If recruitment was invented today this is how it would work.

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’.

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on August 1, 2012 at 9:48am: I recruited a web designer last year so I feel your pain but this sounds a little Orwellian....

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 1, 2012 at 11:55am: Why not take it a step further. Said list of people qualified and interested goes directly to the hiring manager. Hiring manager looks at the top three candidates, pushes a button that sends a list of ten questions to the top three ranked candidates, they answer, the machine ranks their answers by a priority value set by the hiring manager. Hiring manager looks at the top ranked candidate pushes a button. The candidate gets a message on their smart phone that says. "Offer is X, start date is y, accept or decline". Candidate clicks "yes" for accept. Deal done. No need for internal recruiters or HR or interviews.

Companies would have to fill out profiles showing salary ranges for all jobs, benefits and full disclosure of all company information which if misrepresented would result in the same penalties under law required of individuals.

Performance reviews, grievances, benefits administration would all be done via the database thus eliminating HR. terminations would automatically be generated along with eligibility for unemployment or not so a whole cadre of gov. Employees would be eliminated. Because terminations are computer generated with notices sent to employees smart phone there would be no grounds for discrimination complaints so the eeoc would be eliminated along with all the other alphabet gov. Agencies. Without all those lots of lawyers would be eliminated.
Since job requirements and performance would be automatically done by the machine there would be no need for managers so all management positions would be eliminated.

In the final analysis we would have the wizard of oz behind a computer with a smart phone.
Problem solved. Everybody who lies about anything is automatically sent to jail and I can go back to bed.

I'm for it Nick.

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on August 1, 2012 at 12:49pm: I like it Sandra! I hope part of this worldwide process includes subsidizing said smartphones... as all the people rendered unemployed (like me!) will no longer be able to afford them. :)

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 1, 2012 at 2:11pm: And the last step. Since everybody will be in jail for lying, or eliminated nobody will need a smartphone. I can quit worrying about mine being charged and sleep all day.

When does the revolution start, wake me up when it's over. Maybe I can find some human who needs a job and I can walk them over to introduce them to another human who needs an employee. I think I am gonna like this recruiting stuff.

Comment by Peter Ceccarelli on August 1, 2012 at 3:57pm: 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.

Really! You need to move to Syria for anything like this to ever happen. Pull yourself back into reality dude!

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on August 1, 2012 at 5:03pm: Who's going to be in charge of this thing? So it's tied to taxes... in the US sounds like something the IRS would enforce (and they never screw ANYTHING up). But then that's only stateside. What about the rest of the world? Ok, guess we have to put the UN in charge (what could possibly go wrong). Now who's funding it? Tax dollars from the 4 billion workers. But I don't pay taxes in Europe, just the US. Is my tax bill going up? What if I want to opt out of being gainfully employed? Will there be a penalty? This is assuming I don't get thrown in jail for getting an employment date wrong... man this seems a lot harder than interviewing, and I had 10 of them yesterday.

I'm with Sandra. Wake me when the revolution is over and we'll start a black market recruiting firm. :)

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 2, 2012 at 1:20am: Amy has hit upon the solution to the whole recruiting problem. We wait until the revolution is over. We take all the underground non registered, non visible candidates and voila, we control the passive candidate market. There will be no need for anymore seminars on recruiting passive candidates so we just eliminated another whole group of peasants.

We will then be known as black market body snatchers of course because all recruiters internal and external have been eliminated. We won't have to talk to HR or a line manager because they have been eliminated also. Nobody left but the CEO. Fees? Oh yeah , buddy rat. Amy can haul profiles in a convertible with her long red locks blowing in the wind and i will do the accounting. No wait, accounting will eliminated because we are black market so it's cash only. It will be like a passive candidate ice cream truck. Sell what you can each day, put the rest on ice until tomorrow split the cash and we'll be instantly "mobile". "Mobile at it's finest."

Comment by Sandra McCartt on August 2, 2012 at 1:37am: I don't think it's crazy Nick, i think it's just cooler than owl poop. Here's the deal you start it and you are going to need some folks to build that database and some to administer it and some to curate it and then you are going to need an enforcement division to check on everybody, then you are going to need some legal staff to file on the ones who don't register or who lie, then you are going to need some peeps to keep up with all those legal files and of course there will be payroll for all those employees and accounting and HR. Have i got a deal for you. I know a couple of recruiters who know where there are a lot of passive candidates. How much money ya got honey?