Where Recruiting Technology Comes Up Short

Here’s what’s wrong with most “hi-tech” solutions to improve the recruiting process: they miss where the real value is.

With Big data in its infancy, the biggest contribution of technology so far to recruiting is to connect the job seeker to the job offer.  Helpful, but basic.   They do a great job of selecting candidate profiles to match job vacancies but how far has that got you.

Matching is the easy part.  Now you are at the starting line.

In a recent blog, recruiting authority Greg Savage points out what is still to be done.

• Identifying candidates who are notlooking, but who will fit a hard-to-find skill set.
• Approaching, enticing, seducing, and bringing those candidates to the hiring table.
• Managing the hiring process, negotiating terms, finessing the brief, handling the counter-offer, assisting with on-boarding.

These require humans.  They require humans with a lot of experience and, yes, intuition.

Recruiting technology is starting to make inroads into these complex stages but there’s a long way to go.

There is also the question whether technology is even leading us in the right direction.  One of the leading claims of psychometric evaluation is to remove subjectivity.  But, accurately interpreting the findings of these assessments requires a credentialed operator at the helm.  In other words, to remove bias from the process to remove bias comes back to human skill.

Perhaps, instead of setting out to replace the human function, the best technology will lead to an optimum partnership.

“Technology will make talent identification easier and easier,” says Savage. “Recruiting and hiring will get harder and harder.”

Convincing a candidate that the job is right doesn’t come by checking off boxes.  It requires the give and take of human interaction.

If technology cannot replace the “craft” of recruiting, the ideal recruiter of today and tomorrow will be a strategic combination of both that brings the efficiency and speed of technology in finding and matching together with the experience to finesse and finalise the hire that is not available to the client elsewhere.

In Savage’s words: “Talent is not an online commodity”

It’s worth keeping up with “The Savage Truth”. Here’s the link. http://gregsavage.com.au/