My first corporate recruiting job was in the early 2000’s during a period of time when the promise of the Internet was just starting to take shape.
Facebook and Linkedin were just babies. Twitter didn’t even exist.
But job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder and HotJobs had already ushered in a new way of finding and engaging talent. They transformed the application process from mailing paper-based resumes to applying online. It was a total game changer.
Monster, in particular, was instrumental for me. As an early adopter of their resume database product, a small-but-mighty team and I were able to pull a vaccine manufacturing plant out of some hot water with the FDA. As part of this project, we recruited close to one thousand scientists and compliance professionals to a small, remote town in Pennsylvania in less than a year.
We could not have done this if we didn’t fully embrace this transition to online recruiting.
But while advances in web technology enabled a more efficient process for candidates, it meant that Recruiters had to learn new skills and manage through new problems. Like the fact that resumes now came fast and furious through job boards and email. They also had to learn any number of new applicant tracking systems that were entering the market. But they would still also get paper and faxed resumes for several years. I distinctly remember having piles of resumes that needed to be de-stapled, scanned, and entered into an applicant tracking system for compliance purposes.
This was a challenging transition, but it was only the first of many that I saw and will see over my career.
The Rise of Social Media
Just as Recruiting Leaders were starting to figure out how to reallocate their budgets to accommodate for banner ads, job boards, resume databases and applicant tracking systems, a whole new transformation was taking place -- Web 2.0.
During Web 2.0, which was roughly between 2005 - 2010, a whole new class of web sites emerged that allowed people to organize into groups, interact and collaborate. This new transition created both opportunities and challenges for recruiting professionals.
On the opportunities side, Recruiters had new advertising channels and could find groups of people organizing around their professional expertise. This presented an opportunity to find and contact talent via social media sites. From a challenging perspective, the number of channels increased exponentially. Niche job boards exploded. And an entirely new discipline called “Sourcing” emerged inside of Talent Acquisition functions all over the world.
Sourcing introduced Recruiters to the complexities of boolean searching, x-raying websites, scraping contact information and social media spamming.
Recruiters quickly became overwhelmed. Those who embraced these new techniques flourished. Those who didn’t went on to other professions.
Then LinkedIn took off. And everything changed once again.
When all of this was happening, I was fascinated. I personally leaned into this transition. As I have often done over my career, I turned to writing and teaching as a means of educating myself. So I starting a blog called “SocialMediaRecruiting.Net” in 2008.
As a free giveaway on the site, I created a 30 page eBook called “Recruiting 2.0.” To my surprise, I had over a thousand people request a copy of it in the first year. Every once in a while I come across the eBook when I’m cleaning up files on my computer. Each time I read it, it reminds me how important it is to embrace a transition.
The Rise of Software as a Service (SaaS)
In the early 2000s building software was difficult and expensive. Not many people had the knowledge or the skills to build web applications. As a result, they could charge a lot of money to do it. Hosting your application was tedious and expensive too. Since the “Cloud” wasn’t really a thing yet, you needed purchase or rent servers and hire someone to manage the hardware.
By 2010, all of that nonsense had changed.
The cost of hosting a website plummeted as storage technology got better. And the promise of Internet riches created widespread interest in the field of software development. This gave rise to tech hotbeds in Silicon Valley, New York, India and Eastern Europe.
Now, just about anyone could go from “idea” to “working prototype” over a weekend. As a result, from roughly 2010 until today, there has been an explosion of software products on the market. Each of them claimed to solve an existing (or made up) problem the recruiting industry had...or didn’t know they had.
The term “Software as a Service” (SaaS) generally refers to software that lives on the web. You log into it from a web browser like Google Chrome. The application runs on remote servers located somewhere in the world. Many of these web applications also had mobile versions that made working on-the-go possible. Your Applicant Tracking System is a good example of a SaaS solution.
Since building SaaS applications got easier and cheaper, the barrier to entry dropped dramatically. The result is the overwhelm and confusion that you are probably experiencing when trying to make sense of the tools that exist on the market today. Or trying to manage all of the LinkedIn Inmails, emails and phone calls that you get from sales reps from SaaS startups.
