Much like well worn clichés, all good things must, in fact, come to an end. The same, inarguably, applies to the white hot jobs market that just recorded the lowest number of unemployment claims and most new jobs created since 1969; somehow, every month, this reliable economic indicator keeps going up, defying both gravity and conventional wisdom.
Of course, this is made even more impressive given that a century ago, when we last experienced this sort of labor market, unions still wielded the power of collective bargaining, HR was called “personnel,” and the concept of a mass layoff was as unknown as the once standard, employer funded lifetime pension are to workers today.
Recruiting didn’t exist, and obviously neither did the internet – meaning anyone looking for a job most likely involved going directly to their network (some things never change), literally walking the streets looking for “now hiring signs” or, for those hard to fill roles, manually writing out both cover letters (remember those?) and resumes one by one, on a typewriter.
What We Forget About Applicant Tracking Systems and Job Boards.
And as bad as most legacy ATS providers are, even applying on Taleo Business Edition objectively beats having to do that. And that’s before adding a stamp, manually writing out the employers’ mailing address for whatever position happened to be listed in their local classifieds (job boards have always been a thing – they’ve just moved from print to the internet, like everything else) and going to the post office to send the damned thing off via certified mail.
Of course, this meant anyone going through this sort of effort was, ostensibly, a qualified candidate (or some kind of crazy), and there were few applicants for each position – good news for the applicants, too, who probably went broke having to buy all those stamps and typewriter ribbons and stuff.
This phenomenon existed through the age of the fax machine, but quickly, recruiting went online (earlier than almost any other industry, the first and only time this was true) and Monster.com somehow became one of the top 25 most visited websites in the world (no joke – and an S&P component stock, which is as funny now as is the fact the ubiquitous Monster is named Trump).
This all started due to a rip off of Annie Hall that Monster aired during the Super Bowl (above), and before cable was really a thing and our phones were hooked to the damned wall (unless you were Zach Morris, and that was somehow worse). This cost Monster, at the time a Boston based startup that hadn’t really started up, like half of what the company was then valued.
This was, even in retrospect, kind of a poor business decision, given that if the commercial played as well as Danica Patrick in those cringy Go Daddy spots. A huge gamble that probably pissed off investors, although likely the money guys had no idea that marketing was putting it all on black, or things might be quite different today.
But you know what, it paid off. Monster’s servers, in those sunny times before the Cloud consumed everything, crashed due to the onslaught of traffic that happened as a result of 1 in 3 adult Americans with nothing to do but watch a football game on broadcast TV suddenly discovered looking for a job was as easy as going to the same machine they previously had only used to play Minesweeper and watch Toasters flying around a dark screen on an infinite loop.
This sounds weird, but that moment is arguably the recruiting profession’s big bang, an inciting incident where nothingness has continued, irrevocably, to continue to expand until it ultimately explodes. A poor marketing decision by a job board created an entire profession and multi-billion-dollar global industry.
Easy to forget your roots, but don’t hate on job boards.
Recruiting exists only because they do, you know.
The Candidate Black Hole Is A Myth.
This is why the concept of the black hole, in which resumes are never read, because there are just too many – purely an invention of the internet, one of those tired, trite memes like those dancing hamsters, Justin Bieber, Pepe the Frog or social recruiting, exists in the first place.
But it’s erroneous to blame talent technology for exacerbating the job search or recruiter experience. If anything, it’s made it better. I know it’s easy to take the basic TA tech stack for granted, and focus on the features and functionalities we don’t have. But it could be a whole lot worse.
Without the web, we’d still be sitting by the fax, hoping someone responded to our quarter inch classified – and with it, we sit around, hoping someone responded to our quarter inch classified, which today we call display ads, and utilize mainly online advertising and networking.
Recruiting relies on pretty much the same mechanics as always, the fact that it’s much easier and more scalable today, notwithstanding.
