In this episode Matt Alder talks with Matt Charney Executive Editor at Recruiting Daily
There is so much social media and conference talk in the industry round new tools and approaches it would be easy to think that we are in a golden age of recruitment innovation. However when you dig below the hype, some would argue that a lot of the new products being launched are just slightly different versions of existing technologies that have already been around for the last ten years.
In this interview Matt and Matt talk about the current state of innovation in the industry and what makes a genuinely innovative product. They also discuss why employers buy into new tools, the role of established vendors and an emerging trend that could see us looking at recruitment in very different way.
Links from this episode:
http://www.recruitingdaily.com
http://www.recruitingblogs.com
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Monster Worldwide. Monster has two products that are helping to shape the future of Social Talent.
Matt Alder [00:00:09]:
Bin by Monster, which enables companies to source the best tech talent from the.
Matt Alder [00:00:13]:
Open web, and Monster Social Job Ads.
Matt Alder [00:00:16]:
Which extends job advertising reach to target both passive and active candidates on social platforms, including on Twitter.
Matt Alder [00:00:41]:
Hi, and welcome to episode 16 of the Recruiting Future podcast. There is so much social media and conference noise in our industry round. New tools and approaches. It would be easy to think that we are living in a golden age of recruitment innovation. However, whenever I dig down past the hype, I wonder whether there is anything truly driving the industry forward or whether it’s just a lot of people launching slightly different versions of tools we’ve had for 10 years. My guest this week is executive editor of Recruiting Daily, Matt Charney, and he’s certainly someone who has an opinion on this subject.
Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi, everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest this week is Matt Charney. Hi, Matt, how are you?
Matt Charney [00:01:27]:
I’m good, Matt, how are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:01:28]:
I’m pretty good, actually. Pretty good indeed. Could you just introduce yourself to everyone?
Matt Charney [00:01:33]:
Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Matt Charney and I am the executive editor for Recruiting Daily, which is a company that owns a bunch of content based destinations that all focus on recruiting. The two most prominent which are recruitingdaily.com and recruitingblogs.com, you should check them out. And there’s my spiel. So thank you for that.
Matt Alder [00:01:57]:
Definitely, definitely. I will make sure we put links in the show notes as well so people can click through and have a look. I think it’d be quite interesting to start with just a little bit about you and how you got to do what you do.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
Because I know you’ve had kind of.
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
A sort of varied career. I think when I first met you, I think you had sort of doing content and blogging for Monster. So can you just give us a bit of background on you and how you got to be where you are today?
Matt Charney [00:02:22]:
Yeah, I think my career story is kind of like a cambo novel, honestly. There’s no real trajectory or plot, but here I am. So more or less what had happened is I just kind of started off as a recruiter and I realized before employer branding or social recruiting became things that the Internet could be used to cast a wide net to attract more candidates than making cold calls, which I, having started my career in recruiting didn’t want to make because I was hungover most days. Right. It was much easier to use Google and Facebook. So I ultimately kind of set up the first initiatives around that at Disney and Warner Brothers, in addition to doing full cycle recruiting for a bunch of very boring positions like Controllership and Treasury. And from there I just kind of started blogging. And one of my posts, which was on how recruiters read resumes, I got published on ere, and the next thing I knew I was up interviewing at Monster, which I thought was ironic. And I did so I could get some funny content. And I ended up kind of starting their B2B social media and content marketing function. And from there I just kind of worked for a few vendors in their marketing roles. And lucky enough I was able to come on to my current role, which is covering, I guess, for lack of a better word, a journalistic sense, the recruiting industry and vendors and helping a bunch of them with their marketing initiatives rather than work in house. So really, it’s just kind of been a weird but fun journey and it all kind of came from writing the right blog posts and finding the right audience.
Matt Alder [00:04:13]:
Great stuff. And I think that’s why I really kind of wanted to have this chat with you, really, because you’re certainly a man with an opinion. I think that’s kind of fair enough to say, isn’t it?
Matt Charney [00:04:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. Now, whether that’s right or not, that’s up for the day.
Matt Alder [00:04:37]:
And really what this particular sort of podcast is about in this episode is innovation. So from what you’re kind of seeing in the market, because I know you see lots of things, you know, you talk to in house, people you work with, vendors, all kinds of stuff. Do you think the recruiting market is innovative at the moment?
Matt Charney [00:05:01]:
I think it’s innovative at selling things. I don’t think it’s products or its approach to solving problems are necessarily innovative. I think it’s really good at selling those products.
