I can’t wait for
technology to get to the point where candidates can think:
“Wow, that LMA chatbot
was amazing.”
The reason is simple.
They will be better than all of the people sitting around me at the moment, rendering
my fantastic (award-winning) team redundant…. in certain situations.
There are many
ingredients of a great recruitment operation, but two of the main ones have to
be efficiency of process and understanding of people. Most recruiters would
love to spend their time digging deep into the needs of their clients and
candidates, but it is often the cases that ensuring a smooth process gets in
the way. Organising interviews, coordinating admin, collecting references,
managing feedback…. I could go on, but you get the idea. A good recruiter
understands that their process has to be 100% in order to build great
relationships, but they spend so much time on the process that they don’t
always spend as much time as they would like adding value to their relationships.
That is why I welcome
the chatbots, or whatever technology will take the strain on the process side.
If they take my recruiters out of the process equation to let them concentrate
on the relationship side, I will be delighted. I suspect that they will be too.
In an industry that
cannot work on a 9-5 timetable, technology could plug a valuable gap.
Recruitment technology that is on call 24/7 will make job searching so much
more accessible. You might be chatting with a bot from a potential employer while
a bot from your recruiter is working out the best time for your final interview
– all unobtrusively on your mobile phone on your lunch break.
Tech is going to
create so many opportunities for people to get more “human” with each other.
Admin is the bane of our lives, and failed admin is one of the big reasons why
recruiters have such a bad reputation. Candidates think that the recruiter
doesn’t care when they don’t get the promised call back, but the recruiter is
simply too busy. Not that this ever happens at LMA, of course, but it does
happen regularly.
I’m not sure that
chatbots are there yet though. The attempts that I have seen are rather
rudimentary, and when it comes to something as important as a job search,
people deserve to have their hands held every step of the way (by a human). I’m
not even sure that ATS systems do the job as well as they could, so
improvements will have to be made there before chatbots can be taken seriously
and trusted.
Nevertheless, I am
conscious that if I don’t take an interest in recruitment tech, I will be
letting my future candidates down. They need a streamlined and ruthlessly
efficient process, and if the machines can do it better than my people, then I
will happily get my people onto more useful pursuits.
Come on chatbots, show
us what you’ve got.