12/10/2017
Why are recruiters fearing the future?
Talent is scarce nowadays and no company can afford to lose out on talent wanting to work for them.
Still recruiters have a “poste and pray” attitude. Post an advertisement in a magazine or website you think you’re target audience is interested in, get a premium membership on LinkedIn and look for candidates there while letting your network know you’re hiring and then … wait for letters and resumés to come in. Looking on your “working at … site” to see if candidates have uploaded their CV’s over there and after closing date print the CV’s out and read them (if you have a lot them) diagonally.
After a month of applying for a job a candidate gets an invitation to come over for an interview or receives a letter that the company has found a candidate suiting better for the job and wishes him all the best in future applications.
A sure way of damaging the company’s reputation for future candidates.
Or you can modernize the process by using gaming, videos and simulations. After applying for a job, a candidate immediately gets an invitation to participate in a game. He gets an insight what the company is about and what is requested in the job he is applying for. Besides assessing the candidate if he’s suited for the job the candidate can see if he wants to work for the company and do the job he’s applying for.
Perhaps he will be better in a different role within the company than in the role he’s applying for now, you can suggest this in the report the candidate will get after completing the game. If there isn’t a job within your company you can give him career advise bases on the assessment done in the game, thus making sure, though the candidate didn’t get the job, he still has a positive image of the company.
Gaming as an initial step in your recruitment process will increase the way candidates perceive your company, speed up the process, makes it better and cheaper. It can also identify candidates that perhaps don’t have the background you’ve specified, the “proper” schooling or the experience you want, but can excel in the role you’re looking for. Candidates that can perform exceedingly well in the job and would have never been invited with recruiters stuck in old ways, you can identify them by gaming and simulations of a workday. As an employer you can’t afford to let talent go to waste and with gaming you can cast a wider net over the population than you can by using the old way of reading every letter and CV.
As a company you can make due with less recruiters thus saving on your recruitment costs or you can have your recruiters do more inspiring work than reading letters and CV’s all day. Work on your employee brand, think how recruitment links with the strategy of the organisation, how recruitment can play a role in changing the company culture et cetera.
It is up to recruiters to show the added value of their department for the rest of the company or else their role will be marginalized within the near future.
Gaming and simulations is not a threat for their jobs, it’s a way to make their jobs more meaningful and interesting. The boring part of their jobs becomes obsolete, no need to read hundreds of letters. Speak with interesting people and have a role in the way the company will look like in the (near) future.
But still recruiters see the new developments as a method of losing their jobs. Computer algorithms can do a better job identifying candidates, predict who will do good in a job and who won’t, see when candidates are lying in an interview and many other things, but making a real connection with a candidate, make them feel welcome and experiencing the company culture is still a human thing. The role of recruiters should be in this and not fight the new techniques but look how these can support her in doing a better job.
Is discussing with recruiters about using modern techniques like talking to a turkey what we’ll have for Christmas dinner? Sometimes it looks this way, but recruiters who can look over the boundaries understand that they can’t stop the future and that they can act now to make their jobs more interesting in the near future.
