Recruiting automation is often talked about conceptually, but when you dig into the details, there is a big question mark around what is actually possible and what employers are actually currently doing in this area. At the same time, there are questions around quality, cost and candidate experience which just aren’t being adequately debated.
With this in mind, I decided it was time to investigate the issue in more detail, so I got together with experienced recruiting leader John Wallace to dig a bit deeper into the world recruiting automation.
In this episode you will find:
- John Wallace’s thoughts and concerns about recruiting automation from the perspective of being the former head of resourcing at Barclays, Tesco Bank and Royal Bank Of Scotland.
- An interview with Ben Gledhill, Heading of Resourcing at Yodel, on the practicalities of using technology to automate candidate communication at the front end of the recruiting process
- An interview with Kevin Wheeler exploring the potential and likely future direction of recruiting automation
- Mine and John’s summary and closing thoughts
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Greenhouse Software. Greenhouse is a leader in enterprise talent acquisition software. Greenhouse’s solutions, like Greenhouse Recruiting, are designed to help talent teams find the best candidates and improve the entire hiring process. Thousands of the smartest and most successful companies, like Lyft, Cisco, Meraki, Buzzfeed, Warby Parker and Airbnb, use Greenhouse’s intelligent guidance to design and automate all aspects of hiring. To learn more, head to Go Greenhouse IO Podcast. That’s Go Greenhouse IO Podcast.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 178 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Recruiting automation is often talked about conceptually, but when you dig into the details, there’s a big question mark around what’s actually possible and what employers are actually currently doing in this area. At the same time, there are questions around quality, cost and candidate experience, which just aren’t being properly debated. With this in mind, I decided it was time to investigate the issue in more detail. So I got together with experienced recruiting leader John Wallace to dig a bit deeper into the world of recruiting automation.
Matt Alder [00:01:51]:
Hi, John, how are you?
John Wallace [00:01:52]:
I’m brilliant. Matt, how are you today?
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
I’m very well. Very, very well indeed. So our last investigative podcast, that’s a difficult word to say, but I’m saying it anyway, was on recruiting capability and we got some really good feedback and some of the feedback was we should do. We should get together and do a follow up. So here we are, we’re continuing our theme of trying to record in as many different parts of Edinburgh as we can. But for 2019, we have upgraded and we are actually in a proper recording studio. And John, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more comfortable wearing headphones than you are right now.
John Wallace [00:02:31]:
It’s hearing my own voice. Come back to me, Matt, is the bit that’s particularly disturbing.
John Wallace [00:02:35]:
Yeah.
John Wallace [00:02:36]:
We follow in the footsteps of some illustrious artists who have recorded in this room. So let’s see if we can hit them with the same quality today.
Matt Alder [00:02:42]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
So what I really want to know is, you know, what’s on your mind for 2019 when it comes to things that talent acquisition professionals should be paying attention to now? You know, we’ll leave aside economic and political issues for now because obviously they’re sort of dominating, pretty much dominating the new cycle. But with those things aside, what should be on the mind of every talent acquisition professional currently?
John Wallace [00:03:07]:
Well, I think leading on from what we talked about last time, Matt, where we explored capability and we asked that fundamental question, are we good enough to do the really important task that we have within talent acquisition? Perhaps one of the things that will be really pertinent and at the front of people’s minds in 2019 would be a question of is the increasing levels of automation capability the answer to these capability questions. So in other words, can we replace, let’s say average recruiters with brilliant machines or are we replacing average recruiters with average machines? And I think that’s something that’s really interesting for the next year.
Matt Alder [00:03:49]:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I kind of saw more and more stuff being written on automation through the, through the course, of course, of last year. You know, obviously lots of stuff about artificial intelligence and does it really exist in recruitment and you know, also, you know, stuff around algorithmic bias and all these kind of things. But I think there are some sort of fundamental questions around automating recruitment that, that need to be asked that haven’t sort of, you know, haven’t sort of really been, been covered. I suppose for me the fundamental question is what can you automate and is it already happening? What questions do you think automation throws up for someone like you who’ve done that talent acquisition job?
