Spamming for Employment & a Bill of Goods:

For years now I've watched as HR departments implement more and more technology in order to automate and expedite their hiring processes, starting with how they receive and sort applicant resumes. The rationale for this migration to technology is several, if not logical: there is simply no other way to thoughtfully and professionally manage the dearth of electronic resumes that a company will receive in this day and age. I recently noticed one company claim that they receive over a thousand unsolicited resumes a week, and who would doubt that; I'm sure that there are other companies that receive even more. It is interesting to also note that the vast majority of online job ads today are actually posted by recruitment firms, but that's food for another thought. To my way of thinking this thought, the vested goal of recruiting, in-house or outsourced - doesn't matter, is to attempt to pool the best and most appropriate candidates for a particular position. Not really rocket science, eh? The question then becomes, does the current technology help or hinder this goal?

Recently I perused a fairly well known blue-chip company's web site. Their propriety resume screening software included a dropdown menu that already listed the names of (previous) employers from which the applicant could choose. Think about that efficiency for a second. What is the company's motivation for doing that? What signal does that send about the strategic direction of that company's corporate culture, let alone their products and services? New blood? I think not.

Ultimately how an organization handles its applicant queue will depend largely on the strategic HR compass put forth by its senior management's hiring philosophy, for which the technology is simply an extension. I mention this point because I cannot tell you how many times I've heard an HR professional or recruiter recite the dogma that: past behavior is a strong indicator of future behavior (or words to that effect). The problem I have with this rule of thumb is that at best you break even, and at worse, it's outright wrong. In other words, the technology has nothing to do it, philosophically that company has chosen to swim in the bottom half of the bell.

How so, you ask? Maybe you too subscribe to that belief, that expression of common sense. Well allow me to introduce an analogy: investing in or hiring people is really not that different from investing in stocks or shares - human capital. The exchange is such that a company offers wages of some form in return for some rights to future, not past, employee productivity. And yet one of the most commonly repeated dictums in the circles of prudent long-term investing is: past performance is no indicator of future performance. Maybe you've heard that one too. So which one is right? I say, why would or should investing in an employee - a human being, work any differently than investing in a group of human beings, AKA a company? My point is that if people are truly the REAL real estate and the REAL assets of a company, then this metaphor is much more than just a metaphor, it's big blue-chip of a lead indicator.

Of course the reality is that the vast majority of companies are RISK adverse. History is on record suggesting that the bigger the organization becomes, irrespective of what it does, the more risk adverse it becomes. However this is precisely where technology enters the fray to potentially break this cycle of imprudence. Alternatively, if HR technologies are being implemented simply on blind faith, chances are that any viruses already in your corporate culture will simply be amplified, not rectified. Plain and simple, the single most efficient and effective tool a recruiter has when it comes to screening applicants is developing selection criteria that encourage self-selection.

It is crucial that a recruiter incorporate some mechanism into the technology which demands a customized and thoughtful effort on part of the applicant. In the absence of this people will simply spam for employment (sound familiar?). But perhaps even worse than the productivity issues is the signal this cut and paste game of keyword chess can send to up and coming employees, namely, that human competencies are nothing more than a reverse engineered keyword or retrofitted brand name.

Indeed there is a middle ground but that requires taking a vested ownership of the technology. Technology can enhance many functions in terms of recruiting, it helps to expose more of hidden job market while concurrently decreasing the cost of advertising - truly a qualitative win-win, but it cannot fix GIGO. Nevertheless, there a certain perverse irony in the fact that the philosophy of recruiting employees can and should take a lesson from cold and impersonal realm of the financial markets. I suspect many people are offended by such a commodified assertion. However I would argue that it is the contrary position that exemplifies a truly learned and predictable behavior - blind faith.