The Future of Work is Hiring Success

SmartRecruiters’ Founder and CEO on where the current revolution in recruitment will take us.

Hiring managers, recruiters, executives: Close your eyes. Relax. Think about the last time you hired someone amazing. Find a name. Breathe. Think about what you were able to achieve together. Feels good, right? What you are experiencing is called Hiring Success.

When you think about it, hiring is success. Who you hire defines everything: your ability to sell, to service, to innovate, to win or lose. In fact, who you hire defines you as a leader.

The world’s most innovative leaders know this very well – even Steve Jobs considered his primary function at his level to be recruiting – and those who have cracked this code dedicate considerable time and effort to hire the best.

Unfortunately, even with shrinking talent pools making hiring success ever-more-urgent, most companies still treat recruiting as a back-office process, an admin workflow, where applicants are tracked, or more often ignored, in a cheap and automated manner. This is frustrating for candidates and managers alike, and extremely ineffective for business.

As surprising as it is unfortunate, this kind of thinking isn’t limited to stagnant HR departments. The entire labor market is inefficient. 37% of people say they’d like a more challenging job, and a greater percentage of people stay in jobs they are unhappy with because they don’t know how to take the next step. The situation is so dire that a team of economists led by the late Dr Mortensen received an Economic Nobel Prize for measuring theretofore undefined Friction in the Labor Market.

What’s going to change all of this is technology. Technology is already changing it. And if this is news for your company, you have a lot of catching up to do. The labor market, like any other market, is becoming far more efficient, thanks to this host of digital tools currently known as HR Tech. Online Talent Platforms like LinkedIn, Google or SmartRecruiters are now able to connect millions of people to hundreds of thousands of jobs in real time.

Recruiting is being revolutionized. Our old-school resume is morphing into something more like a dynamic Personal Profile where all our relevant skills, education, and experience are protected and made legitimate across the globe by blockchain protocols, with a level of personal control built in that makes our personal information available only to the people or companies we choose.

This then becomes a perfect situation for deep-learning algorithms to sift through hundreds of millions of profiles, learn from the data and make job recommendations to recruiters. The machines don’t care about business hours. They don’t take vacations. How long before we each have a personal headhunter? An entity focused solely on our interests, always on call, who never has bad days, and can not only find me a new job, but offer positions I didn’t necessarily know I was interested in. That’s the new-school revolution of HR tech.

And this is not a crystal ball prediction. Management consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that online talent platforms could lead to 72 million new jobs, worth $2.7 Trillion. Break that down and those numbers mean much more happiness and economic wealth for everyone (and that 37% of people unhappy in their jobs will only shrink. The only question is how quickly.)

The big takeaway from all of this is that HR Tech is the new lynchpin of a new business ecosystem. We now live in the Talent Economy. Ideas and money are cheap; people are the scarce and sought-after resource for which all businesses compete.

In this new world, the ability to hire the best is what separates winners from losers. Miss the boat and you’re going to get out-hired. Machine-learning algorithms evolve from ongoing activity. We source candidates for the right positions by discovering talent inside and outside, marketing jobs only to qualified talent, and predicting performance.

Exciting for visionaries, terrifying for backroom admins, recruiting now looks more like a high-tech marketing job, where programs, campaigns, channels, and conversions maximize candidate experience. The candidate becomes a customer, and recruiters streamline everything from application to placement, making sure the foundation for hiring success is solid.

And this is where we envision a new job title, where, using the digital tools at hand, the VP of Hiring Success will subsume the soon-to-be obsolete director of staffing. The new job description? Attract, Select and Hire the best talent for every role, on time and on budget.

Instead of the old-school faster-cheaper KPIs, companies will start to use a new measurement, a Net Hiring Score, to understand the quality of people they bring in. With a system like SmartRecruiters, which has built-in controls to limit bias as much as possible, this means more accountability, better transparency, higher levels of diversity, which brings us back to the greater goal of labor-market efficiency.

Now open your eyes. Take another deep breath. What do you see now?

What you’re seeing is the future of work.The future of work is Hiring Success. Because ultimately, if you’re ahead of the curve, you already know, you are who you hire.