John Wallace [00:04:33]:
Yeah, what can be automated, of course, is the first question. But what should be automated as well is very important. There are certain parts of the process which the candidate experiences enhanced by human interaction. And can we automate those or should we automate those? And what’s the downside of automating those? The point for me, I think in a lot of the automation of processes is that is invariably a cost reduction exercise. And by implementing more cost reduction exercises into our recruitment, are we doing that thing that always happens with recruitment which is looking at it as a cost cutting exercise, but we know fine, rightly that has an impact on quality. So I think that question of how do you balance automation and the efficiencies you get from that, but still manage to maintain the quality of hiring? Or can you improve the quality of hiring through automation as well and perhaps reduce some of those biases that we know exist in all the processes? So I think that’s a really, really interesting balance that organizations have to find.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
Yeah, definitely. And I think for years we’ve been talking about whether a robot or an algorithm could replace a recruiter. And I think we always end up with this almost this pantomime style argum, you know. Oh no, it doesn’t. Oh yes it can, you know, that kind of thing. And I don’t think that has really sort of driven the industry forward necessarily. It’s kind of polarized the thinking. And I think we see automation in so many different industries. It’s probably safe to say that it’s going to happen in recruitment whether, whether we, whether we like it, whether we like it or not. I suppose it just becomes a question of to what extent and what can be automated. And also I think that there is so spin out there about recruitment automation. I’m also interested to know what can be done right now and what’s for the future.
John Wallace [00:06:33]:
And I think automation is already with us, of course, to a large extent. I mean, if we cast our minds back in history to recruitment campaigns, and if we look for example at the Shackleton Expedition of 1914, where he put an advert in the London Times and people wrote in with a letter to say that they wanted to go on this expedition with very little chance of survival. So that that’s a recruitment exercise that had no automation. And they fielded thousands of responses. And then you move forward to what happens today where people have their applicant tracking systems. They might have screening questions up front. They might do some sort of CV filtering with some sort of tool that analyzes the content of CVs and reduces things like that. They may use AVR systems as part of their telephony interviewing things, they may use chatbots. So there’s already an awful lot out there where I think the next stage is when we get into that fundamental core of the recruitment process, which is that complex decision that is made between two human beings right now, which one human being decides, is this individual right for this organization to fill this role and will they contribute in a positive manner? And the other organization is thinking, is this, the other individual is thinking, is this organization right for me? Does it achieve my ambitions, my dreams and my goals and is it the right move for me and my family? Now you have two kind of morphing, moving, not entirely truthful elements to that and what is already a complex decision. And I think my interest in technology for the future is just how far along that line of automating that decision on behalf of the organization. Can we actually go, what’s the boundaries here and what should be the boundaries?
Matt Alder [00:08:13]:
When I’ve spoken to people on this podcast about automation in the past, people who are recruiting on a day to day basis, the answer has always come back that actually we should be automating the repeatable tasks, the things that happen all the time. The flip side is some of the clients that I’m working with at the moment on recruiting technology, actually being able to buy some recruiting technology that can effectively automate getting the right date and time for interviews is actually quite difficult. So I’m kind of really interested in what is the reality in 2019 of what can be automated. So I suppose to summarize, as a talent acquisition professional, what are the key. I know you’ve gone over some of these already, but just summarize what are the key questions that we need to really go and kind of investigate in this podcast?
John Wallace [00:09:05]:
So I think the key question for me, number one question, is what is the art of the possible here? So what can be theoretically done and how far down the scale of the decision making can that happen? Does it stop at scheduling or can you go all the way to a full decision that would be better than a human being? So that would be question number one. Question number two is, what is the impact on the quality of recruiting that these technologies do? And a sort of subsection of that question would be, what’s the impact on the candidate experience? Because we know your quality goes down, your candidate experience goes down. So are people ready to accept that? And that would be the final point for me, is just because it’s possible, does that mean it’s acceptable? And what are we prepared to accept at this point in time?
