It’s fair to say that trends in recruiting technology are moving quickly. The events of the last 12 months have turbo boasted some aspects of the market and radically disrupted others. So what’s changed, what’s accelerating and what does the future look like?
My guest this week is the perfect person to ask and was the most requested guest in the audience survey that I ran earlier in the year. Hung Lee is the Editor of the leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood and a keen observer of recruiting technology.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Changing trends
▪ The rise of assessment tech
▪ Interview analytics
▪ The future of automation
▪ Ethics
▪ What happens after the pandemic
▪ How the way the industry educates itself on technology has changed
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 338 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s fair to say that trends in recruiting technology are moving quickly. The events of the last 12 months have turbo boosted some aspects of the market and radically disrupted others. So what’s changed? What’s accelerating, and what does the future look like? My guest this week is the perfect person to ask and was the most requested guest in the audience survey that I ran earlier in the year. Hung Lee is the editor of leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brain Food and a keen observer of recruiting technology. Hi Hung, and welcome to the podcast.
Hung Lee [00:01:50]:
Hey Matt, how are you doing? Thank you for inviting me back. A pleasure to be here, man.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
So I look back through the archives and you have actually been on the show before. You’re on episode 94 in June 2017.
Hung Lee [00:02:02]:
Was that five years? It’s nearly five years ago, isn’t it?
Matt Alder [00:02:05]:
For those people who may not know who you are, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hung Lee [00:02:09]:
Sure. So my name is Hong Lee. I write a newsletter called Recruiting Brain Food and basically this is a curated newsletter of recruiting content that I send out to, you know, thousands of recruiters and HR people every week on Sunday.
Matt Alder [00:02:26]:
Now, the last time you were on the show, you were talking about trends in technology recruitment. This time I want to talk about trends in recruiting technology. So as someone who creates a lot of content, you’ve got your own weekly show where you talk to lots of different people about what’s going on in the industry. We’ve been through a crazy 12 months. Crazy things have been happening. Lots of disruption in our space. What are you seeing in terms of recruiting technology? What’s changed? What’s developed? Where are we now?
Hung Lee [00:02:55]:
I think the. I mean, you can. There’s certain things that are Obvious, but it might be worth just like outlining what they are terms of categories I think. First things first, Assessment technology through the roof over the last two years or so, but driven primarily by, you know, the economic crisis that’s followed on from COVID19. What this has meant is ultimately companies have been overloaded by applicants and so the response that they’ve had to adopt is to think about how can probably support the recruiters that are overwhelmed by job applications, how can they support those recruiters whilst at the same time providing the right experience for those candidates coming in. So assessment technology has experienced a rapid adoption. I think it’s been a massive shot in the arm really if I can use that medical analogy for that segment of recruitment tech. So anybody doing things like video assessment, online assessments, psychometric testing, anything that basically asks candidate to be assessed automatically has been. That’s one segment that is clearly in a position that has really boomed over the past couple of years, sort of past couple of months, should I say following the pandemic. So there’s some direct impact stuff basically Matt, you know, you can see it in how companies are dealing with it. Some great case studies that have emerge. I know you had Jeff Uden on actually on the podcast I believe a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, classic example, right? I mean he was talking about hundreds of thousands of job applications. There’s no way a human being or any number of human beings could handle that volume. He recruiting Iceland Foods for for instance Emergency works and so forth. You have to deal with it with, with technology and, and products like Predictive Hire which is what Jeff used helped enable that company to handle those applications and make those hires whilst also giving, you know, great outcomes for the, the candidates that have gone through it. So assessment tech number one massive sort of uptake is one straight off the bat.
Matt Alder [00:05:24]:
Any others that you’ve seen or you’ve been tracking?
