People matter in recruitment, not just process.
You say that “people are your greatest asset”, and you spend lots of time and money building your ‘Employer Brand', and then you go and do this...
Recently a friend applied for a mid-level management role at a leading retail brand. She was very excited at the opportunity as she held the brand in high regard and felt her experience was well suited to the advertised role. Sometime after submitting her application online she received an email inviting her to a ‘video interview’. In this age of social distancing, she didn’t think that was unusual, so she excitedly confirmed her time.
When joining the interview, she found that it was a ‘bot driven’ interview, with no human involvement, nor any human introduction or explanation of the process. After answering the canned questions asked by the bot, the interview ended with no further explanation, other than we will get back to you. Eventually she received an email advising she hadn’t been successful, again with no further explanation, feedback, or transparency, leaving her to wonder if any humans ever actually viewed her interview or “did some bullshit AI process determine my suitability” (her words). To this day she has been unable to find out but we suspect the latter.
Following this “god-awful” (again her words) experience she crossed the company off her ‘Employer of Choice’ list and spent the next several weeks sharing what a cold and insensitive culture they must have to subject potential employees to that process. And if she expressed this level of dissatisfaction, you can bet many others did as well. Clearly not what the firm was hoping for from their “Employer Branding” investments.
In two of my recent blogs I have lamented the outdated process of traditional recruitment where, for the last 200 years, we advertise ‘wordy free form’ Position Descriptions and then battle our way through mountains of equally ‘wordy free form’ CVs, using nothing more than keyword matching and gut feel to come up with a short list of candidates.
This is a ‘god-awful’ experience for all parties because;
For the Hiring Manager, crafting Position Descriptions is rarely a core skill and often an infrequent undertaking, making it time consuming yet still resulting in ambiguous requirements.
For the Candidate, applying for jobs has always been a ‘hit and hope’ exercise, regardless of how suited you think you are for a role, typically compounded by an utter lack of transparency and opportunity for constructive two way feedback.
And for the Recruiters, internal or external, the processing of Candidate responses is largely a manual process, compounded by the fact that no two Position Descriptions are the same – different priorities, different keywords, and different seniorities, meaning the assessment of CV’s is always bespoke to some extent.
And now, with even more CV’s to process as a result of COVID-19, I understand why recruiters are tempted by new technology, such as bot interviews, as a means to reduce their workload. However, as my story above proves, this is all heading in the wrong direction.
Worse still, even if you think the end (dozens of disgruntled candidates and massive brand damage) justifies the means (you hire a strong candidate for one role), you still have no actual data on the new employee’s skills and capabilities, beyond their unstructured CV and compelling video interview, both which promptly get filed away never to be referenced again.
But there is a far more efficient, objective, and transparent approach that fixes the shortcomings of traditional recruitment, while also addressing many other HR and organisation capability challenges.
As the name suggests, Workforce Alignment ‘aligns’ Recruitment, Performance Management, Project Resourcing, Learning and Development Prioritisation, and Career Planning processes by applying a combination of tools, techniques, and technologies that truly transforms traditional, people centric, practices. That said, a Workforce Alignment solution does not compete with incumbent HR systems, Job Boards, or Workforce Planning tools, rather it augments and informs these systems with data driven skills capture and analysis across the entire employee lifecycle.
Central to this alignment is the implementation of Competency based Position Descriptions throughout the enterprise. Leveraging dozens of public domain competency frameworks that address most major industries and professions, competency based position descriptions provide the standardised, data driven measures from which to analysis and plan skills and capability at all levels within the business - from an individual employee through to a whole of enterprise view.
Competency Frameworks describe a series of Knowledge, Skills, Experience, Leadership, and or Behavioural attributes (the competencies) at the various levels of proficiency typically attained within each Competency. https://www.seera.com.au/frameworks
By objectively comparing current skills (Candidate, Employee, or Contractor) with the desired skills (Position Description or Strategic Forecasts) a Skills Gap can be quantified and communicated in objective and transparent terms, rather than the clouded subjectivity that is responsible for many of today’s skills and diversity challenges.
So instead of the experience imposed on my friend, imagine asking her to complete a self-assessment of the objectively described skills and capabilities required of the role, and then providing her with a detailed skills gap analysis that explains why her over or under qualified assessment made her unsuitable for the advertised position. You could even suggest other roles for which her skills may be better aligned.
As involved as I am in Digital Transformation technologies, I am also a pragmatist. HR processes absolutely need to be transformed but implementing the right technologies to support this transformation is critical. As my friend’s story shows, inappropriate technologies can be far more damaging than beneficial. Fortunately, there are positive solutions.
I'm curious where you sit on the discussion. Is AI the answer to recruitment efficiency or is a more human approach worthwhile?
Graeme