Matt Alder [00:09:50]:
Having spoken to John, I wanted to talk to an employer who was actually using technology to automate parts of their recruiting process. Ben Gledhill, the head of resourcing at Yodle, turned out to be the perfect person.
Matt Alder [00:10:04]:
Hi, Ben. And welcome back to the podcast.
Ben Gledhill [00:10:06]:
Hi, Matt. Third time lucky. Thanks for having me back on.
Matt Alder [00:10:09]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:10:09]:
You’re close to the all time record now in terms of, in terms of number of appearances. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. For people who might not be familiar with you, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Ben Gledhill [00:10:23]:
Yeah, of course. Hi, everyone, my name is Ben Gledhill. I’m the head of resourcing at Yodel up in Liverpool. We are a parcel and delivery and been here now since January. Been doing some fantastic transformation around people, around process and around tech and before that. Yeah, I’ve pretty much been around the houses, agency in house, RPO and a little bit of employee branding too.
Matt Alder [00:10:50]:
So I’m trying to answer a few questions about what’s really going on with recruitment automation. And I know it’s something that you guys have been experimenting with over the last few months.
Matt Alder [00:11:04]:
Could you tell us about it?
Ben Gledhill [00:11:05]:
Yeah, course I can. Yeah. So I Mean, you know, we, although we have kind of the standard vacancies in support functions like, you know, marketing, finance, it, other bits and pieces, you know, fundamentally air volume, business, and we probably make circa 5,000 driver and warehouse hires per year. And if you think of the applications that we get, you know, probably getting over a thousand per week in our busiest times at peak before Christmas at well over 5,000. And it’s impossible to speak to every applicant, whether it’s employed or self employed, and actually give them a good old candidate experience, sorry for the buzzword, but actually give everybody an experience whereby they feel that the application has been valued and actually taken seriously. So obviously we did a little bit of thinking and a little bit of looking at possible solutions and actually kind of taking a bit of a step back from the traditional way that we design solutions, put ourselves in the shoes of the candidates. We probably fell into the idea of using a chatbot simply because obviously there is a lot of negative press. But actually when we did our homework around the benefits that automation could bring, and specifically using the chatbot, it’s safe to say that since we’ve implemented the benefits of being fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:12:36]:
Can you talk us through the recruitment process? Where does the chatbot F in? What exactly is automated?
Ben Gledhill [00:12:45]:
Definitely. So currently there are two steps of our application process that we use automation for. So I think on the last podcast I discussed that we launched our new careers website back in September, which went really, really well, and we’re getting some really, really good stats and activity and traffic behind that. But a lot of the people that land on the careers website, it’s actually their journey into a professional driving role. So the first chatbot that we use is almost like a match me bot. So people can go on there, they can put in the postcode, what kind of license they have, the type of role that they would like to work, whether it’s permanent, self employed, or maybe neighborhood courier, something like that. And that bot will actually take them to the vacancy in question. It also shares relevant content like what does it mean to be self employed? Although we sometimes take for granted that people know what self employed means, for example, tax returns, registering your vat, other bits and pieces like that. And the second chatbot that we’ve used is actually a screening bot. And I think this is where automation augments what I would call the human touch in recruitment, if you want to use that phrase. So when a candidate applies, they automatically sent an email asking them to go through a very short pre screening process whereby we ask them questions around the role Their experience and you know, things such as, you know, are you okay to work in these hours? Are you okay handling these types of packages? Whether that’s alcohol or food related, obviously you know, do you know what a 7.5 ton van looks like? Are you okay to carry it? 30k parcel and whatnot. And if they come through that screen and they pass all the criteria, they’re then contacted by a member of my delivery team who will talk them through the last stages and actually book them on to a face to face interview. But what that process means is from somebody landing on the careers website all the way through to completing the screen, there are no black hole applications. Every single person, whatever stage they’re at, will get an outcome. So it might be that there’s no vacancies currently. We’ll put you in a talent pool or we have a vacancy. However, you have nine points on your license or you know, you haven’t got the right type of license to drive a van or whatever, or you can’t get self employed certification. So you know, gone are the days of, well, I applied for a role at Yordle and I don’t hear anymore. Every single person that applies for a role will get a response. And for me that is really where automation comes into, comes into play.
