Dateline Berlin - I have spent most of this week at a think tank in Germany talking about worldwide workforce issues. One of our discussion topics has been the interaction of technology and recruiting, specifically as it relates to candidates’ ability to make better career choices. Staffing.org’s contribution has been significant research gathered over the past three years about candidates’ likes and dislikes concerning the job application process.
2010 Corporate Recruiting Report
Despite increasingly easy access to a vast array of information sources, candidates still feel frustrated by their inability to find information that is relevant and helpful. Search engines remain fairly blunt instruments even for a skilled researcher, which most job seekers are not. And too many employers continue to advertise their companies and their openings as if they were still recruiting in the age of paper-based annual reports and print-based job descriptions.
Research also tells us that in 2010, the overall job application process isn’t much better than it was in 2007, when we first studied it. In fact the opposite may be true. As more companies have turned to Internet-based recruiting, the average quality of a corporate jobsite may actually have sunk. (We will have more information about this later in the year.) Candidates still struggle as much with the application process as they ever have, especially with automated tracking systems that provide no insight into their status or even acknowledge their application.
To give some due to employers, one problem with Internet recruiting is its evolutionary pace. Individuals can alter their behavior much more quickly than organizations can, particularly large ones, and that is doubly true where enterprise technology is involved. Pushing through upgrades to a recruiting process, such as adding functionality to a career site, can take a long time, perhaps even several complete budget cycles if there are many competing corporate priorities.
Candidates know what they want. They are looking for a way to connect to an organization. They want a relationship. They want to get down to the nitty-gritty, poke into the closets, get the skinny, be clued in. In today’s insecure world, they want the greatest security that being “in the know” can provide.
They also want interaction. They don’t want to provide a CV in a one-way transaction; they want to exchange it for corporate information. The Internet has raised their expectations for this considerably. They are becoming used to passing enormous quantities of information back and forth with one another and even with total strangers. The burgeoning social forums of Web 2.0 are built largely on this phenomenon.
Providing a rich, robust, ongoing and proactive flow of communications is not the easiest thing for organizations. Organizations don’t like complexity, which makes things harder to organize, harder to manage and more expensive. They battle against it. One could even say that one of the functions of an organization is to tame complexity and reduce it to predictable, repeatable and profitable processes.
Thus, traditional corporate recruiting has always been pushed toward simplicity – get the requisitions; post the jobs; solicit the resumes; interview, select and vet the candidates, and hire. So we have two forces in collision, one embracing complexity and one focusing on simplicity.
In the competition for talent, those who cling to simplicity will ultimately lose. The Internet is not going away and is not about to stop evolving. Nor will candidates stop recalibrating their expectations according to the robust communication it offers. We are well past the threshold into a new world of recruiting. Talent is the client and the client wants what he wants. If you give him anything less, and he can exercise other options, you lose. It’s that simple.
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