October 12, 2021

Does Recruiting Tech Suck? Or Is It User Error?

Hosts:

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.

Episode Highlights

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Everyone is frustrated that recruiting is so hard. Blame goes in every direction. A lot of it gets dumped on the technology.

Sure, recruitment tech could be better. But when you see worst practices in hiring persist year after year, isn’t that a bit of a cop out? How much of it is humans not using the tools correctly?

Nate Guggia and James Hornick will talk about where recruitment tech misses the mark. And where poor messaging and strategy are the real issues.

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Employer Content show, part of the Talent Insights series brought to you by Hirewell and Before You Apply, I’m your host, James Hornick. Joining me is my co-host from Before You Apply, Nate hedge my comments so the whole employer brand industry doesn’t hate me Guggia. Thanks man.

That was fresh. That was today. That was today. And I still got my EVP and career site dig in on the post. Yeah. Good, good stuff. So before we start, make sure to check out all of our episodes of the Employer Content show on Hirewell’s Talent Insights, talentinsights.hirewell.com. Today’s segment,

and I’m making this title up as we go since we didn’t actually think this ahead of time: does recruiting tech suck or is it user error? I think yes. I think we’ve actually come to a conclusion on this. Yeah, we’ve talked this one back and forth- anyways. So I guess laying this up, what you and I have been talking about the state of recruitment technology and it’s very intertwined with how companies use content to make it also, which is why we’re talking about it on the Employer Content show, because really it’s whatever the platform is nowadays, you’re talking about trying to attract talent.

It’s also how you communicate with that talent, which is spoiler, user error. Anyways. But you had a viral post. I was very proud of you. It really took off. Was that last week? Well, it rarely happens anymore. And I think maybe as we get a little further into this, I want to know why- I want to know why it did so well.

Because actually I think on some of my points, like with your help, honestly, like with your perspective, I’ve like, come- yeah you were half, right. You were nailing it on half and the other hand, I didn’t know what you were talking about. Yeah. And then thanks to your comment, I liked looked at it and I was like, I don’t think I know what I’m talking about.

Which actually is up to the state of like social media. So you admit that like a good part of your post was probably wrong. People loved it anyway, which really makes you think about every other stupid ass viral posts, like they’re probably half wrong. That’s the thing! And I’m wondering if like, was it so agreeable because people just agreed with like a portion of it?

Did they agree with the whole thing? I have no idea. It started a lot of good conversations so I guess I’m glad I did it. Yeah. Do you want to- give everyone a summary of what we’re talking about here. What’d you discuss in the post? Yeah. And so just even for some background on that, we had a potential investor come back to us and ask us about kind of like the current landscape of the market and competitors and things like that.

So I just started writing and I looked at biggest recruiting tools, especially the most like well-known one, especially to investors who aren’t really in the space and like problems that I see in them and so it was really a reply to an investor and I thought, hell, I’ll just turn this into a post

and kind of see what people think. And there also is something really important to insert here. You and I both do this where if we have like an opinion or even like we think we’re onto something, we’ll turn it into a post just to see what people think. It’s a way it’s a way to get feedback. I love crowdsourcing feedback and ideas because you know, I actually don’t know what my take is yet. Let’s see what everyone else has to say. I’m better at like saying why someone else is wrong than coming up with my own- that’s a better way of arriving at your opinion. Anyway. Yeah. So that was another reason why I turned this into a post and just put it out publicly just to see what people thought.

So that’s where it came from. So what I did was I looked at LinkedIn, I looked at Glassdoor, I looked at job boards, sourcing, employer branding platforms, and employee generated content. And video and a few tools. Oh, and video interview tools. Yeah. Yeah. I got the list here. Okay.

Called out some of the problems I saw in those and then you have some thoughts. Yeah. Why don’t you start? LinkedIn is going to be a big part of this discussion because as we found out, everyone fricking hates LinkedIn yet they can’t stop talking about it. That’s the thing.

Can’t stop using it. And I think they’re all wrong but go ahead. Okay. That’s what I have heard. And I have talked to some in house recruiters and talent leaders, more specifically at startup level series B to series C, D kind of a thing. So we’re not talking about mature companies, we’re not talking about like 10 person companies. Somewhere like in the middle growing fast

and they’ve complained about LinkedIn as being this place where it’s hard for them to find technical talent, especially. And the cost of it is increasing, it’s becoming harder for them to pay for but they just kind of feel like they’re handcuffed by it because they need it.