Matt Alder [00:15:56]:
And what results have you seen from implementing this so far?
Ben Gledhill [00:16:01]:
So on the whole we’ve got some really good qualitative and quantitative feedback as well. So we launched the processes back in October last year. We’re well, I think we’re past our 8,000 over 9,000th screening, which is fantastic. We’ve made over about 450 hires to date from the chatbot screened candidates which really, really weren’t expecting that, that kind of number at this stage and the actual feedback because obviously like anything that you do in recruitment, you really need to be kind of getting feedback from CAND to make sure that they are getting that kind of experience. As of last week, obviously I’ve done my homework. We’re at 96% NPS. So we have a smile, we have a meh and we have a frown. 96% of people have given us positive feedback which is really, really good. But the big one for me. And yet again, this shows a power of automation. Like many recruitment teams across the country, we roughly operate nine till five till four, those kind of hours. We have as many people using the screening bot outside of office hours as we do actually in office hours. So for example, there are still people screening themselves at 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night. And what that tells me is, you know, candidate experience isn’t about anything that we do. It’s given candidates the choice of how they want to be screened, how they want to be interviewed, how they want to be assessed. And the thing they have to remember is a lot of our demographics. They might have another job, they might have family or personal commitments. So they’re not always ready to speak to somebody or be assessed during the day. So what we’ve basically said is, we’ve sent you this email. We’d love to hear from you when you complete that assessment. It’s entirely in your own time. I think people are kind of appreciating that we’re maybe taking a step back and understanding their own kind of personal commitments and what whatnot.
Matt Alder [00:18:17]:
And how far do you think automation can or should go in the future when it comes to recruiting?
Ben Gledhill [00:18:25]:
It’s a really interesting, difficult question. Just get off the fence because those nails hurt me a little bit, I think. I mean, it is difficult one, because obviously, you know, I. And this is a big thing. I will always say, you know, recruitment is about two people speaking to each other, whether it’s a recruiter or a hiring manager or somebody being offered a role. So you’ll never lose that human touch. The one point that I will happily argue, and I’ve had some really, really good conversation around this previously, is that, you know, there are. There’s a lot of admin and there’s a lot of mundane tasks in recruitment. We all know that we don’t need to kind of go on that point so much. And if we can use automation, whether it’s a chatbot or whether it’s another piece of automated technology, to take the mundane and admin tasks away, meaning that recruiters, resources, business partners, whatever the person the equation is, if they can then spend that time speaking to hiring managers a lot more, building relationships, building rapport, or spending more time with candidates at the bottom of the funnel. Onboarding, getting involved in induction marketing. We have to look at that because I know for a fact that, you know, the finance industry, the retail industry, that’s what they’ve done. You know, everybody now has a lot more value because they’ve automated the tasks that can be automated. And I think you get a lot of the concern because, you know, maybe some processes in organizations aren’t as efficient as they could be. I think obviously, you know, automation might highlight that, but I think it’s all about augmenting people from, you know, my beliefs are technology is only as good as the People using it. And if you get all that right, that’s where you get the culture right. So for me, the laws be a place for people in talent acquisition. But I think we, you know, we need to realize that automation, AI, machine learning, whatever it is, it has got a place and it is here for the long term.
Matt Alder [00:20:32]:
Ben, thanks very much for talking to me.
Ben Gledhill [00:20:33]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:35]:
So. So, having got a sense of what’s possible with recruiting automation right now, I wondered how things might develop in the future. To find out, I spoke to another regular podcast guest, consultant and futurist, Kevin Wheeler.
