The Lost Art of Recruiting

For years, I’ve been receiving emails from recruiters about a positions that they allegedly think are good matches for my skills – but on reading then, the positions are usually entirely inappropriate.  Sometimes, it is a position that matches my current one – or worse, a position that I held many years ago.   Other times, there’s seemingly no connection at all.

And it becomes obvious very quickly that this isn’t the work of a recruiter, but a piece of software that unintelligently matches job requirements to certain keywords in resumes (mainly on LinkedIn).  This happens so often and has been going on for so long that I’ve had the sense that recruiting is a lost art.

But lately, the quality of these solicitations is getting better.   Either the software has vastly improved, or companies have returned to human recruiters who actually know how to evaluate a potential candidate against an opening to determine when there is a valid match.   That is, the position is not a match for what I used to do or am currently doing, but for something that would actually be a step forward in my career.

I’ve snooped around the industry web sites to see if there are any articles about “new and improved” matching algorithms, but haven’t found one, so I’m led to believe that firms are investing in qualified and intelligent individuals to perform the task that software has been doing miserably for well over a decade.

I have the sense it’s because the labor market is improving, and people with customer experience credentials are so rare that the recruiters can no longer count on posting a job description and having scores of qualified candidates respond – so it’s necessary to pay the extra expense to have the job done right.

Whatever the case, I take it as a good sign, and look forward to the time when companies brighten up about using marketing professionals rather than software to identify and solicit customers who actually need their products rather than spamming the universe.

That might be a bit much to ask, but it’s a future worth hoping for.