That part’s true. That part’s true. You do need it and it is expensive as shit, but continue. Yeah. So those are actually my two biggest points about LinkedIn is that it holds recruiters hostage and it’s really hard for smaller teams who have limited budgets to continually afford. But then there was this other point, which is the best talent has left the platform

or has intentionally, I don’t even know if I wrote this, but they’ve intentionally not updated their profiles because of recruiter spam. And here’s my point. Is that true? I’ve heard this before. I’ve heard people say it before, but are- people use the fact they’re not getting responses back to prove that people are leaving the platform and tuning it out.

It just means they’re tuning you out because your pitch sucks. But anyway, I digress. That’s my take. Is there any proof though? Is there any proof people are actually leaving the platform? Yeah, I don’t know. Anecdotally everyone’s like, yeah, well, I know so-and-so left or I know so-and-so didn’t update their account, but okay, you can say that about social account anywhere. Everyone knows someone who left whatever platform, right. But like, I don’t know if there is data but I just, I think it’s such a cop out that- and I also think that engineers can be guilty of saying that they’re not on LinkedIn because they don’t want to sound like- yeah,

sounds cheesy. It sounds cheesy. Yeah. I’m on Gethub and Reddit but you’re on LinkedIn too. You’re on LinkedIn it right. But anyway. I guess the thing I want to say here before we get too deep into this too, is like a lot of people don’t understand that there’s two sides of LinkedIn. So we’re really talking about LinkedIn recruiter, which most people are unaware of how slick this tool is.

Everyone just thinks of LinkedIn as like the lame ass social platform, which I agree it’s lame, even though you and I are on it constantly. But it’s a genius. They created a worldwide company direct billary that people put themselves into willfully and if they don’t, it’s weird, you know? It’s just, it’s kind of a, it’s a genius concept.

Like this did not exist- 20 years ago, the idea that everyone would just- I mean recruiters used to have to try to scam their way into finding employee directories one by one and get referrals. And you had to create your own kind of thing. But the idea that the whole world would just say, you know what, I’m going to put all of my information out there,

no one would have saw that coming and no one would’ve believed that would even happen. But it’s the reality of where we are. But anyways. My take is that because of the recruiter side of LinkedIn, this has done more good for the world than any other piece of, certainly any other piece of social technology. Millions of jobs, every single year people are getting because of frigging LinkedIn.

When you think about like, Facebook’s done nothing good for anybody- period. Okay. Twitter has some good media value. It’s actually done some certain things in whatever, but like what come on, it’s not even close. The amount of people who are able to find a job easily or have people find them and help their career, it’s mind boggling how underrated the platform is. And I think it’s when people think of LinkedIn, they just think like all people posting about crappy business advice or whatever. They don’t, I don’t think they take into account the entire impact it’s had on our entire hiring economy.

It’s fundamentally shifted it over the last 20 years, but I digressed on that one. So here’s the thing, it’s funny because you and I both had a couple, we were actually planning the show using some of the social post you made recently on this. Yeah. You and I have a friend who was a software engineer and I made this post the other day is just a photo post of his direct messages on LinkedIn.

The entire stack is his iPhone snapshot he had about what is it, 15 messages of recruiters reaching out to him. And he probably gets that many a couple of times a week. He’ll respond to them all, you know, whatever. So he probably gets 30 messages a week probably. We’ll just like estimate 20 to 30 easily.

He replies to every single one. He says what his rate is and what he’d be looking for and people most of the time don’t respond further because he does pretty well, right. He’s priced himself out, but that’s what it- and I don’t think people realize until they actually, because everyone here is okay like developers are constantly getting hit up, like super competitive, but it’s not until you see. Like if this was your inbox and you had 20 messages waiting there, you’re not going to talk to all 20 recruiters. You have to filter them out somehow. And this is someone who’s willfully getting back to people.

So salary is a huge one. If you’re paid a certain amount you’re not going to willfully start entertaining companies below that amount. And when he does that, he mostly gets ghosted. Right. What’s up with that? That’s the whole- it’s like there is a very, this is where it comes down to user error.

There’s a very short term thinking, transactional thinking in much of the recruitment industry. And he’s higher than average salary wise, so he’s not going to fit most jobs but he will fit some. You know what I mean? He will fit maybe something you’re going to have in another month or later in the year.