Matt Alder [00:20:50]:
Hi Kevin, how are you?
Kevin Wheeler [00:20:51]:
I’m great, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:52]:
Brilliant to have you back on the, to have you back on the podcast. For those of you, for those people who may not know you, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Kevin Wheeler [00:21:04]:
Sure. I’m a futurist and a consultant and speaker. I try to focus primarily on the talent space. I spend a lot of time looking at new technologies and emerging trends in recruitment and learning and development and try to do the kind of research that’s future focused as opposed to what’s happening just today and try to give people some idea of where things are probably going to be heading and what they should do to get ready for that.
Matt Alder [00:21:39]:
I’m currently exploring recruiting automation and we’re looking into, you know, does it, does it exist? How are people, how are people using it? And you know, really the kind of the art of the possible now. But I really wanted to talk to you about where things might go in the future. So I know that you’ve recently been sort of, you know, doing some research and thinking around how recruiting might look like in 10 years time. Where, where could automation take us if it, if it takes off in terms of recruiting?
Kevin Wheeler [00:22:12]:
Sure. Well, I think the first thing is it will take off. It’s inevitable. I think the only question that remains is how fast are we going to get to a highly automated future future and what are the intermediate steps that we’re going to probably go through to get there? I think initially in the next three to five years, you’re going to see more things like chatbots and automated assessment tools and more powerful AI powered engagement tools start to play a part in the recruiting process. You’re going to see a lot of fragmented point solutions that I think we already have and we’ll have many more of them. For any particular area that you want to talk about, whether it be candidate engagement or assessment or whatever, you’re going to see, there are multiple choices, many, many choices, and that’s Part of the, that’s the good part and it’s the bad part. It’s the good part is that there’s a lot of choices and lots of different approaches and eventually one of them will, will most likely be the dominant one. But right now it’s an era of really confusion for most people as to which one is, should I use and which is the best one. I think if we go further down the road, if we go down the road for another, you know, till closer to 20, 29, five to six years from now, seven years from now, you’re going to see a lot more, a lot more powerful tools that will virtually automate the entire recruiting process except for certain segments. And I think that’s almost possible today if you have the fortitude and the IT resources to put all these fragmented solutions together. Most, very few companies have that today, neither the desire, the money or the, or the, or the skills to do that. But for example, I think we will certainly be able to find people, engage them in a conversation using chatbots and various automated promotion and marketing tools to explain a job to them, to match them up to a potential position, to screen and assess them for that position, and even to answer any questions they have about it and probe pretty deeply into, into what they’re looking for and what the company’s looking for. All with automated tools, we’ll be able to do all the transactional stuff like generate an offer letter, recommend a salary, send out all the required documentation completely or automated simply by pushing a few buttons. I think we’ll be able to have an automated onboarding process where people can not only complete any required paperwork, but also be introduced to the company and the team and the hiring manager and so forth. We’ll have automated real time metrics that are talent analytics, which are already, already emerging. And therefore, you know, we’ve pretty much gotten an entire recruiting process. So I think very possible, very doable, virtually potentially even doable today. If I, as I said, given the tools and the resources and the technology needed to do that, money that’s needed to do that. So that’s kind of where I think we’re going to head. I think the, the pieces that are left for humans are significant and interesting. For example, the having a conversation with the candidate, overcoming objections, closing a candidate, influencing a candidate and a hiring manager, providing some coaching to a candidate, becoming much more of a full service provider, both to the manager and the hiring and the candidate, candidate in the, in the entire recruiting process.
Matt Alder [00:26:30]:
So is, is recruiting then something that becomes, you know, Sort of very much self service from a, from a hiring, hiring manager perspective. You’re kind of sort of saying that, you know, there are, there are still sort of humans in, in the process, but it sounds like, you know, their role is going to be very, very different from, you know, what it is today and even what it might be in sort of through or four years time.
