The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith, and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found at talentinsights.hirewell.com. Now pass that milestone in the last episode, this week’s episode, episode 101 “The Recruit-Tech Hellscape is here”. I know, we had to really think about how to follow up the monumentous occasion of episode 100. So, shout out to Hirewell’s- sorry Matt Hernandez, but you are our worst golfer at Hirewell.
That’s the joke. For giving us the inspiration on this. So this is a kind of a, be careful what you wish for episode. We talked about how much recruitment tech sucks. It was actually, we did a whole episode on it. Number six, way back in the day. Why does HR technology suck?
And there’s a lot of recruitment tech nowadays. All this was supposed to help make everything better, right? Like if we got all every whiz bang tool we wanted. Now to catch you up, what we’ve said back in episode six, and we’ve said it kind of repeatedly over the years, sales and marketing they get all the cool tools because they’re a revenue driver.
Always. Where as recruitment tech were behind the times because for some reason, everyone sees like hiring the people you need for your company as a cost center, not a profit center, but that’s another rant entirely. Every company needs to sell internal, like you get the scraps or whatever is kind of left over.
We’re, you know, people are still tracking stuff in spreadsheets, where it is always perpetually behind the times. Yeah. When we go in and do process realignment and stuff, it’s always “all right well, just show me your repository of spreadsheets because I know that that’s where you’re holding everything”.
And sure enough, there is. So if we pivot to what’s happening now, if you work in HR recruitment like us, you’ve probably seen your emails, your LinkedIn DMs get bombarded with more and more pitches to buy more and more tools. And it wasn’t until Glen Linley, the senior Director of talent acquisition at PubMatic-
so shout out to Glen, posted an image on LinkedIn, on the recruit tech landscape, and it struck a nerve. 134 unique logos to synthesize it down. But here’s the catch. It’s not even the complete list. There were two tools, Loxo, Recruit CRM specifically, that should be under the applicant tracking system bucket, both of which we heavily vetted that weren’t even, they weren’t even on there.
So just a quick rundown of the numbers. Applicant Tracking Systems, 15. HRAS’s with Applicant Tracking Systems, 7. Headcount Planning, 8. AI Enabled Smart Scheduling, 9. Branding and Marketing, 7. Referral Platforms, 8. Market Intelligence, 12. AI Automated Interviewing and Interviewing Agents, 7. Assessments and Testing, 11.
Interview Intelligence, 11. Already did that. Text box and chatbots, 11. ATS enhancements and add ons, 8. Reporting and analytics 6, which is preposterously low. That should be the highest one. AI sourcing and messaging, 15. Video interview tools, 7. CRMs, 10. And other miscellaneous tools, 4. Yeah. So why is this happening?
Now maybe it’s because, I think there’s a few different reasons. Maybe it’s because AI is finally enabling some useful features. Is it? Maybe it’s making, is it? Yeah. Questionable on that one. Is it making the cost to create new technology that much lower? I think there’s definitely some credence to that.
Or is it just as simple as more and more stuff that’s been used for sales and marketing’s finally getting repurposed to recruitment because they’ve ran out of ideas of things to create for sales and marketing? I don’t know. But the real question is why after all these years of us bitching about the lack of recruitment tech, are we now bitching about too much recruitment tech?
Well, there’s two reasons for you. Number 1, AI in recruiting, so far, up to this point, is creating as many problems as it, you know, says it solves. So, an alarming trend. AI, like everywhere else has arrived in recruiting. We haven’t been necessarily fans of it so far. There’s machine learning software, right in this moment, right now, that can help candidates answer complex interview questions,
live. It listen- helps you live through the interview. It listens to the interviewer’s question and on the interviewee screen, there’s the text for the answer right away. Yeah. AI sourcing is still just matching keywords and resumes. There hasn’t been any innovation there in the last 10 or so years.
The point being is if you as a candidate stuff your resume with enough keywords, the robots like you. So will it ever or can it ever pick up on some of these nuances? I mean, that all remains to be seen, but less human involvement in recruitment appears to be a recipe for disaster. That’s the main takeaway.
Yeah. And the second reason is because we’ve seen this movie before. The same thing happened with marketing and sales technology, and it created just as many issues as it solved. This is not some new phenomenon. If you’re not familiar, the famous, infamous, and hysterical Martech 5000.
So back in 2011, a guy named Scott Brinker, known as the godfather of Martech. He was at HubSpot, I think at the time. First published his marketing technology landscape super graph online. The first version had 150 companies. So, you know, not a huge list, organized by a bunch of different categories.
But then over the years, 2014, 947 companies. 2015, 1,876 companies. 2017, 5,000 companies, which is when they finally named it, the MarTech 5,000. By 2020 it was 8,000. And earlier this year, it surpassed 11,000 different pieces of marketing technology. Hello, it’s 11,000. Yeah. We’ve overdone it guys. Yeah. Look, as this has exploded, back to the original point,
it has created a new host of challenges and the exact same thing is happening in recruit tech. So getting into this, there’s a lot of things that- issues it caused. We would nail down kind of the five that we kind of like want to focus on the most. First off, just the focus on features over strategy. Like I think anyone who’s ever bought software has seen this, like gimmicks are rampant.