And it would behoove you to start a dialogue with these types of people, you know, that people who are higher and lower than whatever job you’re working on. But I think that that’s the issue with recruitment in general is an unwillingness to build relationships if it doesn’t fit your short-term mandate and there’s all kinds of issues why that happens, you know. There’s so many of these large staffing firms are run like boiler room operations where the recruiters are forced to hit certain weekly metrics or they lose their job and all this kind of crap.

And it’s just, it’s not an industry that traditionally thinks long-term. But in context of what we were first talking about here, are people bailing on LinkedIn? No, they’re just not getting back to you and your crappy pitch, is my take. If you have like, most people aren’t our friend who actually responds back to people. Most people like see 30 DMS lining up,

they’re just going to skim them all and see if any of them look good and they’re going to ignore the rest, which is totally reasonable. I don’t respond to every piece of spam that I get, right. I respond to the ones that look really cool. That doesn’t mean I quit checking my email. Anyways, the other part, and I had to do some digging on this because we were, and this might get down to kind of our sourcing tools thing.

This is another part why I reject the idea that people are bailing on- anybody’s bailing on LinkedIn. We were looking at some of the “next gen sourcing tool”. So people who don’t know, and they’re they’re not really next gen. LinkedIn lost a case, a web scraping case. So basically anything that’s public information on LinkedIn, people were allowed to scrape.

So there’s companies out there that scrape every social platform, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, everything else, Reddit, Gethub, all the different jobs. They aggregate all this information, they put it into like one, they’re unified all together. And then they actually, they created their own like LinkedIn recruiter

that’s conveniently slightly less than LinkedIn recruiter. They give you email addresses, everything else. We evaluated a couple of them and they work. They do the exact same filter methods that LinkedIn recruiter does. Here’s the issue, is that LinkedIn, according to our team, which I didn’t believe at first.

So I had to like do some more due diligence. I was first thinking that it was just like a resistance to change kind of thing, but everyone’s like, hell no, people get back on InMail. No one gets back on email and I’m just like, really? Okay. And then I took that and it’s actually true. So I found a bunch of articles out there.

So InMails have three times the open rate as email. They have 300% response rate as email. Yeah, I know and I saw that. And there’s different sources are all backing this up, not to mention our own team. And it’s just like, okay so this idea that people aren’t like- that LinkedIn’s not working anymore, yet people are far more likely to respond on LinkedIn than to InMails and email.

And there’s reasons for that because you get so much other spam and that’s not a direct proof that there hasn’t been a downturn, but it’s proof that it’s still effective, you know? Yeah I remember I dropped a comment. I don’t know if it was a comment on another post or if it’s in this one that I posted last week, I can’t remember where it was. But I had a couple more like senior level people talking about InMail specifically versus email and how they categorize those two channels. InMails for job opportunities, emails for like all the other shit, you know?

And so I remember when you were sharing those stats with me and it was about the same time that I was seeing that feedback too. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. It’s just a way to filter and categorize. Yeah. It’s just also a- not everyone’s a buyer right now.

Meaning job seekers, not every dev even cares. They’re happy in their job, they’re highly paid. They’re not looking, you know? This idea that everyone should always be looking and always responding, it’s just flawed So again, it doesn’t mean they gave up on the platform. It means they’re not looking

and they’re slammed with tons of other spam from other recruiters that maybe did a better job writing than you did. Okay. So there’s two things I’m thinking about. One, is somebody like our engineering friend here that we’re talking about, even if you can’t meet his comp today like you were saying, even just giving it to them and saying, “Hey, this is where we’re at.

I know we can’t meet it today. We’re always going to be hiring. Let’s keep this dialogue open.” Just some simple exchange and that level of transparency would, it would just make that connection. Yeah. The thing is, you don’t care about long-term pipeline and relationships until you need them.

