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I remember when job boards first came out. Ok, that’s a lie. I’m old but not that old.
But I did start my career not too long-ish afterward. I vividly remember one of my first candidates saying “You’re getting into recruiting now? Aren’t job boards putting you out of business?”
Yes, that’s something people actually thought. Hysterical in retrospect.
Then came LinkedIn. Another recruiting killer. Turns out it just became the #1 tool recruiters use. It fueled the growth of the industry even more.
But now we’re running into a legit problem: there’s not enough of us. (Raise your hand if you saw this coming in 2020. Ok put your hand down you filthy liar…)
Going into LinkedIn just now, there were more “recruiter” positions posted (~13,000) than “software engineer” positions (~12000) in the last 24 hours.
(Note: yes it's misleading. Everyone needs 10 devs for every 1 posting but whatever. Stay with me on this.)
Here’s the crazy part. Recruiters, don’t flip out: we shouldn't be needed as much as we are.
If the last 25 years of failed recruitment tech taught us 1 thing, it’s that skilled recruiters are critical to hiring. We’re irreplaceable.
And if the last 25 years of failed recruitment tech taught us a 2nd thing, it’s that we’ve all been designing the wrong damn tech.
So much of our day is repetition. Where there is repetition, there’s opportunities to eliminate it.
Maybe it’s automation. Maybe it’s AI. Or maybe it’s not tech at all. Just thinking up better process?
Two words: self-service. (Is it only 1 word if it’s hyphenated? So many questions…)
That’s the goal. Make things self-service for recruiters, for hiring managers, for job seekers.
On the simple end, we wrote a FAQ for anyone interested in joining Hirewell. Here.
We get the same 37 questions over and over again. Don’t you get sick of answering the same things ad nauseum? Write a FAQ and post it.
I’m currently writing FAQs for every damn thing I can think of. For job seekers, for our team, for hiring managers, for clients.
On the complex end, Hirewell’s acquisition of ICV to create Sourcewell allows us to automate the entire sourcing process.
How many hours a day do you spend on LinkedIn Recruiter? Wouldn’t you want those hours back to do something else. Like I don’t know, recruit?
More importantly: wouldn’t you be able to hire more with less recruiters if your team got half their day back?
It’s not like we grow on trees anyway…
This is my focus in 2022. Make everything as self-service as possible.
You can follow me on LinkedIn here and Twitter here. Join the discussion on this LinkedIn post (or give it a 👍) here.