Time flies when you are having fun…
I’ve been thinking some more about the state of the recruiting industry, the intersection of technology in augmenting talent acquisition solutions, and some of the ‘big issues’ that we face in our efforts to deliver the right talent to organizations for the lowest cost in the shortest amount of time.
Technology creates complexity, and complexity is an often a vastly underestimated factor when it comes to executing a plan involving multiple human stakeholders. I think it’s one of the ‘big issues’ and a trend that must be addressed by recruiting (and HR) leaders to be competitive in the growing war for talent.
I think of the recruiting sphere of influence that I can affect as an ecosystem. This would be my department, my internal customers, my candidate pools, etc. Within that ecosystem, one would find recruiters of various levels, administration staff, recruiting managers, as well as a collection of HR generalists, hiring managers, vendors, and other ancillary but critical cast members. In recruiting terms as the leader of a chunk of the Starbucks recruiting engine, anytime I consider injecting complexity into the ecosystem I need to think very carefully about the return I might have on the investment, and what components of the ecosystem it is going to affect.
The challenge in all of this is that the people in the ecosystem are in a constant state of motion. Some are going, some are staying, some are getting promoted (or worse) and there’s no standardized set of skills and tools that are required in recruiting (or HR for that matter). This, combined with added complexity of recruiting tools, strategies and other tactics creates a much steeper learning curve. This steeper learning curve dramatically erodes the ROI of any piece of technology and creates a higher hurdle for it to drive true economic value into the organization/business.
Add to this the human elements of acquiring talent: Candidates make career decisions by comparing value propositions between companies, but they also make career decisions based on very human principles such as how the process makes them feel valued. Because of this, the hurdle for technology based solutions gets even higher.
I think “feature creep” has a stranglehold on the HR technology space.
There’s a great short piece in Business 2.0 magazine this month from the founders of Google on the merits of simplicity.
I think simplicity is and will continue to be a key tenet in building robust recruiting departments that win.
Great thinking, which made me think of this quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes:
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
There is good simplicity and bad simplicity. Google is a great example of good simplicity (congratulations on the new job, btw). A hugely complex backend - and all we see is this search box and a button. That's the simplicity on the other side of complexity!
Posted by: Alexander Kjerulf | December 28, 2006 at 05:17 AM