But because we’ve made it so easy to apply – a digital resume can be resent ad infinitum, from home and for free for one of the millions of jobs suddenly open to connected candidates, as opposed to the handful of random listings that happened to be printed out in their local classifieds, was when the floodgates opened.
We now average 200 applicants a position, which is counterintuitive, considering the market conditions. The need to source, screen and select at volume or for extremely niche positions is why recruiting has become a strategic business function – consider that 40% of CIOs, execs who don’t generally have much to do with TA in general (as is evidenced by our sad state of siloed systems), consider recruiting to be their biggest business challenge in 2019. This outranks data privacy and network breaches, by the way.
And where there’s a challenge with hiring, there’s an opportunity for recruiters to step up their game – and our profession in general. Because at the end of the day, if we make hiring managers happy and fill reqs with the right talent, then we’ve done our jobs – and neither of these core competencies require any sort of technology at all.
But it sure helps.
Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense.
Automation has proven a good thing, in that it’s not only democratized recruiting information, but it’s essentially professionalized the function as well, codifying corporate recruiting as a standard business process that’s also a strategic imperative.
As much as we might not like applicant tracking systems, they’re also the reason that TA has become much more effective at making hires in house; the resume tsunami many recruiters complain about, in effect, may not be optimal for the “candidate experience,” but the digital transformation of the recruitment function has functionally led to a much more streamlined, standardized and scaleable process that not only makes recruiting easier, but looking for a job, too.
Unless, you know, you want to go back to the days of the paper resume and the printed job ad. Not that either of those really worked all that well, either.
Back in the day, the majority of the time, newspaper ads and print placements failed to fill a vacancy; this is when companies had to call in a headhunter, which sounded way cooler than “talent acquisition specialist.” In this way we’ve devolved as a profession – but headhunters lived up to their title on the quest to find a “passive candidate” and convince him to switch jobs, which was a hard sell when tenures were measured in decades.
They somehow filled roles for hard to find jobs without LinkedIn, Google, Facebook or any public listing of contact information outside of maybe the white pages or professional and alumni directories. They had to hustle hard to make a hire, and truth be told, you paid 30% gladly, because even today, employers struggle to fill a ton of open roles even though they’re basically bowling with bumpers.
These guys, however, were like Jesus in the Big Lebowski, putting it down the lane with a skill and swagger that came across as a little used car salesy. They got the job done, they got paid, and filling jobs on commission wasn’t an industry at the time, it was a weird little niche that was highly localized and highly specialized.
You didn’t fall into recruiting – you had to go find it, since it was such an esoteric and amorphous job at the time, one that was no more career path than car salesman. Recruiters have a poor reputation, and honestly, it’s been around as long as the codification of the profession, and deservedly so.
As the kids say, though, don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
The Candidate Experience Was Way Worse Without the Internet.
Getting a job went from being an intensely personal process, lots of hand holding and handshakes, to one that starts with a bot, screens through stack ranking and makes offers via emailed .pdfs.
Applying became easy, job listings and careers, essentially, became a commodity, and the mass layoffs triggered by IBM in the early 80s (the same ones selling Watson as the future of work also invented the mass layoffs and the current world of work, too), bankrupt pension plans and poorly invested 401(k)s meant that less worker loyalty, coupled with endemic disengagement, made switching jobs not only commonplace, but ubiquitous.
Retention wasn’t an issue when workers knew employers had their backs, and the social contract between employer and employee lasted a lifetime, in most cases. Alternatively, workers had a similar bond with organized labor, a union with unions, which used to be a huge part of the workforce.
Those are what we’d call “high volume” type jobs today, only before the internet, you basically couldn’t have a workforce without working with organized labor. Guess we know who won that one.
Capitalism triumphs every time, turns out. Labor relations was the staffing function of its day in the sense they were the HR contact and company point person for the unions, meaning they were responsible for bringing in enough workers to meet company demand, an impossible feat without the unions in a time before applying for a job was as easy as clicking a couple times on a mobile device. Labor was organized because recruiting wasn’t, honestly.
