#ozrec 5: Humanising Recruitment

With the widespread uptake of Applicant Tracking Systems, automated response emails and keyword matching, the recruitment industry is at risk of alienating the one element it relies on fully to fill roles – candidates. Are we losing the human touch? Lack of communication, processes that push away the human contact and laziness are seeping it. Is it a risky development. Complaints about recruitment are flooding online and the number one bugbear? No sufficient human interaction.

Process efficiencies, standardisations, KPI’s. These are the buzzwords of modern business…all of which seemingly lack a sense of personalisation, or the human interaction to ensure these ‘efficiencies’ and the like are maintained. It is one thing to demand that a business functions in a world of these elements, it’s another to understand what drives such activities. Without understanding that it is the candidates that are the key to success within recruitment and those people will not react according to an ‘efficiency’ if it goes against their own sense of self-worth.

A comment from Greg Savage said a lot: “What I hired was your resume. Unfortunately, what I got was YOU”…so telling as to where recruitment is and what it does.

Questions:

1) Has recruitment lost its human edge?
2) Has laziness seeped in via keyword matching and phone fear?
3) Are ATS’s and Keyword Matching giving recruitment a bad name?
4) What can be done to ‘re-humanise’ recruitment.

Our moderator/host is Scott Brown of Scott Brown Recruitment

Scott Brown comes from a 15 year career in recruitment with a further 2 in training and development. Starting Scott Brown Recruitment in 2009, he has developed into a trusted advisor on internal hiring process, systems and strategies.

From Job Network, through to multinational firms, running national accounts for tier one clients to internal recruitment management, Scott has seen and done it all.

Turning his experience into blogging, speaking and advice, Scott will never really get over recruitment!