Thursday, February 23, 2012

Half-Witted Recruiting

Two things happened that likely wouldn't have set my wheels turning, except that they happened at about the same time: I was reading an article about an innovative experiment in recruiting talent and then received an e-mail from a recruiter that showed how the potential of even current technology is being thoroughly wasted.

The Promising Future

The article I was reading (no link, it was on paper) had to do with using text analysis of Facebook postings to identify people who are not happy with their jobs, even temporarily, and are in a state of mind where the chance of getting them to consider an opportunity is much increased.

The details were a bit sketchy, which I take to mean that they either haven't got it quite worked out, want to keep it a secret, or some combination of the two. However, the kernel of the idea is quite brilliant: by analyzing the tone (specifically, word choices) of Facebook comments, you can determine the mood of a person and how it changes over time.

In a simplistic sense, if a person uses terms that express negative emotions, or even just lukewarm ones, more often than they use terms that express positive emotions, it's reasonable to consider that they are not in a happy state of mind. It doesn't necessarily have to be in posts that refer specifically to their job - being as work is such a significant part of life, if your general outlook on life is dour, chances are your job has something to do with it.

The ratio of negative-to-positive is telling, but less significant than the way in which this ratio changes over time. That is, a person tends to have a penchant to be optimistic or pessimistic in general, but when he seems more pessimistic and dejected than usual, chances are that he's in the right state of mind to be open to the prospect of making a significant life-change.

What's more, this is not a conscious choice. Especially when it comes to work, people are prone to keeping up appearances and hiding negative sentiments - but when they write, especially in casual communications, the words they choose at any given moment tend to be a more accurate indication of their state of mind.

What this means to recruiting is that if you find a talented individual who is already "happily" employed, you can keep an eye on him to detect when he might be open to an offer to make a change. This seems an entirely plausible notion, and a boon to those who do active recruiting.

The Dreadful Present

Around the same time I was reading the article, an e-mail came in from a recruiter who wanted to feel me out about an opening at his firm (or a client he was recruiting for - they're always vague on that account). The problem was, it was a copywriting job - something that would have been appealing to me (and for which I would have been better qualified to do) twenty years ago.

The sender had likely used software that performed text-matching and found "copywriter" on my LinkedIn profile and thus flagged me as a potential candidate because I had previous experience. I don't know how it went from there, whether the software wasn't smart enough to read the dates and notice that I'd moved on in my career a long time ago, or if the recruiter simply didn't consider the information before spamming out a note to everyone who had ever worked as a copywriter.

Whatever the case, contacting me about that particular position was mistake that showed the recruiter didn't invest much time or effort, and left me less positively disposed toward himself and his firm - until the incident has faded from memory, I'll likely hold them in low regard even if they approach me about an appropriate opportunity.

Don't get me wrong: I am impressed to some degree whenever someone leverages technology in an attempt to be efficient in their operations, even if they are not quite as careful as they ought to be. And it's also impressive when a firm has the vision to know what kind of talent they need and the initiative to go out and find it, rather than merely posting a job opening and hiring the best of whatever happens to wash up on their shores. Even if they haven't gotten it quite right yet, it does show some level of intelligence and effort.

But while gathering resumes that contain desired keywords and sending out e-mail enables a firm to be more proactive in recruiting talent than one who posts a job opening and hopes someone qualified turns up, it is still objectively dreadful that this represents the best they can do to find the talent they need, and likely indicates a need for better software that will filter through user profiles and at least pay attention to dates, or a more attentive user who will pay attention to the data his software gathers.

***

Putting the two together, we have a promising new technology that will help recruiters recognize when a qualified candidate might be in the proper emotional state to consider an offer, but it is layered on top of dreadful old technology that makes it impossible for them to identify which candidates would be worth watching - or worse, the dreadful old mindset that they don't need to be proactive in recruiting and shouldn't put much thought or effort into their initial overture to a candidate.

All in all, it seems like there's still a great deal of work yet to do in providing innovative technical solutions in the HR industry.

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