How Social Media and Technology Will Lead Jobseekers out of the Desert and into the Oasis

Gerry Crispin considers himself a life-long student of recruiting. Passionate about examining how candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers can better achieve their goals and objectives, he’s built a career on facilitating communication between these three key stakeholders.

These days Gerry finds himself motivated to be more than an observer of how staffing is conducted in the future, and to that end, he has taken a leadership role in creating and building peer-to-peer talent acquisition professional networks (e.g., CareerXroads, Talent Board). These initiatives focus on staffing models that are driven by evidence, offer candidate experiences that empower them to make better decisions in partnership with corporate selection practices, and embed and embrace technology-based networking tools for building two-way candidate pipelines.

MightyRecruiter recently sat down with Gerry to discuss, among other things, how the challenge of having millennials in the workforce is nothing new and how social networks and new technologies will put a sharper focus on the job market for candidates in 2017.

What recruiting and hiring challenges from 2016 will become bigger obstacles in 2017?

The pressure for greater productivity and efficiency in recruiting continues to grow. Most of the metrics that we apply to talent acquisition relate to efficiencies in terms of cost to hire, number of hires per recruiter, etc. over the course of the past 20 to 30 years. The cost of critical talent is rising, and our ability to make more high-quality hires at the same price is under enormous pressure.

In what ways, will jobseekers drive changes in recruiting?

Social networks such as Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook are changing how jobseekers find and vet employers. In 2017, jobseekers will turn to coaches and technologies to find the right employer and job. Without those, jobseekers will continue to wander in a desert of job seeking without any context within which to put it. The same technologies employers use to find and vet candidates can be used by candidates to do the same when seeking out employers. That technology is all available today, but it’s not being sold to candidates.

What new technologies do you see gaining greater traction and prevalence in 2017?

Chatbots, machine learning, and AI (artificial intelligence). We are reaching a point where machines will represent humans in a way that an objective observer cannot determine the difference. For example, prescreening candidates will become an automated process using chatbots backed with machine learning and AI. The automation of recruiting processes will translate into fewer jobs for recruiters. Kore, Olivia Rye, Alexa, and the new Google voice are all examples of the direction where this is going. These technologies are starting to be applied to talent acquisition and to a lot of other industries, too. The hype about these technologies is at its peak, but the problem is that the quality of those technologies is on a spectrum of really bad to really great. Our ability to tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones is somewhat limited at this point.

Will job boards and how recruiters, managers, and job seekers use them change in 2017?

I say yes. Refer to Google, Facebook, and Indeed. Both Google and Facebook have made statements in the last month about their interest in moving more boldly into the jobs market. How will job posting change in 2017? From job description to job boards, etc.? I think that in 2017 we are going to see an enhancement of job descriptions through the cross-linking of content, video, and interactive features that can answer jobseekers’ questions.

Half of the workers today are millennials. How is this affecting how you find, screen, interview, and hire candidates?

First of all, I think if you look back at the 1960s and 70s, those people entering the workforce from the post-World War II Baby Boom would be described in virtually the same way. The only difference is that there wasn’t the technology we have today or economic factors like crushing student loan debt, which prevents many young people from being able to afford housing. So, millennials are living at home more often and struggling to pay off that damn degree. Meanwhile, there is so much more technology in their lives to a point that they’re distracted in a lot of ways that other generations haven’t been.

I think the millennials are more streetwise about life, but more naive about the world around them because news sources are fragmented and technology has distracted them. They still have aspirations, like every generation does, to make a difference. Fundamentally, you need to understand not just (millennial workers,) but the audience of prospects that could do a great job for you. If those prospects happen to be immigrants or kids with PhDs or technology developers, you need to understand that group within context. It’s not just an age cohort.

As the percentage of millennials in the workplace continues to grow, do you see more changes on the horizon?

I hope that the education of these very tech-savvy folks starts to include real learning about work and careers. The inability of anyone at any age to make critical, well thought-out decisions about their careers simply means that companies will continue to be able to manipulate workers through marketing, particularly marketing that has no ethical standard.

How is the on-demand – or gig – workforce affecting recruiting and hiring?

The similarities and dissimilarities between full-time and on-demand workers require totally different approaches from a cost point of view. Today, most on-demand workers come without any involvement from corporate recruiting; they come through third-party technology platforms and placement agencies that have made deals with purchasing agents. HR and talent acquisition professionals have not been heavily involved. On-demand hiring is going to have a bit-technology play; downstream, it will require an integrated recruiting approach.

What role will private talent pools play in 2017?

Yes, they will continue to grow in scope. The differentiator is whether those talent pools can become communities where those in the pool can talk to each other. This requires the presence of a community manager responsible for facilitating interactions between members. You must keep them engaged by creating and curating content constantly.