We’ve been doing some recruiting recently and let’s not mince words: it’s a gigantic pain in the backside. My company is now entering a real growth situation and we’re starting to staff up and when starting the hiring process the other day it occurred to me just how backward and upside down the whole hiring malarkey is. So it got me thinking……’we’re hiring a web developer, in a perfect world, how would I like it to happen’ and this is what I came up with. 

Wouldn’t it be great if somehow everyone on the planet of working age was legally obliged to create a profile stored on some kind of gigantic database which lists everything you’ve achieved in your career to date, including the companies you’ve worked for and job titles etc. It would be a legal requirement to keep your profile up to date and accurate to ensure that when you did apply for a job, rather like testifying in a court of law, you’re vouching that this is a true and accurate record of your career history and if you lie you’re committing recruitment perjury with a criminal record to follow punishable by fines, time behind bars etc etc. That would stop the little white lies we all know exist ‘Honest I do have a computer science degree’. 

So there we are with 4 billion workers all listed on said uber database. Think Linkedin on steroids. Next challenge would be to ensure that all employers are connected to it. Well that’s not too difficult given the growing ubiquity of smartphones, they can just register and use it. The potentially tricky bit is, as ever, sorting out the data so it can be searched accurately by the recruiter. Location shouldn’t be too difficult. Job title, key word searches and current salary……all can be filtered quite easily (take note big job boards it really isn’t that difficult to create an easily searchable resume database - sort it out, I’m bored of wading through 95% of irrelevant profiles). Sure it wouldn’t be perfect but data analysis is getting better each year so it wouldn’t take long for the system to learn to be incredibly accurate when retrieving profiles. 

Now here comes the clever bit. When hiring the other day I thought to myself, ok I’ve added in the job to our free applicant tracking system now ideally what I’d like it to do is immediately produce a list of matching candidates in descending order of suitability, not just from Linkedin or Monster’s resume pile, no I want it to search the super database in the sky that holds every profile of every person of working age on the planet. In fact I’m so darn lazy I don’t even want to have to type in a search string…….I just want ‘the system’ to do it for me. So it reads the job title, salary, location, key words extracting all the key data from everyone’s profile and then automatically produces the list for me by best match. But I don’t want to have to go and contact them either, that would require work. I want said system to do it for me, not with anything so crude as an email…..’we’re hiring a web developer etc’, no I’m talking about a system which is preintegrated into everyone’s smartphone as an ‘Interesting jobs app’ or the same on your desktop via a browser based app built into Chrome, IE, Firefox etc. That way the moment I start to hire a role ‘the system’ automatically works out who the best people from the database of every single employee on the planet, automatically alerts them to the vacancy via our cool new global job alerts app and allows them to express an interest in the role via a 1 click button. We can’t have the job seeker doing anything so tiresome as actually submitting a resume. Perish the thought. No, what is best for the truly lazy jobseeker (read passive job seeker) is just 1 button which when pressed highlights their profile to me on my list of possible matches as someone who’d like to be considered for the role.  Then comes the time consuming bit……….I’ve actually got to interview them.

Ok, ok….I can hear all the liberals out there foaming at the mouth…..’what an invasion of privacy’  ’ I don’t want my career history made public’. Well there are ways around that. Once you become a registered company or organisation/charity etc, you get a password to access the system and that’s restricted to just selected people within each organisation so the general public can’t view them at will. You could also remove the person’s name, just leaving their career history as an added level of privacy.

Think about it, everyone who works has to submit a tax return of some kind. Why not simply add on, as a legal requirement, that they must also fill in their career profile online at this system. A basic career history can be put together in 5 minutes so it’s not exactly a great hassle and each time you leave a job and go elsewhere it’s your responsibility to keep it updated and accurate.

Yeah, I know……what about the people who are retiring, working part time, maternity leave, just don’t want to work etc. There are probably a hundred quibbles you could produce but I don’t think the broad idea is that daft. Think about how incredible it would be if you just added a job into this system and it automatically searches every single possible person who could do the job and alerts them to your vacancy?

Now job boards, staffing agencies etc would be up in arms as they’d be out of business within days as every job is sourced directly so they’d fight tooth and nail to stop it and I can’t see it being much of a vote winner (other than the clique of dedicated in house recruiters) so there wouldn’t be much in it for a politician to add it to the statute book but you never know. As someone once said………’the ones who are craziest enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do’.