OVERLOOKING TALENT THROUGH HIRING STANDARDIZATION
1. Tools Provided by the Platform
Automated hiring platforms are digital intermediaries whose customers are the employers. The core value they provide is a marketplace for the labor market, linking employers to candidate employees through a set of integrated tools allowing information to flow back and forth in quasi real time. The avowed aim is to closely match employers’ recruiting needs with the right individuals in a timely fashion, beginning with the elimination of candidates whose application does not meet those requirements as they are pre-determined.
The main features of these platforms are the listings of available jobs, work histories, skills assessments, personality assessments, reference checks, background checks, scheduling tools.
- Advertising for available jobs: job boards that appeared thirty years ago save considerable time and money compared to print classified ads., while targeting a much broader population of potential candidates. Very quickly companies like Monster.com and CareerBuilder started to structure resume data to fit the needs of their customers. Both companies built extensive databases of job seekers and charged companies to access them. Using keyword searches, employers could immediately select several “qualified” leads. This pre-screening capability, offered today by several platform companies is enhanced using chatbots. It is a critical step.
- Skill assessment tools as well as personality tests, situational judgment test, etc. are part of the toolbox available to employers.
- Reference checks, background checks are also provided.
- Interview scheduling is organized automatically.
2. Advantages of Hiring Platforms
Three main benefits are flashed by UKG, the Number 1 platform provider:
- Reduced Hiring Bias: automation replaces the human factor with a technical process, avoiding prejudices due to age, color, or sexual orientation. Other types of bias born of the algorithms built to specify the perfect match may however arise.
- Reduced Hiring Time: most data are entered by applicants; the pre-screening is automatic, reducing the time spent hiring.
- Increased Retention: platform providers allege they reduce clients’ turnover rates significantly by determining the candidates more likely to succeed in the offered position and remain in the company.
3. Social Media and Recruiting
Social media has been extensively used both by candidates and by recruiters. 98% of recruiters use LinkedIn in particular, as the premier professional social network. It is relatively easy to sift through hard data and avoid relying on the qualitative narrative, designed to act as a lure. If one firm, for instance, is seeking an aerospace engineer with ten years of experience, including some in production, in companies X, Y and/or Z, LinkedIn is an easy platform to deliver a large number of potential candidates according to these criteria within a geographic area. It strikes me as a great starting tool, when exploited for to that kind of recruiting.
4. Failings of Platforms
Unique talent is not captured by platforms. In fact, platforms make sure that you hire run-of-the-mill employees, including executives. What it does is to level all attributes in order to avoid the candidates out of the concentrated cloud. As it happens, these are the people that make startups become extraordinary. Startups do not need, at the highest level of responsibilities, people that check all the boxes of recruiters. They are not a conventional operation. They need someone that goes off the chart. Talent is not a mix of expertise and experience. It is something completely different.
Because of restrictions imposed to job applicants who must follow a narrow script in a limited number of characters (“the platform authoritarianism” as dubbed by I. Ajunwa and D. Greene, in a 2019 article on Automated Hiring Platform), talent is systematically discarded. Social media is also penalizing talent, by favoring standard work experience over non-linear ones. It is obvious that automated hiring platforms are ill-suited to the recruitment of real talent. It is efficient for filling positions where expertise, experience and a demonstrated work ethics are paramount attributes. Executive positions in startups are better filled through a combination of other means, that can unearth the potential for creativity, original thinking, stamina, ability to perform in chaos and the discipline to abide by deadlines. To use a common jargon, automated hiring platforms will extract good candidates that think in the box, while startups seek candidates that can think out of the box.
One can argue that the negatives of an online platform are the results of the filters built to eliminate candidates (the algorithm). More sophistication and subtlety are required. Automated hiring platforms results remind me of the choice people are asked to make to elect one among three individuals, each introduced through a few attributes that define them. Unanimously, people choose the individual who seems the most qualified, not burdened by negative perceptions, to whom they grant the best credential. As reminded in Thomas Vinterberg’s movie Another Round, that individual, in the quiz, is Hitler, and everyone would have dodged Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as unfit candidates. It is all about the filters used. Crafting filters based on the most accepted standard type is a costly mistake.