Matt Alder [00:05:16]:
Yeah. Okay. And is there anything that you’ve seen that is innovative from all the sort of products and services and approaches and, you know, thought leaders and all the things that are out there?
Matt Charney [00:05:30]:
I mean, I think that there are a handful of products out there. A lot of them don’t get a lot of press or are still kind of nascent in terms of their overall roadmap that stand out? And I think unilaterally, what those have in common is that they’re not only new, but you can understand them within like 30 seconds. Like you don’t need some complicated Pictures like, oh, okay, I understand what you do. And I totally get what hole in the market that fills. An example of that would be a company out of Seattle called Textio that just raised some funds and essentially all you do is you cut and paste a job description in there and it parses that against a database of millions of job descriptions to monitor how strong it is for SEO and suggest ways you can improve it to, you know, improve yield in terms of that job posting. So that. And there’s a British company where all you have to do some always cut and paste a resume in there and it’ll tell you your market range for compensation based entirely on the language. Like, I think those are really innovative point solutions, but I think that their growth is largely being stymied by enterprise and larger vendors who are trying to build competitive solutions in house and consistently tell their clients, you know, that’s coming, a product that will do the same thing is on the roadmap. And whether or not they deliver on that, that’s a mixed bag.
Matt Alder [00:07:10]:
I think that tends to be a kind of a stock response from a lot of the established vendors to kind of stave off that, stave off that competition. I think it’s interesting as well because they’re both companies that I’d not heard of, but I completely it and I think it’s a really, really great idea. I mean, I tend to find that a lot of the products that come onto the market these days are either a different version of a job board or a different version of a kind of recruitment consultant. I mean, what. What do you think?
Matt Charney [00:07:39]:
Yeah, I mean, I’d agree with that, but I also think that a lot of the next generation job boards, for example, have taken that business model and really done what I would say is an innovative job of reinventing the category. Like indeed and Glassdoor are built on the same business model as a mobster or career builder. But at the same time we’re able to really recreate the way that that whole value prop works for both employers and job seekers. So I do think there is some innovation going on even within more established space. But at the same time, I think that what we’re really seeing is the same, I guess, vendors popping up with solutions that may or may not work. And any quote unquote innovation is more or less a feature set that nobody actually needs, like video interviewing. Like nobody actually needs that. Is it innovative in the sense that nobody’s really implemented that and made a strong business case for. For it? Yeah, I think that, you know, you could you could look at it as innovative. All these quote unquote candidate experience platforms, they likely solve what’s a pretty bad problem. But do you need a point solution to overcome lazy recruiting? I’m not 100% convinced as interesting.
Matt Alder [00:09:06]:
It’s an interesting perspective. I mean do you think that. I suppose ultimately this comes down to the demand, the demand in the market. And do you think that recruiters, particularly in house recruiters are actually looking for something new? Are they looking for innovation? Are they looking to do things differently? Or is it just being about being more efficient at what they’re actually doing on a day to day basis already?
Matt Charney [00:09:30]:
So basically I think that’s kind of two trends coming together in a perfect storm. One of those is that recruiters and talent acquisition organizations suddenly have budgets to burn. It’s like they’ve been, everyone’s been so resource starved for so long and all of a sudden the floodgates have opened and they’re out there, you know, looking to make it rain. And then I think that the other thing that’s really driving the market is recruiters have this really weird fear of missing out. So I think that they tend to allocate those newly found funds into places that make them feel like they’re on the cutting edge or doing something new, even if it’s something that doesn’t actually improve real recruiting results. You know, they prefer sexy style in terms of over systems of substance. I would say.
Matt Alder [00:10:26]:
Okay, now as a, as broadly speaking, a content professional, you know, you’re forever, you know, writing articles and producing other content and you know, you’ve already sort of mentioned content marketing as we’ve been, as we’ve been talking. Do you think that that is important or will be important from a recruitment marketing perspective in terms of actually communicating with candidates, allowing people to kind of express their employer brand, find and persuade the top talent for their organisations. Is it an important thing?
Matt Charney [00:11:07]:
Yeah, I mean, so I think it has already become central. If you look at how the recruiting process has always funct like your basic unit of currency is a job description.