Hung Lee [00:05:26]:
Yeah, absolutely. Again, pandemic related. But the shift to remote has completely changed the way in which we communicate. You know, one of the things that is probably underreported but it’ll be obvious when you think about it. But essentially the shift to remote is also a shift from analog to digital. You know, if you think about all of the communications and you know, connections that you’re making in an on premise situation, all of those bits of information were typically exchanged in an analog way. You know, you’d have an in person meeting or you know, you’d have a chat over the coffee machine or such. With the shift to remote, the on premise hasn’t been happening. So all of the conversations that are now happening are happening in a digital format, which means, of course, that companies are able to monitor that information. They suddenly have a massive bloom of data about how their company actually operates and how information flows through their businesses. And so there’s a tremendous opportunity, I think, for companies to learn more about how their businesses truly operate and make better decisions as a result of it. So we’re talking about organizational network analytics, I guess, or people analytics. Or even if you want to narrow it down to a part of the recruitment process, you can talk about it in terms of like interview analytics, for instance. You know, think about a lot of the, the important parts of the recruiting would be the, the face to face interview with a candidate, you know, second, third, third stage, final stage or whatnot. But if that was an analog process, it’s just basically two people in a room, you don’t really have data that you can go with that. You have no idea what’s occurred. But of course, if this is now a zoom call, then you can track information like how long was the interview, how many questions were asked, who is doing the talking. You know, all of that stuff suddenly becomes available to you and it becomes interesting from a business point of view. You know, you might be able to identify some training opportunities there, or you could identify subconscious bias that’s been occurring, or you could have a better understanding as to your interview efficiency. So the shift to remote has all of these kinds of second order effects that we’re just discovering as we go. But there’s going to be new recruitment tech categories emerging that I think are going to be very exciting for us to explore.
Matt Alder [00:08:15]:
It’s really clear now that technology is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in talent acquisition and that’s kind of really, it’s really sort of accelerated because I think that many organizations, and I’m thinking back to Jeff Iceland in particular here, you know, many, many organizations might not have embraced this kind of technology or this way of working, or had sort of internal barriers to it, but necessity has kind of really driven that forward and it means that these technologies are kind of being embraced and used. So I suppose just to sort of pick up on that and a couple of things that you said. One of the big conversations on the podcast over the last 12 months has been about automation and what we’re talking here about certain types of recruiting automation. What’s your view on recruiting automation? Is it going to go further? Has it gone too far already? You know, what’s the balance between humans and Robots. And where do you think we’re going to get to?
Hung Lee [00:09:11]:
Yeah, I’m a big advocate of recruitment automation. I think there’s a lot of we overrated human centric recruitment. You know what I mean by that Matt, is that oftentimes we, you know, think oh my goodness, the candidate’s really gonna, you know, not be happy with dealing with a non human interface or a non human conversation. But we then entirely forget that candidates have been extraordinarily badly treated by human recruiters. You know, the complaints that candidates have over the broken recruitment experience has, you know, been, been going on decades now. So I don’t think when it’s, it’s a great defense to say, you know, a human centric way of recruiting is necessarily superior to one that has heavy components that are automated. What automation, what candidates really want is timely prompt information up until the point where they’re, you know, genuinely trying to build trust relationships. So the division between the candidate journey and my sort of view of it is that when the candidate is at the top of the funnel and just entering it, no one’s interested that much in the human touch. They don’t have time for it. They want to know the information that is factual and timely. Where are they in the recruitment process? Has the application been received? Is it a yes? No, am I progressing to the next stage? Where I am, where am I in this recruiting funnel? None of that requires human touch in my opinion. It just requires the information to be delivered promptly and accurately. Where human beings need to appear is really much further back towards the middle and end of that funnel when people are seriously beginning to make decisions or thinking about making decisions, decisions that have this life changing impact. This is where you do need to have connections with the people that you know, you would be working with. You know, ideally you want to be speaking with hiring managers, with teammates and people of that ilk at that point. But it isn’t the case that, you know, having automation is going to be frustrating for candidates. It’s much better for the candidate to know information whether it’s delivered by a robot or a human being. Just give that person that information when, when the business has it.
Matt Alder [00:11:39]:
And what about the, the concerns around the ethics of all of this? So in particular AI being used to make decisions and potentially a lack of transparency within that. But also going back to your earlier comment about recording data within an organization, people’s privacy being protected from their employer spying literally on every word they say. Well, you know, where do you think.