And that’s a big beef that I have with recruiting is it’s just like, it’s hair on fire, we need a result now and so we’re going to take action now to get that result instead of- I think that the internal recruitment and I’m broadly generalizing right. But internal recruitment- I’m saying this, this is my empathetic voice, too many internal recruiters, overwhelming join your internal recruiters are being asked to it’s the hair on fire,

we need to get these positions filled right now. Right. They would love to do longterm pipelining but they’re usually under resourced as is. There are some that do a great job of it. So I’m not throwing everyone in that bucket and I’m not criticizing anybody who’s not but when you’re- you know what it’s like when you’re in a hair on fire situation, we need stuff done yesterday,

like the long-term strategic stuff just falls by the wayside. So a lot of the relationships, so companies would probably love to build a virtual bench of devs who might want to join them someday. It’s just not, when you’re already behind to where he need to be in, it’s not realistic for that to be the norm at least. Agencies on the other side of it,

I mean, they’re just not- too many agencies don’t incent people to think long-term. Sure. They’re incented and held to like short-term numbers. Again, that’s not all agencies. And a lot of times it falls to the recruiter if they’re in a spot where they know they’re happy- people at Hirewell- then you’re more incented to think long-term, right. But that’s the reality of the situation and why everyone gets frustrated that recruiters are notoriously short-term thinkers, anyway.

But why can’t you do both? I mean, in this like specific example, if you’re already going out because you need to hire an engineer yesterday and you can develop the relationship with them doing the same motions that you’re already doing. It’s just adjusting your behavior, not taking you away from your job. Well, think of it from a sales standpoint, right?

You remember what it was like when you were starting your sales career? I don’t think they have BDRs or SDRs in our day when we were getting going but there’s a lot of dumb shit you did in the first three, four years of your sales career that if you could do it all over again, you would have approached it differently.

Yeah, that’s true. It’s just, you’re still learning stuff and the things you need to learn right away is the basic qualification, how to do a pitch and how to hit your weekly numbers and the ability to think more long-term about how to build relationships people doesn’t come when you’re just getting your career started a lot of times.

So I think- yeah that’s a good point. I guess the other thing is I would say the majority of senior recruiters I know think longterm, it’s just that it’s also a churn and burn kind of industry where there’s just so many junior people out there who haven’t developed those skills yet, are the ones sitting in a lot of these seats.

And so they just haven’t hit that point where they’ve got the business acumen to do it and they will. Or either will or they’re going to realize they hate recruiting, which have a lot of them do and they’re getting into the different fields entirely. Well one more question for you before we move on. Sure. I know this whole concept or this idea of like sharing comp up front,

it’s a hot talking point and it’s also debatable. Who’s stopping that from happening? Is it because I, I don’t think it’s the recruiter. Is a recruiter like let’s say ghosting people- ghost in let’s say our friend here, when he’s asked what’s the comp? Are they ghosting because they just don’t want to share it or who’s blocking them from sharing that information?

It’s a controversial topic because there’s not really a great solution for it. If you have a job and the salary range is 100 to 120, your midpoint for that position is probably 110, just hypothetically, if you’re trying to hire for it. Yeah. Every single person who applies for that job, they’re asking for 120.

No matter what. The ones who are good enough for that and the ones who aren’t. They just have, it just sets an expectation. The way that you as a company, when you’re phrasing salary and the way the job seekers see it. And I mean, there’s going to be people who are making 70K applying for that 120 job just to see if you’ll give it to them.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And that’s not to say you could be making 70K doesn’t mean you’re capable of doing that work because maybe you are underpaid, but you will get a lot of people who aren’t qualified that just applied to stuff because they see what the big kind of what the big ticket number is.

So that’s the thought process behing it. I don’t know. I don’t have a great solution. I’ve never been sold that it’s- what I do believe in a hundred percent is that once you’re qualifying and having a conversation with somebody, you need to get to get the brass tax and have the comp conversation sooner or later, because it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

Yeah. From a job posting standpoint, it causes different problems than it solves. Yeah. And you wouldn’t know that unless you’re actually sitting on the side of it and you seeing like the amount of people that, what the effect that it has. Yeah. But whatever, some people will disagree.

I don’t know. I’m not dying onthat hill either, so. But whatever. All right, move on. Yeah. Was there anything else in the LinkedIn topic I want to talk about? I guess this one, let’s come back to this. I did have one thought. I think this is one of our takeaways. So let me mark this down for later, because I think there is something broken here still, but I think this kind of leads into the bigger point of why we’re having this whole conversation about. The rest of these,

if you’re listening should be a little bit shorter. Glassdoor. Glassdoor. Glassdoor.

My take was it’s lost its value, candidates see through it. They know that companies are gaming the system and that basically now like any review site and often what we see with social media, the loudest 1% suck up all of the air and they’re the ones who complain anyway. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I just, I don’t think it was ever relevant.