Matt Alder [00:11:19]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matt Charney [00:11:23]:
So because we’ve more or less democratized distribution through aggregators like indeed. As well as, you know, everyone starts their search in Google, it becomes less about where you’re putting those job descriptions and more about what you say in them and how you optimize them to be found. So I think that that strategy alone and trying to drive applicants through the millions and millions of dollars companies dedicate to recruitment marketing every year, it really just comes down to Building and optimizing the best content possible to reach the right target.
Matt Alder [00:11:59]:
Okay, and do you think that’s likely to go beyond job postings in the coming sort of months and years?
Matt Charney [00:12:08]:
I mean, it sort of has already in terms of, you know, employer branding or employee reviews on sites like Lastdoor, and increasingly like, indeed, as well as, you know, companies trying to build this presence across platforms around their employer brand. So I do think that, you know, there’s definitely starting to be a shift there now. Whether or not that’s actually a thing, I don’t know. Because at the end of the day, as long as we have search engines, as long as we have applicant tracking systems, then it really is not going to be a substantive change from the current model. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, to be honest with you. Anyone who says the resume is dead does not understand how enterprise systems work in recruiting.
Matt Alder [00:13:07]:
Okay. Which I suppose leads me fantastically onto my next question, which is something that I pretty much ask everyone who comes on the podcast now, which is, can you replace a recruiter with an algorithm?
Matt Charney [00:13:20]:
No. Well, I guess actually that’s a subjective answer. It depends on the recruiter and it depends on the algorithm, to be honest with you, because there are some recruiters who are, I would say they do nothing at best and hurt all of us in terms of professional reputation at worst, who should be replaced by algorithms because the algorithms would actually do something. But that said, ultimately what we’ve seen is that there’s, I mean, high tech has really driven a lot of the strategy and approaches in recruiting today. But it’s high tech, it’s high touch that I think really turns that into an actual relationship that’s going to lead to an offer. Right. And at the end of the day, that’s what you’re trying to do, is you’re trying to fill positions. Yeah. So I think that’s really become the competitive differentiators, how well you can take those online relationships and strengthen them offline or through interpersonal communications. And I don’t think an algorithm will be able to do that anytime soon, no matter how advanced semantic technologies get.
Matt Alder [00:14:35]:
Okay, so what’s next? What do you think is next for recruitment? Where is this innovation or lack of innovation leading us to what? You know, what are we going to be sort of talking about in two or three years time, do you think?
Matt Charney [00:14:52]:
So what I think is kind of interesting is that you can always kind of tell where recruitment’s going by looking at where marketing was. It’s about a five year lag time, I would say if you’re looking at, quote, unquote, leading edge. So if I look at what’s next, I honestly think that the biggest changes that are going to happen are going to be that I think employers are going to start increasingly tasking employees with driving referrals and actively recruiting as part of their job responsibilities.
Matt Alder [00:15:33]:
Okay, that’s interesting.
Matt Charney [00:15:34]:
Yeah. Rather than just rely on, you know, a recruiter, I think you’re also really going to see a shift since, you know, companies are ultimately going to wake up to the fact that all those resumes they’ve spent years ignoring are, in fact, a huge database of, at one point in time, warm job seekers. We’re going to see an emphasis, I think, from owning external search to having the search capabilities to make those profiles meaningful. And we’re going to start early, sourcing the systems we have instead of looking to funnel more leads into them. So those are, I think, the largest changes I anticipate in recruiting. And then obviously, if I’m really looking out, I’m excited to see what happens when Oculus Rift gets released and goes mainstream, which will happen the next couple years.
Matt Alder [00:16:27]:
Virtual reality recruiting. What do you think that would look like?
Matt Charney [00:16:30]:
You know, I don’t. There’s so many possibilities, right, from situational job training to being able to see what it’s like to really work in an office, employer branding initiatives, to even being able to do test and or real interviews. So I think that what you can do with that system is all about who’s building what using the API, because it’ll be open. So I think the vendors have a really interesting chance to help drive that technology. And there’s so many applications for recruiting an hr. All I can say is that as soon as I put it on for the first time, I realized that it was everything that Google Glass was supposed to be. Right.
Matt Alder [00:17:15]:
Fantastic. I think I’m looking forward to that. The virtual reality recruitment future. Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Charney [00:17:24]:
Yeah, no, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:17:27]:
My thanks to Matt Charney. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes and read show notes@www.rfpodcast.com and also subscribe to the mailing list there to get exclusive content and find out about future guests.
Matt Alder [00:17:45]:
Thanks for listening.
Matt Alder [00:17:46]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
