Over the past 10 years there has been a steady stream of SAAS companies tackling the customers need to serve themselves rather than use a recruitment agency.
The question is what is self serve? and can they co-exist with traditional recruitment agencies?
- Tech platforms that customers (talent acquisition teams) log into and can search a database of available candidates
- Platforms allow combination of sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing, assessments, contracting and movement of candidate to major applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Why does self serve exist?
- Perception that recruitment fees are too high. Why pay 15% for one role when you can pay equivalent and get access to feed yourself with candidates for a year!
- Some Talent Acquisition (TA's) peeps want to build their own team, rather than rely on others and having sourcing tech helps them do this.
- Management teams like having control of the process and not outsourcing such a key function to a 3rd party.
- LinkedIn - Recruiter product has major reach but is super limited in functionality.?
- hackajob - focussed on technology roles
- Haystack - focussed on technology roles
- cord - Broad set of candidates (tech, product)
- Otta.com - Generalist but great user experience
Where are the constraints with self serve?
- It’s only as good as the person using it - TA’s are usually not as strong at finding top talent as specialist recruiters and serve a more generalist function.
- None of the main players specialise in Product Management
- Isn’t super initiative as a user journey although OTTA is pretty snazzy
- Need separate systems for sourcing, onboarding and training, unless you go for a general ATS like hired.com but again not specialised.
Is AI the self serve silver bullet or the problem?
- Optimising sourcing is a key area where machine learning can have huge advantage. Returning results quicker and more accurately is a key benefit AI can bring.
- Semi supervised ML can be used to show candidates who are similar to superstar PM who you already have in the team
- Unsupervised ML can be used to filter out bad eggs if providing cultural values upfront
- AI confuses people and still has to be programmed by a hooman so is still in itself biased.
Is self service here to stay?
- 100% yes...
- Generation X and Z and Y are increasingly becoming the hiring managers and they are used to dating (bumble), chatting (WhatsApp) and banking (starling) through an app which is easy to use and accessible. Hiring is the next frontier.
Can white glove play alongside self serve?
- 100% yes..
- Where there is a need for specialist sector knowledge in the recruitment process then a TA isn’t going to have that so specialised agencies will survive.
- Self serve is also really good at lower to mid roles but less great at finding you the next superstar product leader. Executive placement is an area that white glove agency will continue to thrive.
- Generational game: There is also people not in Gen X, Z and Y that grew up speaking to each other face to face, phoning each other and quite frankly won’t move away from the agency model. Getting them to log into a UX and view profiles rather than receiving PDF profiles on an email from a recruiter is like me trying to get my mother to use internet banking.