That’s why I don’t think it’s important. I just, I think that review sites have always been like check a box to make sure they’re legit or run away if you find out they’re terrible. Like yes, companies game the systems but if you’re an awful environment you really can’t. Companies that are truly terrible, can’t get a four-star rating.

It just doesn’t really work that way. But I’ve never thought it’d be relevant to anything to begin with. So I just, I agree, but I don’t think it’s relevant to like, yeah it’s nothing worth getting upset about. What’s that other one where techies hang out? It’s another kind of review but it’s all anonymous.

Dang it, what’s it called? Blind. Yeah. You should check it out. I think it’s all anonymous, but I heard it’s just like one huge bitch session of like- because it anonymous. Yeah. So you can like ask questions to people, like share. It’s really transparent. Awesome. It sounds like it’s right up my alley just for shits and grins.

Okay. What was the next? Job boards. Job boards. Yeah, I guess my beef with job boards is that lower level talent, not a good experience for recruiters or for job seekers. I feel like recruiters get overwhelmed with volume and job seekers rapid apply into black holes and a lot of times don’t get responses.

So it’s just like, it’s just a volume game on both sides with very little value. See, I think that you’re a little skewed in the circles. Job boards work great for certain positions. It is very situational depending on what you’re trying to hire for. If you’re doing high volume recruiting, if you’re doing maybe some lower level positions, works great. Even for high demand positions, if you’re talking software developers or other things over for comp- sorry, another side note: contract positions also works great.

But here’s where, again, coming back to user error. I think that our friend Mitch would agree with this one, Mitch Sullivan, everyone out there. People just write crappy ads that don’t know how to attract- if you’re taking a job description that is written in the most dreadfully boring, probably copy language ever,

that’s not enticing or engaging. And you’re just banking on your company name being the sales pitch for why someone would want to hit the apply button, of course you’re not going to have a lot of applications. But on that topic though, this was interesting because talking with Mitch and I talked to a couple other people recently who work in the UK or the US and UK.

I didn’t, because I always knew there were some sort of difference in the business model in why some of the services, stuff like the stuff Mitch sells, things more kind of like the recruiter branding things seem to do better in the UK than here. Also just has a different vibe. It seems like when you’re talking to recruiters in the UK, they’re a little more, they’re a little more on top of some certain trends.

I didn’t realize this. I like to get some numbers back this up. Hiring there, there’s just more recruiters per capita in the UK. It’s a far more competitive environment than it is here in the US and fees there get driven down more than they do here in the US. So everyone in the US probably thinks it’s super competitive.

Like no UK and Europe, it’s even more competitive than it is here. Therefore recruiters in order to excel, they have to do things like take Mitch’s course learn how to write a proper job description or learn how to brand themselves on LinkedIn, all these extra things. It’s just like they have to become better.

They have to become better content writers. They have to be more conscientious about some of this stuff because they wouldn’t be able to make it. Every little piece of- every little bit of edge they need for these types of things is what it takes is required as more table stakes to do the job there versus here.

Yep. And there’s these- I just learned about this today. In some of these countries there’s rules where you have to wait like three months before you can start another job after you leave one and- yeah they got all kinds of rich- they got all kinds of weird stuff. And so the process is – you’re right.

It’s like a lot more. You have to be more thoughtful. It’s not like somebody can just jump right over to your company tomorrow kind of a thing. Yeah. There’s probably a lot of less poaching. Plowing right through, employer branding platforms. Yeah.

Your take was the best. Garbage. Garbage. I mean, I’ll try not to hedge too much. I don’t see much value in them at all. Agreed. In fact we agree so much we dedicated an entire show to it, which we’re in episode 23, 24. So I don’t think we need to talk more about this point.

We’ll continue. Yeah. Candidate sourcing tools. Yeah, no I lost you. I had no idea what you’re talking about here. This is the one. So this is the one where out of all my points, this is the one that missed the most. Because honestly it wasn’t until- so this is how you can learn from stuff you post.

I was like, okay I’m thinking about sourcing tools wrong. Like, in my mind, I actually had one example. And so I used the one example in my mind to form an opinion about the whole thing. And that one example was, you know, I was doing some research. I came across this startup, which is a sourcing tool and one of the features that they-

I have to write a post about this because I took a screenshot and it was like some AI technology that is going to write your outbound emails for you, right. Okay. And I’m like, what the fuck? You, and I both are big believers in copywriting and how you’re doing messaging at scale, that kind of a thing.