Hung Lee [00:12:03]:
The balance is in a crisis, Matt, and I think that when we’re probably going to end up not solving this problem at the ethical level simply because there isn’t a clear answer as to what the right thing to do is, I think different countries and different jurisdictions will behave differently on this, by the way. So, for instance, you know, there’s a kind of a continuum, isn’t there, as to which societies care about privacy more than others. You might see, for instance, that the countries in Europe probably have the most heightened sense of citizens rights and employee rights and so forth. At one end of privacy, then you have kind of countries in East Asia, China in particular, that you know, would have no consideration on this at all. And then probably floating in the middle of that, you’ve got the Anglo Saxon world, which is, yeah, sure, let’s give it a shot. Particularly in the US where a lot of these technologies come from. So I think how we deal with this ethically will be regionally different. We’ll have different outcomes. I think we’ll be wrestling with this for a very, for a very long time. I’m not here to say what my opinion is on it simply because I don’t think my opinion is close to consensus in the region where I operate. So in plain language, I basically think that we should plow on ahead and use AI and embrace it, even though it may be imperfect. Again with the main point of my argument is that the human beings were never perfect. So having AI free experience doesn’t necessarily make fairer. In fact, a lot of the issues associated with AI have been based on kind of data from human recruiters that simply been scaled up. So a good example of this would be a post I featured on the newsletter a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know whether you saw it, but it was with the German business that a bunch of German journalists, actually Bavarian journalists, tested video technology by changing hairstyles, changing, you know, backgrounds and lighting conditions and all those types of things to see whether they may be able to impact the, the success or failure of those candidates or the scoring of those candidates. And of course, you know, it came up with some remarkable bits of information. You know, if you had like three books more on your bookcase, you might trip the AI to thinking you’re a smarter candidate and therefore improve your scoring. And of course, you know, everyone jumps on to point the finger at the technology and say, look, AI is a terrible thing, we should get rid of it. But if you dig a little bit deeper into the research, you’ll find out that the AI was trained on human recruiter behavior. So it’s simply replicating what a human being would have decision a human being would have made as, as we, we do it. So getting rid of the AI doesn’t remove the bias, it simply removes the responsibility of the bias. It doesn’t actually improve the conditions of fairness for the candidate. So my view of it is we need to get better AI, we need more of it, we don’t need less. But we are wrestling with huge ethical issues and different people will have different opinions as to what is right or wrong. Probably I would say in Europe, if you want me to give forecast, we’re going to strip out a lot of potentially useful technology because of legal and of these legal and ethical concerns.
Matt Alder [00:16:00]:
I think that’s really interesting and I think you make such a good point there about. This isn’t actually necessarily about the technology itself. It’s about how, it’s about human behavior and understanding of the technology. And I think we’re in a position where things were already moving quicker than human thought could keep up with. And the last 12 months has really accelerated that. So there is a lot of catching up to do in terms of education, understanding and really thinking about the impacts of this technology. And sadly I’m old enough to remember when email was first introduced in the workplace and there were huge amounts of sort of privacy concerns and Big Brother is watching you and all that kind of stuff going on there. So this is nothing new in terms of technology, but obviously things are moving much faster and, and are much more all encompassing than they, than they used to be.
Hung Lee [00:16:54]:
There’s, there’s, there’s also like there’s paradoxes in this debate, man. I mean it’s difficult again, you know, we do need to have probably a values driven conversation industry wide about it. But you know, this, this, the paradox I’ve just come come up with here is, you know, we, we generally think that, you know, being colorblind is a bad thing. You know, that’s the, the consensus conversation when it comes to, you know, racial discrimination and what have you. In the 1990s it was promoted to be the idea, you know what? Don’t see color, it’s not a thing. Treat everyone the same and everything will be tickety boo 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line. We’ve not moved to the point now where we say look, you’re kidding yourself. If you’re thinking you can’t see color, you will see it either consciously or subconsciously. What you need to do is recognize it as what it is and then Recognize the potential biases that you might have developed as a result of these color differentials or these racial differences that are these racial categories should I say, that exist in society. So we’ve got to the point now where we think, you know what, we shouldn’t be colorblind in our social behavior. You know, we should recognize people’s ethnic and racial identity. And yet you look at how, you know, the path of recruitment technology is going to, is like we should anonymize now. And I’m just thinking, okay, if we’re moving down a path where we are at a social level saying we shouldn’t try to be colorblind and yet the pressure on the technology guys is to say, you know what, we should, you know, anonymize the data or create sort of ways in which we are not collecting this information, then it just strikes me, you know what, that’s kind of going counter against the, the social trend. And at some point we’re going to have this paradox where we want to recognize racial categories, racial distinctions in society because that’s the root cause of discrimination in many cases. And yet we’re using technology that may not actually collect that information. So we, we’ve never had an ethical conversation at any kind of level. And that makes a difference at industry level, Matt. And so, you know, we will end up with these paradoxical positions and you know, like I say, I don’t think we’re going to solve any of them very easily. Unfortunately. It’s going to be a very tough challenge.
Matt Alder [00:19:26]:
No, absolutely. I think this is a conversation that we’re going to be revisiting numerous times over the next, over the next few years. Basically just thinking about the future while we’re talking about it as the, hopefully the world comes out of the pandemic and we get to whatever normal is going to look like. Where do you think recruiting tech’s going to going to sort of be taking us, taking us next? Do you think that these are long lived changes that we’ve been seeing or will the trends go in a different direction once we’re kind of out of the COVID emergency?
