Why Corporate Recruiting May Be Doomed

From ERE Community | by Kevin Wheeler | Mar 10, 2010

How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able
to find and hire top-notch people faster than before? Have you invested
in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and
improve the speed to find and present qualified candidates? If not, you
are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time
catching up. The corporate recruiting world is soon to be under full
assault from the third-party and RPO world.

The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag
the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use
new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It's only
after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to
use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.

An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days
of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would
take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This
took two people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the
point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to
type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the
profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency
went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this
is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of
time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how
to use it and to adjust processes and structures.

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organizations globally were
investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that
because of those tools, productivity would soar. For anyone old enough
to remember, that did not happen, and lots of economists called this the
productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology,
computers, or software caused any major change in productivity. Then,
around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb. It
has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth
which is still greater per year than before 1970. The great lesson is
that investments in technology and process improvements pay off - but it
takes time for that to happen.

Recruiting has seen no surge in productivity, and corporate
recruiting functions may even be losing ground as the talent market
becomes more complex and employer needs change. Relative to most other
functions in an organization, HR and recruiting have made little
investment in technology and even less in process improvements. A
recruiter from 1970 would be very comfortable in most corporate
recruiting departments today except for learning to use the computer.

My concern is that recruiters have been and still are too focused on
the short term to see that investments they make today will eventually
pay off - and pay off tremendously. If you have not made the
investments, you are not only behind, but it may be impossible to catch
up. Being able to use technology requires a learning curve that early
adopters get from the beginning. Look at how hard it is for a
middle-aged person to grasp the power of social media or to fully
realize the capabilities of the iPhone compared to someone younger who
has been working with these technologies from the beginning of their
careers. Time is not our friend when it comes to adopting technology,
so early investments pay off the most.

Here are a few ideas on what kinds of investments you should be
making:

1. Invest in software that will increase your ability to
   interact with candidates. This includes all sorts of things
   from websites and highly-targeted marketing systems to candidate
   relationship management tools. Most of you are still focused on the
   zero-value-add backend systems that do nothing directly to serve your
   customers: the candidates. Applicant
   tracking systems may be convenient, but they are the equivalent of
   order entry systems for salespeople. They are not going to make you
   better at finding candidates or getting them interested in your clients.
   You will need to refine how you source candidates and try to
   reduce the number of people you need to do each step of the hiring
   cycle. The goal might be for a single person to attract, source, screen, and present a
   candidate while the administrative tools automatically track everything
   that is happening and generate the appropriate reports and paperwork.
   RPOs and agencies have been working on these things for at least a
   decade and are about to reap its benefits.


2. Invest time in thinking through how you recruit people today.
   How many steps, people, tools, and touchpoints are average? How much
   time does a recruiter spend per hire? What could be done to shave
   seconds or minutes off that? What would you have to do differently if a
   recruiter were to deal with twice as many requisitions as they do
   today? The answers to these questions can form the backbone of an
   improvement strategy that will pay back high dividends down the road.
   Several RPOs have made big strides toward integrating automated
   processing and tools into what they do. This has given them the ability
   to charge lower prices while maintaining customer loyalty. Over time,
   they will refine and improve the technology until it will offer them
   such a large time and cost-saving that very few will be able to compete
   with older and less technology-enabled methods.


3. Move on from legacy systems and old technologies.
   Even if you have not recovered your investment, hanging on to obsolete
   applicant tracking tools, old databases, and inefficient processes will
   hurt you. Anything you own or use that is more than three years old and
   has not been upgraded is a candidate for the dust bin. Most technology
   has moved into the cloud or is delivered from an ASP. No software sits
   on your own servers unless your organization is large enough to need its
   own instance of the software. Almost every kind of software is being
   delivered as an app that can be installed on your mobile devices as well
   as your computers. Social media is dominating the sourcing arena and
   search is becoming easier to do, is likely to be built into
   applications, and is more powerful than ever. Resumes are being served
   up along with compilations about the candidates that have been scraped
   together from many different sources. Candidates are delivering their
   own "social resumes" that expand the information on the usual resume.
   You need to be able to accommodate all of this easily and quickly.
   Recruiting productivity will go up - I think exponentially - very soon.
   Most of this improvement will come from third-party agencies and RPOs.
   Unfortunately, the corporate recruiting world is still mired in
   yesterday and is unable to make the investments needed to move
   productivity up and to ensure success.