European Recruiting Institute

just the other day I came across a message from the recruiter network in the Netherlands. It talked about the European Recruiting Institute http://www.recruitinginstitute.eu/

Obviously very interested in this material as I'm developing a global training program for all Agilent recruiters I decided to check out what it was all about. Turns out that this is a purely Dutch initiative led by a recruitment agency together with an educational institute. That of course directly makes you wonder about a potential hidden agenda of the recruitment agency. How much indoctrination will they try to push through by marketing all the material and showcasing their stuff? Why are they calling the the European Recruiting Institute where there is nothing European there? anyway, perhaps I'm just having Monday morning blues so let's have a look.

Any way, I decided to have a closer look and it actually looks pretty nice. Well, unless you find it surprising that the site is actually one static page and that you have to download a pdf for more information. Any internet sourcer would already raise his eyebrows, right?

There are 3 levels to start at: entry, advanced and master (well that's how I read it). The entry level seems to be designed for people who absolutely have no clue about recruitment. Topics: the importance of recruitment for an organization, the recruitment process from a-z (is there one generic process?) and then some bits and pieces on how to write a job profile, how to interview (STAR) and some stuff on the legal side of things. Program seems nice for a beginner but I doubt that anyone with 2 weeks of experience is really going to be blown away by this.

Second level seems a bit more serious but still seems a bit theoretical: recruitment planning (welcome to the world where your planning will be obsolete within 2 weeks), the different forms of recruitment (agency, corporate, head hunter etc) branding and sourcing. I don't get any feeling in how far recruiters will actually be trained on these topics and especially on sourcing I'd be interested to learn what material they will show (just sourcing on the average Monster database or are we going deep on Google and Live.com)

The Master level is for recruitment managers and unfortunately that one seems to be kind of theoretical as well: mission and vision of the organization, doing a recruitment SWOT and developing a recruitment strategy. They do organize workshops and work sessions so I hope that the learning will come from best practices.

It seems that the effort is nice but I'm very curious to hear from the experiences of participants whether this is just a way to sell more recruitment processes or something very serious where recruiters can learn something for real. They mention that the professors are top recruiters from all over the world but fail to provide any names, the one thing that might have given their program a bit more "cachet"

The big question is whether the recruiters feel that such a "degree" would add something to their curriculum or not. Would you be interested in do this?