And I’m like, what the hell is this? Why are we taking the human out of the most important part? I’ve tested out some of those GP three, GTP three tools and they’re crap. I could not get any kind of useful output out of them in terms of AI writing. I’m not, and maybe someday, maybe GPT four will get us there.

I don’t know but it’s just terrible. Yeah, and so it just, it got me in this mode of like, okay, this is where we’re going. And I think the biggest beef I have overall with any of this technology is that it is now being created mostly by people who have no idea about the industry.

They haven’t spent time in the industry. They’re not even related to it whatsoever. They’re just like developers who just see an opportunity and want to put something together with zero empathy for either market that they’re serving. So I’m like, oh crap that’s where we’re going.

Tech wants to just remove the human out of this. But I wasn’t thinking about sourcing the way that you and other recruiters think about sourcing. I was thinking about as touching- a recruiter touching a candidate. So sourcing is- okay this actually ties back to when I said, when we were talking about LinkedIn

and I said let’s come back there. LinkedIn is a sourcing tool, LinkedIn recruiter. That’s what it is. It’s the world’s greatest sourcing tool. So maybe this is a good time to kind of come back to this and where sourcing tools, LinkedIn and all the other AI focused ones I mentioned earlier, I shouldn’t say AI focused ones.

That’s how they sell themselves. I don’t really think there’s a whole lot of AI actually happening there. But the “next gen” or whatever you want to call it, the web scraping based sourcing tools, LinkedIn clone placements, they’re all just, it’s just technology that’s been created without knowing what problem it needed to solve.

LinkedIn’s a widget, it’s a widget that doesn’t integrate with anything. So that’s a problem. So a lot of these other things like actually integrate with your ATS or some other things like that, they’re a little better. But the challenge is that if you’re a recruiter and you’re spending four or five, six hours a day just going through LinkedIn, trying to find people to contact like that is painfully inefficient.

And none of these systems are making it less so, right? The problem is sourcing and just finding people that fit your parameters so you can start contacting them through whatever campaign means necessary is a massive time suck. It’s painful for recruiters. It’s hard to find actual because there are people who are sourcers, which are very hard to hire for, because it’s not always a job that people enjoy doing.

And if they do a lot of times, it’s a stepping stone again to something else. So it’s not really necessarily a great, it’s a pain point. Just trying to find more people to call, more people to contact, which at some level, it is a volume game, right? If you’re trying to hire tons and tons and tons of tons of software developers, you need 10 times whatever you’re trying to fill to even make it remotely reasonable.

Yet none of these tools have fared out, LinkedIn or any other ones. How do you actually cut that time down? That’s the actual pain point. Absolutely none of them are addressing it. And if you want to talk about AI, what AI should be doing, there is nothing more home run, slam dunk, solvable from a machine learning AI standpoint then figuring out how to train a computer to think like a human sourcer would as they’re doing a search.

Hmm, yep. Right, right, right, right. Because there’s all these like little nuances. There’s tons of little nuances, tons of little things to make this time-consuming, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t train a computer to do it. Yeah. I think you also had a really good point about whatever the technology is doing.

What it needs to do is allow recruiters to actually do more recruiting. Yeah, because that’s what would end up happening precisely. If you could take that amount of sourcing time, instead of spending four or five hours in LinkedIn recruiter, they spent one hour in the new sourcing tool

they would have another three or four hours a day to actually recruit and you’d have better output. Right. The thing is like, will drive me crazy too, is if we make a clip out of this you’re going to have a few companies come across and say, we’re working on this and it’ll be one of the few we’ve evaluated and checked out their AI sourcing and it’s garbage.

Like it’s nowhere even close. Yeah. I think a lot of, some of that back to your point, some of that is because there’s people developing these tools that don’t know what the actual pain points are. They’re just trying to make something they think is a little better than LinkedIn.

Because, you know you can kind of conceptualize what a bad user requirement gathering session would look like. Okay what do you hate most about LinkedIn? Well it’s expensive, doesn’t integrate with our systems, doesn’t have enough candidates. And it’s like all right, let’s it cost less. Let’s make it integrate and let’s make a- let’s scrape

the web so you can find a few more candidates. Problem solved right? No, it didn’t solve the real problem. No. It didn’t do shit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anyways. Last one, video interview tools. Is it? Yeah. So last is your video interview tools. Did we talk about that one? There’s also employee generated content. I feel like we did a whole show on employee generated content though.

