplus of skilled candidates and a shortage of vacancies, recruitment companies do well. Simply, the marketplace is either candidate or vacancy and client focused."

The great LinkedIn debate

Stephen doesn't blog because "it's a commitment that can make you look bad if you don't keep it up." However, he is an avid reader of other people's, such as Dan's and Louise Triance's UK Recruiter blog.  He often appears as a guest author in industry press, offering strong opinions on how the networking phenomenon is utilised by recruiters. Despite the Web 2.0 boom, Stephen believes that the online recruitment industry has moved slower than was predicted in the early days.

"I remember sitting with Dan (McGuire) in 2002 and talking about what was going to happen because we all thought that the internet was going to develop much faster than it did."

"What's happened in the past 8 years is what we predicted was going to happen in three years. We had thought you would click a button and be face-to face with your HR manager having a meeting."

One thing that couldn't have been predicted is the speed at which social networks would develop. Stephen, who has a profile on LinkedIn, says of the network:

"On LinkedIn there are a lot of people who look to build up their list of contacts to thousands and thousands. But if this is a list of people that you don't know, what is the benefit? You're effectively recommending someone you don't know. I only want people on my LinkedIn who are in my phonebook."

"There's too much networking beyond the people that you actually know. I might want to know you and the people that you know, but I wouldn't like to know who you randomly know."

"The theory of six degrees of separation, where everyone in the world is connected through no more than six connections is like saying I danced with a woman who danced with a guy that danced with the princess of Wales -but I didn't actually dance with her!"

Stephen, who has 183 connections on the online network, thinks that worldwide networkers like Dave Mendoza are taking things too far.

"I think Dave Mendoza is causing a lot of trouble and should stop now, the whole networking beyond people that you actually know isn't a benefit to anyone; it also goes against the rules of LinkedIn!"

Looking ahead

Now responsible for Sales and Marketing at 1JOB and the day to day running of Alljobsuk.com, Stephen still manages to find time to organise the NORAs, awards that have been going strong since 2001.

The first event for the Awards, which recognise the best online recruitment sites in the UK, takes place on the 13th November this year.

www.AlljobsUK.com