Kevin Wheeler [00:26:53]:
Absolutely. I think that probably the best analogy that I can make and it’s not a perfect one, but it’s what happened in the world of the travel agency where you know, 20 or 10 years ago you would go to a travel agent for the smallest of trips and they would book your, they would book your ticket and they would book your hotel and pretty much hold your hand throughout the entire process. Which is, which is pretty much analogous to what a recruiter does today to a hiring manager manager. I think what you’re going to see in the future is the hiring manager will do a lot of this themselves using the self service apps and tools. It will just be much easier for them. It’ll be painless. It’ll be something they will just be, it’ll just be normal to do this. They’ll open up their mobile device probably. I think we’re going to see computers become much less dominant. They’ll open up their phone, they’ll click on an app and it will generate a position description, it will potentially even recommend candidates almost immediately and so forth. So it’s going to be a very much a self serve model. Just like you’d say I want to fly from London to San Francisco and you’re presented with a bunch of choices and prices and time schedules and you kind of pick what works for you. So I think that’s absolutely going to be a reality. I think it will happen and then the recruiter, if they still exist and they won’t be called recruiters. I’m not, I coined the term talent concierge for lack of a better way to describe it. But it’s somebody that serves more as the concierge function person who answers questions, engages the candidate, helps, maybe helps managers find those really hard to find people. Just like a travel agent would help you book the really complex travel schedule that you might want to have. They’ll influence and coach and guide you and provide a hiring manager with good advice and potentially backed up with data, they’ll be able to provide a much higher level of service, way above the very mundane traditional service that 80% of recruiting provides to get day. And they’ll also be able to do some Sort of high quality troubleshooting and quality control of the automated tools to make sure they’re working properly and providing the right kind of guidance to the hiring managers and to the candidates. So it becomes much more of a two way role.
Matt Alder [00:29:24]:
So, final question.
Matt Alder [00:29:26]:
You said that the technology kind of exists to do this at the moment, but the, you know, the money and the, and the focus perhaps isn’t, isn’t, isn’t quite there. If this is going to be the sort of the inevitable future, what’s the driver going to be around that? Is it better technology? Is it a desire for more efficiency? What’s actually going to get us to get it, get us to this point?
Kevin Wheeler [00:29:53]:
I think it’s just going to be the cost of people, the cost of recruiters. When you look at companies that employ a large Enterprise, Enterprise employs 50 to 100 or more recruiters. It’s a huge payroll cost. If they can, if they can reduce that down to the transactional cost of using an app or to a service charge of, you know, $50 per candidate or something like that, which I think is inevitably what’s going to happen. It may not be $50, it might be, you know, significantly more than that, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as much as they’re paying recruiters to do the job job. So the biggest driver of any of these kind of things is money. That’s the bottom line. And if it’s cheaper to use the technology than it is to use people and they’re getting a similar or even a better level of service in their, in their perception, then they’re going to be very, it’s going to quickly adopt technology. So I think that the primary driver of all use of technology, whether it’s robots in manufacturing or, or automated tools for recruiting, is it cheaper and is it as better or even or better than what they were getting from the people?
Matt Alder [00:31:06]:
Kevin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kevin Wheeler [00:31:07]:
You’re more than welcome. Enjoy doing it.
Matt Alder [00:31:10]:
Hi, John, how are you?
John Wallace [00:31:11]:
Yeah, very good indeed. Thanks Matt, how are you?
John Wallace [00:31:13]:
How’s Amsterdam?
Matt Alder [00:31:14]:
Yes, it’s good. So things have changed a little bit since we recorded the first part of this show, which was a few weeks ago actually. We’re no longer in a recording studio. I’m in a hotel room in Amsterdam. And where are you at the moment?
John Wallace [00:31:28]:
I’m in the County Antrim countryside in Northern Ireland. At the business I have there, which is an old people’s home, a residential home for the elderly.