It’s like the biggest issue. Do they actually solve any challenges? Do they actually move the needle on what you’re trying to accomplish, whether you’re marketing a product where they’re trying to get people hired? If your recruitment process is bad, streamlining it with more technology just amplifies those issues.
It makes you kind of, you’re just subservient to the technology at that point. Autopilot actually makes it harder to diagnose and correct issues. We see this all the time with low level recruiters using tools instead of their brains, because they’re just following what the tool is telling them to do, as opposed to like coming up with a better strategy to get people hired.
Automating a bad process, no good. No good. Number two, there’s just general oversaturation and redundancy. The main question is, how many tools do we need to do the exact same thing? The more companies that are on these lists, the tougher it is to distinguish what that tool does and if it can actually solve your unique problem.
I go back, I was laughing. No one needs seven different interviewing tools. We have zoom or teams. Sorry teams. We also have humans. Those two things in conjunction can satisfy virtual interviewing. Similarly, there are 22 different ATS options on that list, and they continue to follow the exact same playbook.
So they charge a subscription model by company size and user. They tie people into long term deals. And generally speaking, it’s a shitty baseline product with kind of this endless buffet of add ons. They just add, they have one feature the other guy doesn’t, and it barely makes a difference. Exactly.
Point is, these companies, they’re just copying each other as new things roll out. So if there aren’t clear differentiators, companies who are in purchase mode and need something new, they want to go get a new ATS, for example, they’re just going to run after the cheapest option.
And the support of that option once it’s purchased is going to be subpar because the provider is going to win the deal and then focus their time on their bigger fish. It’s yet another example of racing to the bottom in our industry. All right. Third thing, complexity and integration challenges, which is the bane of my existence personally. Stitching these tools together because you’re going to need multiple tools,
it just requires more and more technical know how and it’s not something recruiters are especially known for. Like- the question for a company is if you’re going to do all this, are you prepared to hire a like HR operations project manager or a center of excellence? Because newsflash- you will need it to integrate all of this.
And that actually, that’s the thing is like sales and marketing teams they do have some sort of guru that takes care of this stuff, especially when they get larger. Like recruitment teams, they’re never going to have that, you know? And that’s not even to mention like the biggest tool that every recruiter uses LinkedIn, like still makes it hard as possible to actually integrate with anything.
You can’t just pull all the information you want out of there with an API. They very, very limit that to their select partners. Yeah. So we’re dealing with this right now. We’ve got, we use HubSpot for some things. We use, you know, Bullhorn. Client as of now. And the integration without paying- without paying out the nose for custom integration
it’s just an absolute disaster. HubSpot has like an app they created, but it still doesn’t work and do everything you want to do. Then you layer on different messaging tools or job boards or whatever you want to do. It’s just an absolute mess. People who make these tools typically think of very, very specific use cases, but don’t like understand the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish or what else you might need to integrate with.
So it never solves the full problem and things just get wonkier and wonkier, the more different tools you try to layer onto these things. So like, all these companies think they have everything figured out. They think they have the full suite, but they never quite understand the use cases that their true customers are using it to think of the bigger picture.
And it’s just like a, just a rambling mess of technology. Yep. Next one, escalating costs and vendor lock in, you know, whilst ROI continues to decline. So when you have to buy more of these tools, not only does the stack get bloated, but shit gets expensive. Yeah. And there’s lots of transactions too. It’s a burden on the county.
You have 17 different instances, like that’s 17 different monthly invoices or yearly invoices, especially if they overlap. So when they lock you into these year, you know, things, you get some better pricing and then you realize, “Oh gosh, this wasn’t worth it” you know, two months later.
We’re it just turns into another SaaS rant. Yeah. We could do a whole episode on like, why SaaS sucks. That might be an episode 102. We don’t want to- we don’t want to discourage our wonderful clients. And lastly, it just ignoring the human element. We should be thinking brains over bots. Too much tech makes you choose. It forces you to choose bots automation over brains, instead of picking human creativity and strategy first, you end up fitting your process around what, you know, the tech can do, which makes you less nimble, makes you less able to do what you need is specifically in recruiting, which is connect with human beings live and assess that talent effectively.
And again, we’ve seen this in sales. Spamming the hell out of people instead of writing compelling messages to individual people. I remember when I first got started in sales, it was all about, you had very key accounts and you do whatever it took to find these most creative ways of getting in.
Now everyone, you just spam everyone to death is just what the go to thing is because everyone picks the bots over brains. And marketing, it’s just like if you followed like direct response and performance marketing, instead of brand building, branding ultimately is what puts companies on the map and helps them win.
But there was a long period of time where that got deemphasized because it all turned into like, how can we just, we can track everything and see how much money everything’s making. And then, you know, that starts to fall apart. So, yeah. I don’t really know if we have a fix here. This is more just pay attention to what’s happening.
Build a good process. Yes. Build a process and a strategy where the tech can compliment it and not the other way around. There’s your takeaway. We are short on clock. That is a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in the 10 Minute Talent Rant. Thanks for joining us for our second batch of 100 episodes. Yeah. This is all part of the Talent Insights series. Can’t wait for number 200. Always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com as well as YouTube, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
