I’m old. I mean, I don’t feel old. But in the world of recruiting technology, I’m old.
I’ve been around long enough to see the birth of some pretty cool technological advances in talent acquisition. When I started recruiting, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was a green screen Rolodex (look it up kids!) akin to using an excel spreadsheet to do all of your recruiting.
Sourcing technology was basically cold calling into a company and trying to get the person at the front desk to push your call to some unsuspecting employee who was about to be recruited hard with a sales pitch that usually started with something like, “Wait, don’t hang up!”
In the past year, we’ve all witnessed the rise of an entire segment of hiring technology that wasn’t really around pre-pandemic: conversational AI. This technology now moves the world of hourly recruiting into the forefront of organizations that have long treated it as an afterthought.
Conversational AI and hourly hiring.
What’s amazing about conversational AI is that it’s a new breed of recruiting technology that is virtually invisible to everyone using it. Candidates just believe they are applying for a job and getting immediate interaction from your company. Recruiting teams don’t have to do anything, and the technology seamlessly pulls candidates through the process to completion. Unlike a traditional ATS that forces candidates to jump through hoops and recruiters to push candidates from step to step, conversational AI does away with all of that by automating it.
Thankfully, we’ve finally gotten to a point where our recruiting technology is actually working for us, not against us. Conversational AI works exactly how we always hoped recruiting technology would — like recruiters designed the perfect hourly hiring system in a lab to fit all their needs and solve all their problems.
A candidate decides they want to apply to your job. They find the job through all the ways and means we give them (text, QR codes, URL links, career sites, etc.). They do the entire process on their phone. It takes a few minutes. They immediately feel engaged with your company, and the technology works to make sure they don’t disengage before you can actually screen and hire them.
It’s so simple it’s hard to believe it took this long to come to life, but that’s what great technology is: simple. Turns out, making simple technology that works is super hard!
How to make hourly recruiting simple?
- Creation of conversational AI that felt real to the candidate.
- A screening assessment that could accurately predict better hires and only take 90 seconds to complete.
- A full delivery and engagement system that fits in your pocket.
- A recognition by organizations that maybe, just maybe, the 90% of hiring we do that is hourly is just as important, if not more important, than the hiring we do on the salaried side of our business.
Yeah, we need to recognize that for far too long we’ve been using a process and system to hire hourly workers that was designed to hire salaried workers sitting in front of desktop computers. That is what our ATSs were designed for. Can we hire hourly workers with an ATS? Yes, but it’s not very convenient and useful for high volume hiring of hourly workers.
The change in demographics and difficulty in all levels of hiring over the past couple of years has really opened our eyes to how important hourly hiring is to the success and livelihood of our businesses. Let’s be honest, ten years ago most talent acquisition leaders and organizational leaders didn’t give much thought to hourly hiring. We just posted a job, and the candidates came in. That was the complete hourly recruiting strategy — “help wanted”. End of story.
Today, a “help wanted” strategy will put you out of business. Organizations in every industry are competing for hourly workers like never before, and the organizations that have the best hourly hiring machine will win.
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