Matt Alder [00:31:40]:
You do have a diverse career.
John Wallace [00:31:42]:
I’m living the portfolio career dream, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:31:47]:
We’ve sort of failed a little it in our task to record in as many different places in Edinburgh as possible. But. But that doesn’t matter. So you’ve listened to the two interviews. What do you think?
John Wallace [00:31:58]:
Oh, I thought it was really interesting stuff. Matt, I think you’ve got two great sort of almost contrasting views there. I mean Ben has clearly done something that is working really well and I think it’s really interesting. Great. The way he talks about the candidate experience and the uplift the technology has had in the candidate experience. And that is something that a lot of people will find surprising because when I’ve spoken to clients or people in the past, they sometimes are a bit nervous that the technology might put people off. And I think what Ben shows in a real practical way is that the technology can enhance the candidate experience. I love this point about the fact that people will do it at a time that suited them. And would he call it the bizarre times that people, people who are actually using the technology is fantastic. And as for Kevin, I love that look into the future of what might be and where he sees things going. And the idea of the recruitment concierge, maybe not a phrase I would use or terminology I would use, but the concept is absolutely where we see the technology in a process sense pushes the human engagement towards that back end, white glove kind of area when you’re getting down to your last few candidates in a real high to touch experience. So really great couple of interviews.
Matt Alder [00:33:16]:
Yeah, no, I thought, I thought they were really interesting conversations really. You know, Ben, looking at the art of what’s possible now, Kevin, with his view on the, on the future of where we might be going. I suppose what came across to me was this is a really complicated topic talking about recruitment automation.
Matt Alder [00:33:34]:
There is, there are so many pieces.
Matt Alder [00:33:36]:
To this and so many directions it might go, go in. I suppose the second thing that came across to me was that I agree with the, the inevitability that Kevin points to. You know, we are going to see much more automation in recruitment. And I guess also what came out of talking to Ben was they’re obviously doing some great things with automating that kind of front end candidate communication at yodle. But it also shows we’ve still got a really long way to go. We’re very much at the beginning of this automation journey.
John Wallace [00:34:11]:
Yeah, I think when you listen to what Kevin says, a lot of the pieces that he puts together, if you look in various organizations, they’re already there in bits and pieces. It’s that fragmentation part. And it’s stringing it all together. It’s consistency of stringing it all together for multiple organizations. For example, one of the things he talked about was onboard. Now, I know there’s a government agency in America does recruitment for the US Government and they have a completely automated onboarding service which understands what the candidate is coming in to do, understands what questions they might ask, and feeds them information accordingly through the onboarding process. What’s absolutely brilliant about it, if you ever watched the West Wing, they call this piece of software, Mrs. Land, who was the secretary for the president in the West Wing, that automation already exists. And then you’ve got Ben’s automation at the front end. And there’s lots of bits of what we’d call the process automation. The question for me that we didn’t answer in the interviews was about the automation of the actual assessment bit itself. And what are people doing around that?
Matt Alder [00:35:21]:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. And I’ve. We’ve had some sort of discussions on the podcast before about what’s changing in assessment. And, you know, there seems to be a vast influx of technologies and different ways of, different ways of thinking that are coming in. Interestingly enough, I’m in, I’m in Amsterdam at the moment because I was sitting on a panel earlier at a conference that Kelly Services has organized and we were talking about the future of recovery recruitment. And you know, technology assessment was a, was a, was a big topic that, that came up.
Matt Alder [00:35:59]:
And, and certainly my feeling around it.
Matt Alder [00:36:01]:
Is that there are some, you know, some really interesting things going on, but it’s, it’s, it’s sort of very early days. But, but, but employers are realizing that, you know, they might need to think differently about how they, how they do assessment. Assessment, I think is a really interesting area in its own right, and maybe it’s something that we can investigate on the next project podcast that we do.
