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HeadRec is our series of interviews with gurus, opinion leaders and innovators within the recruitment industry both in Ireland and abroad. No better a start than to get up close and professional with Tom Clancy - Recruitment Specialist for Ebay Business in Ebay Classifieds across Europe. Tom is pretty crazy and even crazier about social media so read the transcript below or better again see the video on our  Sonru Ezine page. Contact us to be one of the first 20 readers to access the video interview.

Tell us about yourself Tom, introduce us to your role, where you work and what your company does.

Recruitment Specialist for Ebay Business in Ebay Classifieds across Europe. The client group would include 20 countries worldwide but primarily doing business in Denmark, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Our customers are both B2B and B2C and the recruitment process is entirely challenging depending on what part of the world you’re in.

The recruitment industry has undergone much change in recent months, what’s the single biggest challenge facing your company for 2010?

My biggest challenges in terms of recruitment are not identifying numbers and not identifying volume but primarily identifying small numbers of key talent to fill small numbers of headcount for very challenging businesses and building a global brand going forward.

The biggest challenge in a European/global context is to identify smaller numbers of key talented people in and infinitely more fragmented media market, the days of using 3 to 4 channels is no more. Our role is to identify the channels where the talent will be and communicate with them in their channels so our message needs to go outside the business into the media where are talented candidates sit as opposed to our expectation in the past that they will visit us and that’s the biggest challenge.

How are You/your Company adapting to this face this challenge?

We’re rethinking the path to the candidate and getting rid of the assumptions that we’ve a god given right to talented individuals, now  we’re asking ourselves what media are these talented individuals using? We’re  making more contact through social media, visual and video platforms, targeting the media and the messages we use. No longer can we adopt one unified media message, we have to use targeted messages so now we’ve one message for social networks, one message for video, one message for job/boards/traditional media.

What’s the most exciting tech innovation you've seen in the industry?

The most exciting technological innovation I’ve seen so far has to be around social networking particularly in the video space, we’re looking to try and unify a lot of the platforms and lot of the technologies into what we would consider to be a visual recruitment platform in order to allow us to communicate in a visual way. We have to rethink the way we use video in the recruitment process, video is now part of the recruitment brand, part of the referral system, probably soon will be part of Job Description and so on. Visual and video will become central to our interviewing, testing and branding efforts in the markets. The challenge for industries is to join technologies such as taking video from YouTube and using innovative video tools like Sonru and taking other diverse tools and bringing them together into one cohesive video pitch from business to the candidate market.

If you had to come up with a one-line prediction for the recruitment industry by December 2010, what would it be?

It is now incumbent on the employer to find the employee particularly the talented ones – those talented employees now exist in variety of fragmented media. We now need to use the new tools of social networking, video and other technologies to make sure we refine and define the message and push it out to the appropriate media. If we don’t do that, we’ll lose the talent and our competitors will have taken a leap in front of us, we’re not going to the let that happen in Ebay and we’re going to get there first.

What’s the best tip you could offer recruiters and HR managers for 2010?

To adapt to change, to adapt to innovation and to adapt to technology, the norm will leave you standing still, if you’re still using the tried and trusted methods then you’re probably already behind the market and the talented people will have already taken roles with innovators who are taking risks in using new technologies to engage and connect. If you find yourself behind, you’ll end up with the second or third tier talent in the market and not the most talented individuals.

Please provide us with a short bio of your career

I've been working in recruitment field for about 15 yrs,  I’ve worked in various different disciplines in different companies, have worked in multinationals both inside organizations and as a supplier to organizations globally. Personally I’ve been involved in the recruitment of about four or five thousand people across 20 counties in Europe. I now work for Ebay Classified as a Lead Recruiter for the European business.