Hung Lee [00:20:03]:
Yeah, I mean some of these things are going to be persistent. I think the, the, the assessment tech is more or less going to kill the multi stage interview for sure. You know, the idea that we’re beginning to realize why we do in person interviews and again we’ve been kidding ourselves all this time that you know, we’re doing it because we wanted to assess for this person’s capability to do the job but actually you can do that better with different ways now you can do it better with assessment technology, you can do it better with work trialing, you can do it better with other signals that can pick up in many cases from this person’s, you know, previous working, working life. And so a lot of the big stages that we used to have in the recruiting funnel, I think will, will get smaller. Some of them might disappear altogether. I do anticipate a scenario where people get hired without a face to face interview ever occurring. And already this happens, you know, with companies that are remote first remote only oftentimes the interview is, is, is pretty much an irrelevant thing. It may well be provided as a way to introduce the individual to the people they may be working with and we will change the purpose of that function. But the idea that whatever use it as a way to assess capability probably is on its way out. So that’s a big chunk of the interview process, Matt. You know, if you count the number of minutes and hours spent doing the interview side, it’s probably the predominant part of the all recruiting funnel. So there’s going to be huge changes that I think will be persistent driven by this period.
Matt Alder [00:21:59]:
There’s a lot of change going on. And the need for people to educate themselves to learn to talk about, talk best practice and really kind of come together and communicate has never been, it’s kind of never been more important. And here we are with, with most of the world still locked down or semi locked down there. There are no face to face events going on anywhere certainly at the moment. How do you think the pandemic has changed the way that people sort of learn and educate themselves about recruiting technology?
Hung Lee [00:22:31]:
Yeah, it’s been a big bang, hasn’t it Matt, in terms of just all of the laggards, if you like, and I don’t want to use that term in a derogatory way, but you know, reading the dictionary definition of it in the sense, you know, the people that you know never really embrace the idea of online community and online communication. I think COVID 19 has forced all of those folks to really dive into this online space and to learn that it is just another space. So, you know, we’ve seen the growth of online events, we’ve seen everyone’s doing a webinar, everyone’s doing a podcast, everyone’s doing these things. I’m not appalled by that. I’m looking at that thinking that’s a good thing, you know, that gives people a lot more choice, gets people to be involved, really democratizes who are the people that are organizing these things. So it’s not locked within, you know, a small coterie of people, people that sort of, if you like, can sometimes control what people is being spoken about. So I think the, the blossoming of, of these online communities definitely will be sustained going forward. I don’t think there’s any going back. You know, there’s no scenario where people adopt technology and decide to just, you know, get rid of it and go back. That doesn’t seem to happen anytime where there is a technology, mass adoption. So we’re just going to plow forward. Online communities, podcasts, newsletters, all of these things have just proliferated and I think all the better for it.
Matt Alder [00:24:03]:
So on the topic of online communities, tell everyone a little bit more about recruiting brain food and how they can get involved and where they can go to sign up.
Hung Lee [00:24:12]:
Yeah, sure. So it started off as a newsletter and it’s still the main thing. So if you go to recruitingbrainfood.com you can sign up for it. It’s free. It’s just a weekly newsletter. And all I’m doing, Matt, is curating, you know, great content that I find on the Internet and saying, you know what, maybe you should check this out. So it comes out every, every week. It’s since become of the things, you know, there’s a really lively online community now where, you know, members can speak to each other. There’s a video live stream I do every, every Friday where we typically speak to community members that have got an interesting story to say and we get other people involved in the conversation. There’s all kinds of, you know, the way I see my role now, Matt, is to. Is to say, how can I continue to service this group of people and this ecosystem, this recruiting ecosystem, as best I can. And, you know, the demand is always there the same. It’s for, where can I get educational content? Where can I get inspirational content? Where can I connect with other professionals in the space and learn from them and become more, you know, educated and secure in their own, you know, profession. One thing I would add to that, that as well, Matt, is One thing that COVID 19 has really taught us that, that we can’t just sit there and be very, you know, casual about our own marketability and our own sort of economic security. You know, we’ve all seen how difficult it can be when a complete surprise like this pandemic has been, can completely, you know, wipe the slate clean for everybody. So your ability to access knowledge, your ability to connect and build a network, all of those things I think are going to be persistent demand hands for everybody in the recruiting industry and hence why, you know, I think recruiting brain food makes makes sense to a lot of people.
Matt Alder [00:26:10]:
Hung, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hung Lee [00:26:12]:
My pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:26:13]:
My thanks to Hung Lee. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
