As I am about to enter into my senior year of college, the biggest priority is to get a job after graduation. I am quite sure it is a stressful thing for every college seniors across the country. In an attempt to dissect the job search process, I try to look at it as a 2-way street: recruiters and job seekers. Recruiters want to find talents to join their companies, while job seekers want to seek out the best place to work at. As a job seeker, I think it would be very interesting to look at it from a recruiter’s perspective. How to source the right candidates? How to evaluate one person against another? How to make sure that a strong candidate does not lose interest in the company?
Last week, I went to a meetup event at Hired, a career marketplace that brings together job seekers with the companies who want to hire them. They have a panel discussion on the intersection of technology and recruiting. In a highly innovative and tech-oriented place like San Francisco, software invades every functional department of a company, even in non-technical positions like sales (Salesforce), user research (UserTesting), inbound marketing (HubSpot)… Recruiting is no exception, with the introduction of products like Jobvite, Workable, ApplicantStack… In this discussion, the panel talked about innovative tools used to recruit and hire top talent, and how technology is transforming the way companies approach every aspect of talent acquisition. The panelists are:
· Andrew Hubbs – Director of Product at Greenhouse
· Vivek Reddy – Former Head of Talent at Entelo
· Aline Lerner – Co-Founder and CEO at Interviewing.io
· Gemmy Tsai — Head of Product at Hired.
· Allison Bawazer-Pedro – Human Resources Manager at uBiome
In my usual writing style, I would recap the questions and answers throughout the discussion, as well as add a bit of my thoughts on each of them.
Why is the current hiring process at most tech companies broken?
The common denominator of most responses from the panelists is that there is simply too much noise out there; thus it is very difficult to prioritize your job applications. From a job seeker’s perspective, how can one amplify the signal? (How to spot the right opportunity to go for?). There is also a big discrepancy in both sides: that companies can’t source the right candidates and the job seekers don’t know what they want. Aline gave an example of software engineering recruitment – that it should be completely meritocratic (based on a candidate’s programming skills), but a lot of companies go for pedigree instead (based on the name of the college they go to or the company they work for previously).
From my point of view, at least the last part is true, that a lot of tech companies here in the Valley are more impressed by the candidates’ education. If you study at Stanford or an Ivy League school, your chances will be significantly better than the rest of the application pool. Studying at a liberal arts college, I really need to take initiatives to come up with strategies to get attention from recruiters: personal networks, conferences and meetups, social media engagement… to name a few.
How can technologies improve the existing broken process?
Products such as Hired and Greenhouse do make it easier for both the companies and candidates to interact and understand more about the other side. There are 3 important things that I found interesting from the panelists’ responses to this question:
· Technologies shifts the power dynamics between the candidates and the companies. Traditionally, companies can just wait for candidates to apply for open positions. Now the companies have to brand themselves as a marketable and worthy place to work at, because there are many other options for candidates to choose from platform like Hired or Greenhouse.
· The role of the recruiters changes to brand ambassadors. This is very intuitive: if companies need to brand themselves, it is the job of the recruiters to talk to the candidates and show the quality, benefits, and any positive things about opportunities to work there.
· Companies need to adapt technologies in other functional areas to nurture candidates. This goes back to the point I made in the 1st paragraph – sales, marketing, HR all need to utilize technologies to train new hires and get them acquainted to the work culture.
Aline brought up another good solution, which is to use technology to evaluate interview performances. Her company, Interviewing.io, essentially provides sample tech interview questions for software engineering candidates and then rank them using a scoring algorithm.
However, the most fascinating answer is from Gemmy, Hired’s Head of Product – applying machine learning and big data to help with the sourcing and Hiring process. He mentioned that Hired’s product team is using machine learning algorithms to match candidates with the jobs they will most likely to be interested in, based on data from candidates’ profile and companies’ job descriptions. I think this is a total game changer because it will completely democratize the hiring process.
What are the main challenges for job candidates to find the right job?
The answers from the panels gear more towards ways in which a candidate can best represent himself. Here they are:
· Make sure your resume is clean and well-formatted.
· Be honest and authentic throughout your job application and interview process.
· Less is more: focus on past accomplishments that you are most proud of instead of having a laundry list.
· Expect the process to be a two-way street.
· Lastly, there should have better and more detailed job descriptions from the company side so that the candidates know what to expect and prepare for.
Are you someone who is stressful about finding a job at any time soon? Or are you a recruiter who wants to look for the best talents to work at your companies? I would love to hear your thoughts on this post!
