OUT OF CHAOS COMES STABILITY ….eventually?

The job market is in free-fall at the moment, the last two and a half years has seen most companies doing their own recruiting, they have stopped using recruitment agencies and have been posting their own job adverts on LinkedIn and other job boards.

But that in itself, has caused lots of issues, the biggest is ghosting the applicants, creating blackholes. Companies are not geared up to even send out a simple ‘Thank you for your interest’ email. They are struggling to manage the 400 – 600 applicants and often more people that applied for just one job role they post on the job boards.

They sure don’t have the resources to screen all those CV’s they get sent, they simply don’t have the manpower, although many companies have hired ex-agency staff to help them. Many companies have increased their ‘Talent Acquisition Teams’ fivefold. Others are relying of technology to do the work, using ATS Systems or AI engines to do the screening for them, asking them to create a ‘short-list’ of potential candidates for the hiring managers to review and speak with.

But this technology is still in its infancy and gets it wrong a lot of the time, missing the best people who applied. It’s also not particularly ‘diverse friendly’ and relies on the person asking for the criteria for the shortlist of candidates based on a specific skillset, experience or key words and occurrences used in a CV or Resume. It’s a bit like pinning a tail on the donkey while wearing a blindfold.

The idea behind it is to save time and effort but like many things in life if it’s not done right then it might as well not have been done in the first place. If the answer is wrong, then it’s wrong. The other thing is ‘Human Resource’ without humans is shaky at best. I have always been an advocate of ‘If you hire on skills and experience alone, you will fire on behaviour. So, when you hire make sure you hire on skills, experience and behaviour’. This has always been a mantra of mine, and I have tried to get clients to adopt it as well.

Earlier this year I had a lot of clients who had been doing their own recruiting, many said this or something similar, “we hired a bunch of people last year, but they were all mis-hires or bad hires. They either left after 3 or 6 months, or we had to get rid of them after that.”? The cost of doing that or something similar, not just in effort and wasted salaries, redundancy for some and the sheer impact on the business and the teams that they joined was immense, far greater than if they had used a professional recruitment partner and paid agency fees. But when the accountants don’t give a budget for that hiring managers have to try something different even if it’s wrong and cost far more, so no blame here other that on the accountants for being cheap. Or you might say it’s just the way the budgets are handled and it’s the difference between OpEx and CapEx.

LinkedIn has just launched their first ‘Hiring Assistant’ it’s an AI powered product using natural language processing and large language models (LLMs) and it’s something that can be taught by each hiring assistant that uses it. It will learn to get better and adapt to the nuances that each hiring assistant has and teaches it, emulating the criteria that these people have. When they have launched this is just as interesting as the product itself. They are putting control and power into the hand of the clients and cutting out the recruitment agencies, we all knew it would eventually happen.

?LinkedIn has been playing around with AI for years but has brough very little to market. Yes, they keep changing the algorithm to the annoyance of every marketing professional, but they have stayed with the base products that Microsoft bought when they acquired LinkedIn back in June 2016 ($26 billion) and have not changed things significantly, until now. Is this the start of the revolution and the chaos where Microsoft (LinkedIn) acquires the whole of the recruiting and hiring market??

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AI has a place, and no one is going to stop it now, no one can deny that it can do things quicker, better and cheaper than humans and it can take away the boring, and repetitive elements. But in any process especially recruitment, hiring people and Human Resources we must not lose out on the human elements and the behavioural elements.? Do you know, like and trust the person you are hiring or is it just the skills & experience that you want to hire and use?

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We are seeing a new era emerge, it will be chaos but eventually we will have stability and a new norm.? This could well be LinkedIn’s play for taking the market, moving from stealth mode (that's been happening) to domination and control of the whole recruitment market. ??I just hope the final decision to hire, is left with a human.

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