John Wallace [00:36:21]:
Yeah, that would be. I think that would be really interesting because if you look at. There’s a lot already being done. So I’ve implemented psychometric testing online, technical testing online. So there’s a certain amount of testing using the screening process, but then you get into that decision making, you screen out and then you assess in. So who are the. How are we going to use technology to help the assessment? So I think that would be a great one to find some people who are doing interesting stuff. Stuff. And I know some of the rec tech companies would certainly be interested in talking about that. The other point that Kevin raised Which I felt was really interesting as well, was about cost is going to be the driver of this. The idea of cost being the primary driver could be a force for good or it could be a force for bad in terms of the candidate experience or the caliber of hiring. But I think there is a bigger cost implication here which organizations still don’t get their head around when it comes to recruitment. And we’ve discussed it before and that’s not just looking at recruitment as an isolated cost center and how we can drive down costs of our recruitment, but actually looking at the impact of good and bad hiring across the organization and the cost impact of that, the opportunities that you’re not achieving because you’re not recruiting the right people, or the massive risks that you’re running as an organization because you’re not recruiting the right people. Once organizations get their head really into that place, that recruiting the right talent has such a commercial advantage for them, that in itself should act as the catalyst to make them look at how technology can be used as a way of ensuring you make better hiring decisions rather than just cheaper hiring decisions.
Matt Alder [00:37:52]:
So final question. How do you think this is going.
Matt Alder [00:37:54]:
To develop in the, in the medium term? So Ben’s kind of showed us what’s possible now. Kevin has given a kind of a longer term view of where we might be going, what’s going to happen next?
John Wallace [00:38:06]:
No, I think that’s really, really interesting question. And if I knew the precise answer to it, that’s where I would invest my spare pennies. We go back to this idea of process and I think the nature of the process becoming more and more automated for the very reason that Kevin talked about to drive down cost, I think is the medium term future. Beyond that there will be somebody who makes the leap or organizations that are already making the leap. And that will probably be in the areas where the catalyst and the driver is a real shortage of skills and the real need to find highly skilled people where they will start to use the technology in more sophisticated ways to identify talent in the marketplace and to assess talent that they have coming their way. But I think it’s that catalyst of needing the skills will take it to the next level as opposed to just driving down the cost of hiring. Now that will probably take place where the investment exists for that, which would more likely be tech industry in America, for example, as opposed to the general hiring that Ben would be leading for hiring the drivers for yodle, et cetera. Another thing to think of, Nat and I think it’s really interesting you’re talking to the guys at Kelly is organizations like Kelly and Adelaide, Deco or even Randstad, the big RPOs as well. The investment that they need to make to make sure that they have really highly automated processes that they can scale from client to client without having that mass cost base that they require to deliver the services that they have. That could also be a real driver. As we move through times of uncertainty and more organizations think about an RPO solution, we could well be in a situation where the technology is driven by the RPO providers as much as anything else, because they need to do it to make their businesses profitable in an ever changing world.
Matt Alder [00:40:07]:
So to kind of summarize in one sentence, I would say that, you know, there’s a long way to go with recruitment automation, but it’s certainly going to go a long way. Would you agree?
John Wallace [00:40:18]:
Oh yes, and it’s going to be great fun.
Matt Alder [00:40:20]:
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Wallace [00:40:22]:
Thank you very much, Matt. Speak again soon.
Matt Alder [00:40:24]:
My thanks to John Wallace, Ben Gledhill and Kevin Wheeler. I’m delighted to say I’m going to be recording a live episode of the podcast at RecFest in London in July. I’m going to be joined again by Ben Gledhill, as well as Andrew Stone from Accenture and Megan Butler from Cognition X. And we’re going to be diving even deeper into the topic of recruiting automation. You can buy tickets to Wreckfest at www.recfest. i’m also going to be podcasting and speaking at TA Tech Europe in Lisbon, Portugal in early May. I’d highly recommend TA Tech to anyone who’s interested in innovation in recruiting technology, and you can buy tickets to their events in North America and Europe by going to www.tatech.org events. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
