The Happy Future Group

The more I dig in the world of recruiting and hear from those many talented people who never seem to get any response from their applications, the more appalled I become!

In my view, the whole recruiting process is going in the wrong direction. Everything is set up to just provide companies with “adequate” candidates, but there clearly is no effort anymore to go find out that special someone who will really add competitive value to his/her employer.

I can understand that recruiters seek some help in technology, but only if it creates quality to the customer. What they are doing is adding cost savings for themselves as they do not even read resumes anymore but let the computer do the screening. The keywords matching will sort out who will pass and who will lose. This is sheer laziness and if you ask me, it is cheating the customer. What happens with all the very valid words that are in the resume but just are not the right ones? Bad luck my friend, you used the wrong word, and therefore you are a loser!

And the beauty of it all is that thanks to this “black hole” nobody will ever know that very solid candidates were wrongly rejected. That is the greatest CYA I can think of. And companies keep paying obscene fees to such charlatans in a time where they should cut costs by eliminating all the useless suppliers! Companies do not get the best anymore, they only get the luckiest resume owners.

In my life I have hired quite a few people, and the only few times that I did it through recruiters, it has always been disappointing. They never have been able to send people who had the right personality and solidity for the jobs I wanted to fill in. All the real talents I have hired I found myself and trained myself, with simply the most amazing results and a performance for the company that our competitors envied and our customers valued.

I believe that technology’s purpose is for people to do their work better, not just easier. I also believe that when technology replaces the people using it, then those people purely and simply have no function anymore. They are redundant and irrelevant. Recruiter, you are fired!

I believe that if the way of the future is to screen job applicants by a computer program, then companies can  just as well buy the program and do the work themselves. After all, placing a job posting on Monster or whatever job website does not require a genius and the result will be the same.

As far as I am concerned, except for my first job, I never had to write and send a resume for any position I have held; and even for my first job, I had sent my resume while there was no job opening at that time. I guess that they hired me because they saw something in me. After that, all the jobs I have had have been offered  to me or created for me. I wonder what my life would have been if they had had a computer keyword screening.

In the future, I see two groups of recruiting activities:

1. The real talent search, by this I mean looking and finding people who have above average abilities, will still be done by headhunters who will tap in their networks and actively work the field to find them one way or another. This will be a quality niche for quality employers. Talented people most of the time are passive job seekers. They are working, either employed or have their own business and can be attracted to another employer if this latter has matching values and offers a job at the level of those over performers.
2. The bulk or commodity job market, in which companies are not looking for  superstars, but just adequate ones, as they are expendable. This market does not justify the level of fees that recruiters charge (but neither do real estate agents, to whom recruiters actually are quite comparable).  Companies will have the computer program and will go “purchase” the average commodity, and will try to underpay them, as is currently the case already.

Here is a link to an article I found in the National Post that present the current situation: Losing the best: the technology trap in hiring

I really feel sorry for all those people who currently have to find jobs in a very difficult economic environment and who are treated with such little consideration and who have about no way to get around the modern practice of recruiting.

Copyright 2009 The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.