Over the last eight to ten years, so many new categories of point solutions have appeared. For example, we now have multiple vendors who offer software in the following categories:
ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems): Avature, iCIMS, Greenhouse, etc.
TRM (Talent Relationship Management): Phenom People, Beamery, Yello, etc.
RM (Recruitment Marketing): SmashFly, Beamery, Candidate ID, etc.
Video Interviewing: RIVs, InterviewStream, SparkHire, Montage, etc
Resume Matching: Hiretual, Hiring Solved, Entelo, etc.
Employee Referrals: Simppler, Rolepoint, Teamable, etc.
I could really go on for pages and pages listing new categories, sub-categories, and all of the players that exist in each vertical. But that’s not the focus of this book.
While there have been many amazing products developed over this time period, we’ve reached a point where the volume and pace of new entries to the marketplace have created more confusion, complexity, and chaos for talent acquisition leaders than anything else.
I saw this first-hand when I threw my own hat in the ring and started a recruitment software company back in 2015.
I came up with the idea for my solution when I was working as a recruiting operations leader at The Hershey Company. We were trying to improve our hiring outcomes by implementing a competency-based, structured interview program across a distributed global workforce. While this was a much-needed service, without a software tool to help build the interview guides, it ended up being a major burden to our recruiters who were now spending 2-3 hours per job prepping hiring managers, building custom behavioral interview guides and collecting scorecards from interview teams. I wanted to get this process down to 4 or 5 minutes.
So I did what any crazy person would do. After realizing that there weren’t any good products on the market, I left my job, hired some developers and built a solution from scratch. Fortunately, it all worked out and the company was immediately successful. But I learned something from that experience that started me on the journey to writing this book.
What I learned was that even though you could have the perfect software solution that solved the exact need that a company had, they didn’t always buy it. Even though I had proof that it would help Recruiters save hours of prep time, the thought of adding one more tool was too overwhelming for many leaders. This was partially because they didn’t have anyone on their team with the bandwidth or skills to implement it and partially because improving their interview process was just one of the many priorities that they were concerned with.
To be clear, this wasn’t just a technology issue. Leaders were struggling to transition their processes, their programs and their people in response to the collective change that was swirling around them in their businesses and the talent marketplace.
It was a broader issue about getting recruiting operations under control. And the issue of “overwhelm” amidst another technology transition.
THE RISE OF AUTOMATION AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
If you’ve been to a conference, scanned some Tweets or read a blog post from anyone in the recruiting industry lately, you would think that talent acquisition is being run by robots. While this is certainly not true (yet), automation is quickly creeping into our technology stacks at an alarming rate. And it has the potential to eliminate jobs or change them dramatically in the near future.
This section of the book will probably be outdated before it goes to print, but it’s worth mentioning some of the technologies that have emerged recently that will play a role in reshaping our industry. For example:
§ Geofencing
§ Interview Logistics Automation
§ Programmatic Advertising
§ Semantic Search
§ Natural Language Processing
§ Visual Processing
§ Augmented Reality
§ Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
§ Blockchain
If many of these terms are unfamiliar to you, don’t be alarmed. They are emerging technologies. But they are beginning to have an impact in the consumer space at companies like Amazon Netflix, Facebook and Google. And whatever you see at these leading technology companies typically shows up in recruiting products within a couple years.
The threat that is enabled in this next technology transition is not about needing to learn a new skill like it has been in the last two transitions . This time, the consequences of not evolving with the technology is more severe. Each of these technologies has a major component that automates something that a human typically does today. And in some cases, it does them faster, better and cheaper. You can be sure that these technologies will improve over time and they will replace many of the manual tasks that we do today.
What this means is that jobs will be eliminated, and ways of working will change dramatically.
So, you know that it’s coming, but what can you do? The avalanche of new disciplines, programs and technologies are spreading us too thin. And when you’re spread too thin, it’s hard to work on improving your function. You’re just trying to stay afloat. But in the midst of a technology transition, you can’t afford to just stay afloat. You have to lean into the change because the challenges we’re facing now and the challenges that we are about the face in the near future will require an entirely new and different approach. I believe that different approach is to build a practice of RecOps.