What Technology Can’t Do For Recruiting

Kevin Wheeler is an insightful writer on human capital and recruiting. And in his decade-end wrap-up, he discusses what makes for a good recruiter. There is so much packed into it, I really suggest both job-seekers and recruiters read it.
I think his most essential point, that recruiting is sales and sales is human, is worth mulling over for a l-o-n-g time. The sooner we, the technology and Internet service companies in human capital, get that deep into our bones, the better and larger impact we will have.
He writes:

The decade began with the hope, maybe even the expectation among most recruiters, that the Internet would change things profoundly… As it turned out, neither the average cost per hire nor the average time to present a qualified candidate has changed much despite the introduction of all the tools that the Internet made possible…

Because recruiting has still not agreed with the business about KPIs, technology is unable to assist in improving those KPIs. One of the most commonly used measurements — “time to hire” — is a proxy, at best, for good recruiting. [Would you compensate your salespeople on "time to close" instead of dollars actually brought in?]
Until recruiting, as a business process, has readily-agreed-to and measurable KPIs, I’m afraid the utility of technology for solving more of the recruiting puzzle will be limited.

..Recruiting is sales. It’s that simple and anyone who expects to succeed in any decade has to understand this.
Good recruiters are coaches, consultants, and psychologists. They need to not only sell candidates, but also hiring managers

In my experience, this is what technologists are most likely to miss when the analyze recruiting and recruiting workflows. Recruiting, like sales, is a human process, and rather obviously, the internet itself is not human. It can enable humans to do their processes better, but it simply can not replace them.

I’m surprised at how many times HR industry people quiz me on why we at TheLadders.com use executive search professionals to fill some specialized positions. Yes, we absolutely post the job on TheLadders, and we get great candidates (some of which we’ve hired through executive search firms) from our own site. But the quizzical look I get comes from the mistaken assumption that internet job sites are an excellent replacement for recruiters, when in fact, they are enablers for excellent recruiters.

Just like Hoover’s and SalesGenie.com, as sources of great sales leads, are not trying to replace salespeople but, rather, make them more successful, TheLadders.com exists to be phenomenal at what the Internet is great at — collecting, collating, and curating information — in order to allow the industry’s professionals — recruiters — to spend more time at what they’re great at — the person-to-person discussions, persuasions, and negotiations of recruiting.

Similarly, a great recruiter, like my old colleague Dave Carvajal does so much more than merely processing leads. There’s understanding the flavor of the job, the mentality of the person, the assessment of cultural fit, shepherding the negotiations between the two parties and enabling them to each get what they value most, etc. etc. Technology is simply not going to replace that.

Toward the end of the decade social networking appeared and became the new buzz. Recruiters had tools that would give them unprecedented access to candidates and make it much easier to create talent pools and stay in touch with candidates. Recruiters eagerly adopted Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other tools as the new panacea, feeling perhaps that if the Internet couldn’t fix their problems, then social media would.
They too have been disappointed, because the Internet, applicant tracking systems, CRM, and social media are tools that enable knowledgeable, skilled recruiters to do a better job. They are not, in themselves, solutions to anything and will not magically make anyone a good recruiter.

The excitement that we all felt the first time we signed up for any of the social media properties is part of who we are as humans — “I can’t believe how many people are on here!” But mistaking that elation at the presence of so many colleagues, old classmates, and childhood friends, for the simplification of the hard work of recruiting for us — prospecting, marketing, qualifying, screening, and selling candidates and hiring managers — leads to a dangerous lack of productivity for the hours you’ve spent surfing.

There is a myth that anyone can recruit for any industry because the Internet and social networking tools make access to people and information ubiquitous and easy to get.

If your VP of Sales came to you and said, “hey, all of our sales recruiting problems are over! I got the list of all 648 buyers in our industry. The hard work is done, we can have the interns call them up and they’ll buy right away!”, you would fire him.
Similarly, just because everybody is in the white pages, or on Facebook, or using Google, that hardly means your job is done (or, really, that it is even started). In recruiting, as in sales, collecting good prospects is the start of the pipeline, not the end.

Never underestimate industry knowledge and experience as a major factor in recruiting success.

There’s the famous progression of understanding from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. Technology generally, and the Internet in particular, are phenomenal at the data, very good at information, and sometimes quite effective at knowledge.
But technology will never surpass humans for wisdom. And the sooner the industry recognizes that, the quicker we can get on to solving the real problems of recruiters and HR departments today.

And I think this is why a recruiting guru like Kevin Wheeler can look back on the past decade and be disappointed. The whirlwind we Internet recruitment people have unleashed is very, very good for recruiting and is also very, very bad for recruiting. In the next decade, let’s do more of the good.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.