OK, on a scale of 1-10, do you consider yourself a technophobe or a technophile? One means you still feel more comfortable with pencil, paper and flat file folders. Ten means you think technology’s cool, can cope with its frustrations, and enjoy figuring out ways it can improve your life.
There was a big crowd of technophiles at HR Tech in Chicago last week, which I attended because we’re going to write more about technology in 2010 and my knowledge of HR state-of-the-art was dated. I needed new benchmarks to work from. The crowd appeared to be comprised mostly of IT people, which is consistent with how most corporations are structured: i.e. IT in their own separate space, charged with managing the enterprise infrastructure that everyone else uses.
Staffing technology today is so complex that for practical purposes it’s opaque to anyone who isn’t trained. Snooping under the hood is impossible for the layman. So we, the non-techies, mostly use it with only the vaguest idea of how it works. We need manuals for all but the simplest tasks and if something breaks we’re helpless. In no way is this IT’s fault. I have enormous admiration for these folks. Their days are every bit as complicated as yours or mine and they face enormous pressures. Even a minor disruption in their intricate systems will paralyze today’s corporation.
Staffing and IT are locked in an inescapable partnership and like any partnership it needs work on both sides to make it function well. Based on impressions from my visit to Chicago, here’s some of the work that staffing faces.
We non-techies need to upgrade our technical literacy. The illustration above roughs out the basic systems that corporate recruiters have to understand and work with today. These represent only a fraction of the total corporate technical infrastructure, which includes dozens, and frequently hundreds, of systems running simultaneously. Keeping all these interlocking parts operational, upgraded, synchronized, and “talking” to one another, plus adding new capabilities, is a humungous task, fraught with innumerable problems and roadblocks.
Technical literacy does not mean technical mastery. One can be highly conversant with modern literature or music, for example, without being a practicing writer or musician. By literacy, I mean we need to know what’s going on, understand the history and the trends, be able to see our work from a technical viewpoint, and become actively involved in designing and upgrading the systems we depend on for our livelihood.
There are wonderfully informed, technically literate staffing professionals working in corporations today. Some of them sat on the session panels at HR Tech. But Staffing.org research confirms there aren’t enough of them. Average literacy scores are modest and there is a sizable contingent that still feels technology is more trouble than it’s worth. They want to “do” recruiting, not “do” technology.
But those two things are inseparable now. We have been writing the past few weeks about trends that will impact staffing in 2010 and beyond. All of them are tied to technology in some way. And the IT people really need our help. The vendors, in particular, are engaged in a fierce competition to see who can make their offerings more functional and more comprehensive. Some of the work being done is fabulous. But the programmers can program until their fingers ache and still not get us where we need to be.
In the end, computer systems closely mirror human systems. Brilliant technology means nothing if it isn’t practical from a human point of view. That’s where we can make a contribution.
So the non-technical message from HR Tech is upskilling. Whatever your personal or departmental ranking on the technophobe-techophile scale, please start seriously undertaking its improvement.
We will be addressing technology a good deal more in 2010 because it is so closely entwined with the metrics, benchmarks, business productivity and business alignment issues that we have focused on for the past decade. We will not be diving deep into the technology itself. There are others far better qualified. Besides, our audience does not work in the IT department, it works in HR. So our challenge will be to inform the HR perspective. We’ll investigate where technology is headed, what it can and can’t do well today, where big improvements are being made, and how to help you work more effectively with your IT colleagues.
Technology is the elephant in staffing’s closet. We need to open the door and get to know it-him-her(?).
(Note: find out more about internet recruiting in the 2009
Report : Mastering Internet Recruiting - Job Seeker Attitudes and Behaviors)
Related Reading:
A Recruiter’s Guide to Boolean Searching (and the World’s Largest Free CV Database
Glimpse into the Future of Recruitment Technology
Crispin on The Future of Recruiting
Six iPhone Apps for Recruiters
A "Killer" App that Puts The Science in Recruiting
Sourcing Insight: Market Segmentation
Bing and Hunch: Two New Sites to Check
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