Yeah, we have. We did multiple shows on that. Most of them are terrible and the technology. Yeah, well that’s I guess- so for the video tools, I don’t see the- we’re talking on zoom right now. There’s this like- especially for screening calls, companies will use these tools to like, you know a candidate applies.

And then they do a video. They record a video that then goes to the recruiter and then the recruiter evaluates the video as if that was like the first real interaction with somebody and then they filter based off of that. So you get like an inner and out based off of like your video of you answering some questions.

Yeah. Which I’ve done that before as a candidate and I hated it. Okay. So I’ll say this. It’s relevant in certain industries. So if you’re recruiting high volume people and you’re trying to make the process more manageable or if there’s certain- I wish I had a better example off the top of my head, but let’s say your nurses or something like that, you know what I mean?

I suppose you and I look at things through the lens of software developers, digital marketers, salespeople. And I think for those traditional corporate niche areas it’s just not important. But there is other areas where there needs to be some level of more repeatable vetting/process flow of getting a high volume of people through your interview process more easily than doing one off zoom interviews.

Because that’s what you’re talking about. If you’re going to interview five software engineers this week. Cool, like I can set up five zooms, no big deal. But if I needed to somehow figure out I need to hire 20 people for some skilled trade skillset, like you might need some kind of tool that’s actually going to manage that process for you.

So that’s the thing, because I want to be fair about this. Is that we do kind of look at things a little bit slanted through like the circles that we kind of roll in. But no, I think for the stuff we wrote, it’s just not necessary to have like a special tool for it. Yeah.

You had some other thoughts on your follow-up posts. I don’t know if it was anything you wanted to kind of talk about with that one, but. I was wondering if we should save, if we should do just like a separate show on potential solutions or the future of this stuff or whatever.

Because I know you have thoughts about like- you just gave one about if you were going to develop the best tool that would save recruiters the most time it would look like this, but even more like just the future of the industry, like where it’s going, what it could be, what we wish it would be.

I don’t know, something like that. Maybe we could just do like a separate show on. Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Okay. As opposed to putting me on the spot and telling me what I think the future of industry is going with zero prep. What do I have off the cuff that I can tell you that’s going to sound interesting? So let’s do that.

We can do that as a follow-up. All right. That sounds great. So everyone, now you know what our plan is for some sort of follow on where the industry is headed. That’s a wrap for the Employer Content show. Maybe I should reiterate before we officially cut the show off that I believe that- what was the first question? Does recruiting

tech suck or is it user error? Okay. So let me answer that. Before we officially close the show down, let’s answer the core question we started the show off with. I don’t think recruiting tech, the current tech doesn’t suck. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, but there are certain situations that have popped up unforeseeable, such as the incredibly high demand for software developers where it’s just not current enough. I do think there needs to be better solutions created from here.

That just no one’s devised yet. A better way of kind of managing that process or managing that communication, what that is I’m not entirely sure. I also think there’s ways things could be more efficient, but- so yes, there’s definitely room for improvement, but that being said, I think saying that it sucks and that’s why my job sucks

and why recruiting is hard is a total cop out. I think there’s so much user error, especially when it comes down to- it really comes whether it’s job ads, whether it’s your outreach to people as a recruiter for within LinkedIn, you got to- you can’t have basic bitch copy and then say that it’s technology’s fault.

And that’s unfortunately what we see between that and lack of follow-up and lack engagement with building long-term relationships with people. Those are the two bigger issues that anyone can solve on their own. And until you’ve done that, don’t tell me the tech sucks. Gosh, I feel like we have another show or maybe even just like a mini session here about like stop bitching about the tech.

Here’s how to make the most out of the current situation or something like that, you know? Yeah. Anyways, that was my last thought.

This was good for me. I’ve come to the middle on some of this. All right, everyone for real this time, that’s a wrap the employer content show.

If you want to hear more of what Nate and I have to say, you can view all of our episodes on Hirewell’s Talent Insights and you can also subscribe to the Hirewell’s channel on YouTube, the talent insights podcast on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Amazon and Spotify. Nate pleasure as always. Everybody out there,

we’ll see you soon. Bye.

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