The Pervasive Post and Pray Pathology

The corruption of our thinking began with learning things that we are unwilling to unlearn. Beginning with inventing the wheel and discovering fire, we eventually came to worship better technological advances. Often we found that automation alone was not the answer, but we failed to understand why.

Nobody who is a recruiter today would consider spending time by only placing ads in a newspaper and then watching the daily mail – or a fax machine – for paper copies of resumes. The savvy job seeker of yesteryear subscribed to multiple print publications, spread out those want ads on the kitchen table, circled the best ones with a yellow highlighter, stuffed envelopes with preprinted resumes along with a stock cover letter, and then kissed it goodbye by licking and sticking stamps. Archaic? Yes, but it did work. Jobs were filled and people were hired. Then along came that infamous automation and we became our own worst enemy.

We do have it much better today. Recruiters scoff at old school practices and pride themselves on being smarter than their predecessors because they have now learned to use technology to ply their trade. Young job seekers brag about growing up with computers and a whole generation of know-it-all, know nothings pollute the job search conversation. What’s wrong with this picture? We have changed the medium but not the underlying logic. We evolved past job board infatuation and on to posting jobs on social media, but for the most part we are still passively advertising and not engaging. As it became increasingly easy to apply for a job by clicking a hyperlink we have trained the new technorati generation to click without reading and then hoping to hit the job lottery. Back away for a minute. Looking down on this picture from space, nothing changed except for the speed and volume of posting and praying. We are unthinkingly doing the same thing we have always done; only now we can now make mistakes faster and more often.

If there is such a thing as evolution of thought, the new paradigm that discards everything we know and builds something unique is long overdue. Blow it all up and start over! There have been many missed opportunities. LinkedIn could have been the place where hirers and hirees could engage in a dialog for a better solution. Instead most recruiters saw it as just another job board and LinkedIn has complied by giving them just what they wanted… not what they needed. Ask a job seeker where they look for jobs and most often it sounds like using the internet to replace that kitchen table/highlighter drill. Nothing has changed. Nobody sees the similarities of today’s methodology to the old ways, but everybody complains about how broken the process has become. It was always broken!

There are signs that people are searching for that better way of doing it. Several companies are rolling out job-to-candidate matching services following the online dating model. So far most of them fall short because it is a software programmer’s concept using the less expensive word matching model rather than any hint of the more expensive true artificial intelligence. Since money rules all, we trade efficiency and time for glitzy dumb systems that repeat the past. They have automated the buzz word bingo and eliminated the human element. It is sold to companies wanting to save a buck and job seekers wanting magic. The biggest flaw is the same as the dating models; it doesn’t work unless people are talking to each other. Ironically, the same people who are complaining that computers are narrowing their chances of a job through an applicant tracking system are hoping that a computer will find that perfect match painlessly and without any effort on their part.

The Zappos story is another unique attempt at changing the paradigm. There are no job postings… period! Well how about that! One way to eliminate the recruiting black hole is to eliminate the one-way communications that it elicits. By promoting conversations between Zappos Ambassadors and Zappos Insiders a true dialog can be established with the end result of everybody being happy. How do job seekers get to be an Insider? By applying online. Oops! This is a major step toward fixing that broken system and it will be interesting to watch this culture evolve and mature. It will no doubt be improved with experience and is bound to be copied by many… rightly or wrongly.

The real answer to the problem is out there somewhere and one thing is clear: The best solution will always be one that does not disrespect the value of a person on either side of the interview table. It will not be solved by technology replacing humans, but by humans using technological tools to reach their goals more efficiently. The best solution will NOT be to repeat what we do today in a different format. We need to learn to unlearn things that we think we know.

Image Copyright: Brad Calkins / 123RF Stock Photo

Original post by Tom Bolt on 7/28/2014 at http://leute.com/

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Comment by Daniel Fogel on July 29, 2015 at 11:22am: Thanks for posting Tom! It was an interesting read. So where do you think the drive for disruption will come from? More from the candidate side of the equation or from the employer side?

Comment by Tom Bolt on July 29, 2015 at 12:53pm: Thanks, Dan. The candidate side of the equation will whine about their lot and complain that they are only treated as a number, but they have no real clout to fix things. Recruiting managers, agency leaders, and corporate HR can do something, but it will take C-suite buy-in and commitment to spend the money required. My crystal ball says it will most likely come from the employer side, but we need a progressive mindset or we are stuck in the past.

Those of us with one foot mired in the past and the other on shaky technology have to stop thinking that we can replace people in the recruitment process to save a few bucks.

Comment by Katrina Kibben on July 30, 2015 at 10:10am: Love the part about not repeating what we do in a different format but taking completely different strategies. You hit the nail on the head - half of the poor use of tech today is coming from people trying to take the same strategy on completely different platforms - see all the people who simply post job ads on Twitter instead of engaging with people. They took that strategy from the e-mail job blasts and now, they are exactly where they started.

Comment by Tom Bolt on July 30, 2015 at 11:19am: Katrina gives us a great example! I'm wondering how many companies are lured into buying LinkedIn Recruiter accounts and never use them to dialog with potential candidates or use it for sourcing. It is the same post and pray mentality your father grew up with. If you want that degree of simplicity, give up and go back to a job board. You won't have to deal with people there, only resumes.

Comment by Nicholas Meyler on July 31, 2015 at 12:22am: I have a Twitter account with 2600 followers and I regularly post ads on it -- not once have I found a real candidate for any position through them, or through GooglePlus, where I have almost 100,000 views. Direct contact works much better. Email can be a fantastic medium to use, especially when many companies essentially no longer permit phone calls to workers. Automated phone-mail systems with no operator and executives whose names are known but don't happen to be on the automated directory when you carefully spell them out.

Comment by Katrina Kibben on July 31, 2015 at 11:03am: At some point, I would be willing to bet money that just won't be the case. The way we communicate has to change.

I mean, come on. This entire business used to happen with the USPS and fax...

Comment by Skip Graham on August 3, 2015 at 4:24pm: Here's a thought... move completely away from the experience-matching model. I don't think the current (big) shortcomings in recruitment are related to platforms, technologies, search algorithms, nor the amount of social reach or influence a recruiter has. Fundamentally, a big problem is that companies poorly define jobs. Offenders usally write descriptions of a person they are looking for and dispense a recruiter to go a find only the people who fit into that box (missing upwards of 90% of a total candidate market that would never even show on the radar). Adler has written extensively about this but it's not an entirely new concept. Simply put, companies need to change the optic through which they look at talent. Rather than only putting candidates in the top of the funnel who meet some convoluted experience profile, job descriptions should actually represent what a person has to do to be successful in the job. Managers are so intently focused on what a person has to have (experience) that they end up missing the forest for the trees when people who can do the job+ show up.

I've never met a hiring manager who didn't get this concept after a reasonable explanation. To Tom's point, the machine is old and large, and the current mentality is pervasive on all sides. There's not much newthink going into the old process. Rather than talking about fundamental change, we're teased into thinking we can continually improve a bad process by applying more technology and deeper social network connectivity.

Companies will never change the old way of doing things wholesale. My mission is to win over one manager, one executive, one leader at a time and make it stick through results. If we don't adjust the way we think about what talent looks like, recruiters will continue to fight over the same 10% of the market that gets filtered into the funnel through faulty Boolean match criteria and artificial intelligence algorithms. Funny thing is, their mostly doing exactly what they've been directed to do.

Just a thought.

Comment by Daniel Fogel on August 3, 2015 at 4:55pm: Skip - Love the comment. A waterfall starts with a single drop. Keep changing people one person at a time.

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