The death of recruitment cold calling

So it is just me or do recruiters today tend to over-rely on technology to do their recruitment for them ?

Tools like job portals, social networks, job announcement groups, email …. these are great sourcing and communication tools. However for me they remain tools and are not end points in themselves. So LinkedIn is a great place to meet new candidates and have good contextual conversations. But do I count a candidate as a “serious” candidate till I have not had at least one good phone conversation with them ? NO.

The issue with over-reliance on technology is that I find people shying away from making the cold calls, and shying away from speaking with new candidates. The art of identifying a new prospective candidate by simply calling the board of a competing company seems to be a dying one. This is exemplified by young recruiters not even understanding the basic differences between open ended and close ended questions and how to continue difficult conversations.

The tone, tenor, vocabulary and interest of a phone conversation speaks volumes about a persons candidature than information you can glean from an email or an inmail.

Off course – I am one of the few people left who is holding out on the purchase of a Blackberry and am still not on Facebook. I am on LinkedIn and use it extensively since it helps in my work but friends already call me a technology dinosaur. So my opinion is colored in that sense.