With Big Data on the rise, employers are diligently collecting, storing and ultimately analyzing their applicant data in order to recruit and hire better. The concept of job matching isn’t a new one, but with the increase of tech innovation, it’s becoming the latest darling in recruiting. A few months ago, Tech Crunch and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL talked about the investment boom where investors are dumping “cash toward one of the largest pain points for any company – hiring.” How much cash? “Over $400 million” in venture funding was raised last year to develop innovative technology that promises to make finding the right job or employee much like finding the perfect love match. Now before you laugh about the concept of “match.com” for job seekers and employers, there is even a romance site, trying to match employers and job seekers as easily as they pair couples. Pardon me as I quote Tina Turner, and ask the question, “What’s Love Got to do With it?”
While you can thank me later for having that song stuck in your head for the entire day, the real question to ask before applying any of the latest-tech trends to your hiring strategy is…will all the technology work?” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Ben Baldwin asked that question and more about the tech advances stating, “is all the innovation in the hiring space making it easier for you to actually find the right employees, or conversely for job seekers to find the right jobs?” The article goes on to mention about how these job match solutions must be able to have three elements in order to be successful, including real-time mobility, scalability and this one: “Leverages the true predictors of job success. To be effective, job matching must involve the true predictors of job success, which include both sides of the hiring equation: skills, knowledge and experience on the one hand, and personality, motivation and culture fit on the other. This means that job matching has to go beyond what the résumé provides.”
These elements certainly make sense in terms of selecting the right criteria for success, but for employers this last element barely dips its foot in the recruiting pool. If the goal is to have more presumable qualified candidates, i.e. job matching for employers, well, that’s one thing. But personality, motivation and culture fit aside, reviewing resumes from those job matches is just the beginning of the entire hiring process. What’s missing MOST in the technology we currently have and what lies in our future is the one thing technology can’t provide—the human element.
I’ve been working in the employment industry for well over two decades, and I can promise you, the hiring process by no means is one that is technology-driven. It’s people-driven. True, the technology, like any business, supports our needs and creates efficiency, but the process by which we review, discuss, interview, test, select, offer, negotiate and hire has little to do with technology and more to do with good old-fashioned hard work. And in the end, what determines real success is the employers’ commitment and willingness to find the right fit for their business. All the technology progress is great and I agree the innovation has been lacking for some time, but as it stands today, technology can help the process, but it can never fully replace the reason we’re here in the first place—the people.
That’s my two cents on the subject. What about you? How do you see this technology revolution today and how it will impact your business?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Ingrid Moore
Ingrid Moore is the Founder and CEO of Corporate Resources of Illinois, an employment & staffing agency withover 20+years’ experience located in Schaumburg, IL. Ingrid and her team assist employers with finding the right hire for their business. For more info, follow us on our LinkedIn Company Page, or follow us Corporate Resources of Illinois‘s Google+ page.
