By William Geldart
By William Geldart, Marketing Manager, BPS World
Widespread job losses from the pandemic have flooded an increasingly opportunity-scarce market. The subsequent blowback on recruiters and heightened focus on their soft skills has uncovered a delicate balancing act between the role of technology and human contact in the hiring process.
The power dynamic in recruitment has shifted. Just last year, we were being warned of a global candidate shortage of 85 million people by 2030. Those of us in recruitment marketing were being pushed to find new ways to attract and maintain the attention of a dwindling talent pool. And then 2020 hit.
Like many others, the recruitment industry was upended by the pandemic. Suddenly the market was highly competitive, with countless talented candidates going after limited job postings. This shone an unfavorable light on recruiters who have been unwilling or unable to manage this volume of people. Disgruntled candidates have taken to social media to criticize recruiters and hiring managers for inconsistent communication and, at times, even “ghosting”, where they don’t hear from a recruiter ever again.
These complaints center on a lack of humanity and empathy shown by those in recruitment for people whose lives have been uprooted by the events of this year.
Unfortunately, the truth is not so simple. In fact, it’s the “human” aspect of recruitment that’s responsible for many of their criticisms.
It’s a common but understandable misconception that an optimal hiring journey should involve a high number of human interactions.
This method is fundamentally unsustainable when your number of candidates in the funnel reaches a certain level. It’s just not possible to give every single one of them a high level of direct, human attention. According to a recent LinkedIn survey, nearly 46% of hiring professionals said the outbreak has negatively affected the candidate experience at their company.
Operations aside, it’s also incredibly problematic to have every stage of a hiring process conducted by a single individual. Sadly, human empathy and bias go hand-in-hand.
Let’s say 300 people apply for a role. Based on technical skills and experience alone, they’re narrowed down to five people, all of whom would be great for the role. The fate of those five people is then in the laps of the gods. It’s all down to the hiring manager’s personal preferences and transient moods, whether they’re aware of that or not.
Someone could lose out on a role because the recruiter or hiring manager was feeling a bit tired during the interview. Or maybe another candidate reminded them of someone they knew. Or maybe someone else just seemed like they needed to catch a break.
Human empathy is inherently biased. How we give and withhold it is formed by our own experiences and prejudices. It’s why many in recruitment have tried to move away from filling roles with people who match company culture, which encourages homogeneity.
“We talk a lot about culture add rather than ‘fitting in’,” says Sandi Lurie, Senior Director of Global Recruiting at Optimizely. “‘Fitting in’ doesn’t create a diverse workforce.”
While it’s understandable that people want to be given personal attention in the hiring process, we need to be aware of the limitations of human involvement and fill those gaps with technology.
Recruitment doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to adopting technology at the same pace as other industries. However, when given the chance, it can help pick up the slack where human output fails and even confront our own biases.
The fundamental demand people are placing on recruiters right now is clarity. They want to know which stage their application is at, when they’ll next hear an update, whether they’ll need to go back to an office environment, if their interview is going to be COVID-secure, etc. Addressing this is paramount.
As we’ve established, this can’t be done manually at any great scale. More and more recruitment agencies have adopted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and talent pipelining software as a solution to this. It’s commonly used by marketing teams as it allows you to store huge numbers of contacts and automate messaging based on certain triggers. Pre-written automated messages might not sound particularly empathetic, but it means consistent touchpoints for every candidate so no one is ignored. And when you have access to vast amounts of data and the ability to segment, you can produce messaging that still sounds ‘human'. That’s much more than many are seeing now.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also growing in popularity.
One technique that’s been prevalent for a while now is psychometric testing which produces AI-generated assessments of a candidate’s suitability. This helps identify the best candidates for the role based on their personality profile and/or skillsets rather than demographic data subject to unconscious bias. Increasingly sophisticated gamification software is also becoming more widely-used, as well as other skills-related tools that remove bias and focus solely on the individual’s suitability for a role.
Technology can also be used to improve your capacity to be empathetic over time. At BPS World, we use Net Promoter Score®.
NPS measures a customer’s overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend us, which informs our own people strategy, and understanding of the experience we offer. We’ll ask candidates and hiring managers to rate us at every stage of the customer journey so we can isolate any problem areas.
This is measuring empathy as data that we can then analyze to improve not just one person’s experience with us, but every subsequent candidate’s as well.
By letting these technologies do the heavy lifting with labor-intensive tasks, recruiters are freed up to offer that human connection for important late-stage candidates when appropriate.
It’s difficult to predict where technology might take recruitment in the future. Some say we’ll see face-scanning software that reads your emotional state and analyzes whether you’re telling the truth or not. Others think that sounds more like an episode of Black Mirror. But when we first started doing video interviews years ago, people labeled that as sci-fi as well.
What’s clear is that recruitment still has a long way to go. The backlash against our industry is proof that we’ve not kept pace with technology. When the job market changed essentially overnight, many lacked the agility to offer an empathetic experience to such a large volume of people.
While technology alone does not eliminate bias (AI is as biased as its creators after all) or completely replace compassion, it can be used alongside human labor to offer an experience that gives candidates the dignity and fair treatment they expect and deserve. The jury’s still out on whether this lesson will stick after the pandemic, but with projections of high unemployment to last for years, I don’t see there being much of a choice. ◆
BPS World is a global recruitment partner behind hundreds of thousands of unique and life-changing recruitment experiences across the globe