Alana Post recently wrote some biting criticism of HR technology, most specifically recruiting software. ((Since the post has been removed, I won’t go into specifics other than to say that her post was extremely interesting to me and I’ll try to hit the high points without revealing anything she may have decided to keep private.)) It brings to question how much more effective we really are utilizing recruiting software, and whether the substitution of people for technology is a good or bad thing.
Now, I’m a defender of talent acquisition and think I understand some of the trade-offs. But there is a realization that a great many good candidates will be eliminated in the initial automated screening. The idea is that the huge majority of eliminated candidates were actually not qualified for the job. The tradeoff is a great deal of recruiter time that was not spent looking at resumes for 30 seconds each. At the same time, it’s assumed that a computer can do a better job objectively evaluating the content of a resume (without the frills of paper, writing, and formatting) than a recruiter can do in said 30 seconds.
The more serious trade-off is that the recruiting software may have given some organizations too much allowance to remove people from the equation. We’ve gone to delivering automated e-mails and postcards and eliminated personal communications from 99% of our recruiting contacts at large organizations. It impacts not only the recruiting process, but also the brand that we display to the various publics. The tradeoff again is that it’s almost impossible to evaluate and disposition as many inquiries as we get without some distancing of the staff through technology.
My question to the readership is to ask if we think we have the right levels of tradeoffs, and where we think we can do better. Thoughts?
3 responses to “Does Recruiting Software Make HR More Effective?”
DD, Your too much of a gentleman to post it up, but I hate a mystery so here is the Google cache link to that post:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:SRMyoIMHZeYJ:www.alanapost.net/content/2006/12/20/how-recruitment-software-eliminates-human-resources/+alana+posts+recruiting+software&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
On the substance of the post; it obvious that automated cut systems are going to eliminate some potentially great talent.
The best systems make the most of a recruiter’s 30 seconds-no software can approach a skilled recruiter in resume reading ability, but good software can locate, display, and process candidates for skilled recruiters in ways that dont require automated cuts. If you are getting blasted with way to many responses and/or talent pool members, you are not doing something right well before the resume intake process in terms of marketing and describing your roles.
Autodidacts are sometimes the best possible additions to a team- credentialism can a real competitive disadvantage in certain businesses- esp. knowledge and symbol driven ones.
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Recruiting software are a far demand currently. thanks to the new technologies concerned within the market and considering lots of resumes within the hand it’s simply an not possible task for the hiring managers to travel into the fabric.