Great recruiters use this advanced technology to find talent

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates continuing its fight against inflation. The markets expected the benchmark rate to increase. So, what is the Fed concerned about? It's persistent wage inflation. According to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, the US labor market is short, almost 4 million people, attributable primarily to people who left the labor market during the pandemic. Does that mean that the Fed wants to slow the economy until the demand for workers matches the labor supply? I hope not. But I'm no economist.

According to Gallup,?McKinsey,?Korn Ferry,?Manpower,?and the?Brookings Institute, the tight?labor market is a feature of today's US economy. Korn Ferry predicts a tight labor market globally for the next ten years. If the labor market will be tight for the foreseeable future, how do companies find and hire the talent they need to achieve their growth objectives?

Several weeks ago, I sent a message to?Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist, to better understand what's happening in the labor market.

Aaron is a senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and a former associate professor at the University of Minnesota - Carlson School of Management, where he focused on work and organizations.?He's also served as a Senior Economist on The White House Council of Economic Advisors.

He explained to me that the labor market is a complex matching problem.

When you go to buy gas, it's a simple match.

Consumer: Do you have gas?

Producer: Yes, I have gas. Do you have money?

Consumer: Yes.

It's an easy match.

When hiring a new teammate for your organization that's a complex match.

Both the candidate and the organization care very deeply about the match. There are many variables that each person considers. The only more complicated match might be the search for a long-term romantic partner.

Today, many companies digitize the hiring process by using applicant tracking systems (ATS) to help them collect and sort candidate resumes. This is done to save time and money.

According to Jobscan, here's how an applicant tracking system works.

1. A job requisition enters the ATS. This requisition includes information about the position, such as the job title, desired skills, and required experience.
2. The ATS then uses this information to create a profile for the ideal candidate.
3. As applicants submit their resumes, the ATS parses, sorts, and ranks them based on how well they match the profile.
4. Hiring managers then quickly identify the most qualified candidates and move them forward in the hiring process.?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the gaps presented by this process. The ATS is only as good as the documents it uses to match the job and the candidate - the job requisition and the resume. Experienced recruiters are aware of these problems. They put little faith in the ATS and other automation tools. They use the ATS to include candidates because of the failures inherent in the matching process. Less experienced recruiters tend to rely on the ATS to exclude candidates. ?

Remember, the labor market is a complex match. Both the candidate and the employer care deeply about the match. The applicant tracking system is limited to matching keywords pulled from the job requisition to words in the resume. Job descriptions and resumes are notoriously ill-suited to communicate what matters most in the candidate search.

Over the last few months, I interviewed several experienced recruiters to understand this challenge better, watching as they did their work. Experienced recruiters use industry, organizational and technical knowledge to decipher resumes making inferences about their work experience based on their understanding of their previous employers. They read LinkedIn profiles to learn an applicant's story. Did they grow in their previous roles? Did they overcome adversity? Do they thrive in a fast-paced environment? Do they work well in teams? Are they a leader? ??

Automation is very good at making technical matches. It can include job titles and facts. But it does not make inferences or ask questions. Savvy applicants use job descriptions for gaming the ATS. The applicant tracking system includes their resume because the applicant identifies the keywords in the job description and includes them on their resume. Consequently, whether a candidate knows how to craft a resume to beat the ATS becomes a job requirement.

The process reminds me of a scene in Coming to America. Eddie Murphy's character, Prince Akeem, is meeting the woman his parents, the King and Queen, arranged for him to marry for the first time. Prince Akeem questions his queen-to-be, Imani Izzi, "what do you like?" She responds, "whatever you like." For obvious reasons, Prince Akeem decides that Imani Izzi is not the best match. There is no genuine connection. She responds to Prince Akeem, telling him only what she thinks he wants to hear. She wants the job and is prepared to do whatever Prince Akeem asks her to do, including one of the movie's most iconic scenes where Imani Izzi barks like a dog while hopping on one foot.

Experienced recruiters use the most advanced technology to find a good match. It's the conversation. Conversations are essential for making complex decisions. Skill and experience are only some of the requirements for a job. Even if they were the only requirements, there are many shades of gray regarding skills and experience only revealed by conversations. But more importantly, today, collaboration and adaptability are mission-critical. How many job descriptions are effectively written to uncover soft skills as requirements?

Hiring is a complex decision. By talking to candidates, experienced recruiters pull relevant information, make inferences, and uncover insights about the candidate that the applicant tracking systems are incapable of finding. How many candidates never make it to a conversation because the ATS excludes them from the pool based on an ideal profile created by an ill-conceived job requisition or simply an old one??