Unions hardly exist today, replaced, instead, by the concept that each individual person is responsible for directly negotiating for a job with a company, instead of having a collective bargaining agreement in place to make it a moot point for every union member.
Unions were so dominant that most non-professional positions required being a dues paying member, whether you liked it or not.
Now, workers compete against, not with, each other, driving down their collective wages by relying on platforms like Uber or Upwork to effectively serve as their union, instead – since they’re partners, after all, and not employees.
You can’t compete without giving up a cut of the action to the guys who own the system, as has always been true for workers.
This has turned job hunting into an equally competitive endeavor, but more individuals, and the shift from service to knowledge economy leading to more specialized roles and more siloed and professionalized functions. Job descriptions became SLAs, not simple storefront signs.
We checked boxes, and started hiring for culture fit instead of character, experience instead of potential, and for filling transient jobs instead of hiring, training, developing and essentially providing for each worker in what amounted to a two way lifetime deal.
This was the norm that existed until the World Wide Web spun its web worldwide.
It’s Not That Hard. Just Make the Hire.
I know I sound like Andy Rooney – and truth be told, I’m not that old. I’ve never known a world where looking for a job doesn’t involve the internet (I found my first on Craigslist, the most profitable job board out there even today #truestory), and even though it was LotusNotes, paperwork was always just a euphemism, not a literal reality.
Digitization isn’t a trend – we’ve been here for a really long time now, point being, I’m not like, all that old, you crazy Gen Z job seekers – get off my SecondLife lawn before I report you to the admin.
And the entire recruiting profession only exists as we know it because of what we now consider to be old school.
Job boards remain a big business and big source of hire. These living fossils, like the jobs Jurassic Park, somehow remained the #3 source for external applicants last year, as news of its death were greatly exaggerated for about as long as they’ve been in existence.
Applicant tracking systems, when they delivered on exactly what their names promised without pretense of being a CRM or marketplace or anything but a system which tracked f-ing applicants. Now, we distract ourselves with tautological talk about AI when we really should be figuring out how to become more indispensable to the business and insert ourselves more into the process, not less.
Having a system that sucks isn’t the worst thing in the world, frankly, because you have a system. Imagine having to use sticky notes, or newspaper ads, or Yahoo! HotJobs or some similarly archaic way of handling your hiring. Yeah.
It really could be worse.
Recruiting Isn’t Broken. It’s Better Than Ever.
My point is this: we exist because, well, there are a ton of candidates and the ease of application and transactional nature of work today has created a need for people whose jobs are specialized in finding people jobs, which is basically the definition of postmodernism.
You don’t need to make a business case about the importance of candidate experience. You don’t need to have the latest and greatest system, or care about the latest trend. Most of us just want to fill reqs right now. And the truth is, it’s really not all that complicated, to be honest.
The one thing, arguably, we suck at the most is stopping and appreciating that someone pays us really good money to find people whose information is almost unilaterally in a database that’s available whenever, wherever, an to whomever, which are also the qualifications for getting into this highly lucrative and highly inclusive club of miscreants and liberal arts majors.
We don’t need to be marketers, or digital marketers, or influencers.
We just have to be recruiters.
Boolean is cool, but anyone can find anything on Google, Facebook, Snap or whatever – just ask your kids.
Sourcing is something any seventh grader could do, although if anyone really admitted that then obviously, we wouldn’t get paid stupid money to play internet detective in an age of information ubiquity.
We can’t control the future of work. As talent acquisition, similarly, we don’t even have the past, since we’re only in the infancy of this even being a profession, much less a potential (profitable) career path.
We only have right now, when we’re under full employment, anyone can raise VC for even the worst TA tech ideas as long as the market involves some use case related to recruiting and TA, and we’re in the spotlight and on the front lines in the tightest job market since the 60s.
That’s not bad considering we’re all here by accident.
But we’re still here.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
