Those Magnificent Recruiters With Their Recruitment Technology

Those Magnificent Recruiters With Their Recruitment Technology

Is recruitment more a science than an art?

This was the question posed by last month’s ‘Recruitment Technology Showcase’ http://ukrecruiter.co.uk/community/recruiters-network/, an event organised twice a year by Louise Triance, “the most connected woman in the UK recruitment market” who founded and runs UK Recruiter.  

The keynote speaker was Rob Symes, founder & CEO of The Outside View http://www.theoutsideview.co.uk/Symes set up his company with one clear aim: to connect Business with Science by means of predictive analytics. The company provides a software platform that uses machine learning to predict the future for businesses.

 

An avid devotee of data, he described how it has passed through 3 phases: Collection – Understanding – Prediction. “Data is the new oil”, oil that, in his vision of the future, is yet to be adequately mined. Organisations are in possession of vast amounts of data but need a new set of tools to be able to use it effectively. The Outside View is already working with other sectors and sales workforces but Symes believes that the recruitment sector has everything to gain from using such a system.

 

Why? Recruiters are, in his view, sales people and therefore the same processes can be applied. Unstructured data such as emails, phone calls and online activity can be analysed so that the work of recruiters can be refined and achieve ultimate perfection. Prediction is the way forward and will raise the recruitment bar; it will lead to a future in which it will not be good enough for organisations to be world-class – they will have to be world-changing.

 

Symes has based his company’s approach on 2 years’ research that he carried out, visiting and interviewing key thinkers in the field; he stated that he has read every book on recruitment. (An interesting statement for me to hear; when I published a 30-page report in 2011 about recruitment websites, someone told me that “no recruiter ever reads more than a one-page A4 document.”)

 

I wondered if Symes had read a recent article by Tom Starner in Human Resource Executive entitled ‘The Recruiting Game’ (print version link http://www.humanresourceexecutive-digital.com/humanresourceexecutive/may_2014#pg25online article link)http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/view/story.jhtml?id=534357046&ss=The+Recruiting+Game

 

Starner describes how HR and recruiting professionals are in constant pursuit of the definitive mechanism for tracking down and predicting the ideal candidates for the jobs on offer. He outlines a range of games and testing methods all claiming to provide such a mechanism; an important element of these data-centric approaches is clearly the prediction factor. Starner quotes John Sumser, editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer online magazine and a noted HR tech guru, who in turn predicts that data will have a huge impact upon talent acquisition and recruiting – but that only a minority of the current experiments will produce the desired effect. Time will tell if The Outside View will stay the course; if Symes’ enthusiasm and self-belief are anything to go by, he may have just struck lucky with his formula for success.

Following on from the keynote speech, each of the 20 exhibiting companies were given two minutes to make an elevator pitch. This was the opportunity to discover the range of products currently on offer; details of the companies are available on the booking page http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/recruitment-technology-supplier-showcase-event-5th-june-2014-registration-10254554649Talking to delegates at lunch time, it is clear that this really is a working event: recruiters come here to get the latest up-to-date information and exhibitors find this event more than worth their while. Technology is clearly an indispensable tool for the recruitment industry and one that comes under multiple guises. Some exhibiting companies have been around for years, others are fairly new; while there was some overlap of services on offer, each company has their own distinctive style. Two Irish companies were present (Arithon & Intalex): encouraging hearing from them that the employment situation in Ireland has made noticeable improvements over the past year. Also attending as delegates rather than exhibitors were staff from Combi-Nations, an international Recruitment Agency specialising in assignments for employees for companies in Africa.

 

Perhaps worth noting for the sake of equality: of the 20 presentations, just 6 were given by women. Nevertheless I think it is fair to say that the two most memorable presentations were given by women: Wendy McDougall, CEO of Firefish, and Sonja McGinn, Customer Relationship Manager for the Irish company Intalex. If you ever need to hire roof raisers, I recommend this feisty duo (although you might need to equip yourself with ear-plugs beforehand). Whatever about the science of recruitment, it certainly requires an understanding of the art of communication and the elevator pitches were a fine example of this.

 

A similar event takes place in October. If you want to become an expert in the dark arts of recruitment technology, this is the event to go to.

 

Anne Tynan is a Writer, Copywriter and Equality & Diversity Consultant (@AnneTynan)