For job seekers it really is who you know
My youngest son has recently secured a new part-time job.
After ‘falling off the roster’ at Zambrero late last year (a topic for a post at another time), he applied for a range of roles via SEEK. He received crickets from almost every advertiser.
One of his mates thought there might be a job at the shop where he works and passed along the owner’s mobile number.
James called him and, after a brief conversation, was offered a trial shift the following week.
After successfully completing the shift, James is now a permanent part-time employee at The Cheesecake Shop’s local franchise, working two four-hour shifts a week.
Like four of the five previous casual jobs James has held, this job was secured via a personal relationship rather than through an ad.
Yesterday, Melbourne financial services recruiter Amanda Chisholm posted on LinkedIn about helping a sister of a placed candidate secure a graduate role, but not by placing her in a role she was recruiting.
The candidate applied directly to the employer via an ad and was rejected without any person-to-person screening.
Having phone-screened the candidate, Chisholm assessed her as well-suited for at least an interview and contacted relevant people at the company (whom she knew) to recommend they do just that.
The candidate was interviewed and ultimately offered the role, which she accepted. She had applied for more than 35 jobs with not a single interview to show for it.
Of course, using personal networks has been a common and effective job-sourcing channel since the beginning of paid employment.
If recent trends are any indication, the importance of this channel will only increase, not decrease.
Almost all of the reasons for this can be blamed on technology.
This detailed and insightful post How Technology Shapes HR, Not Just Enables It on Talent Intelligence Collective Digest, provides a deep dive into the reasons why.
“The first applicant tracking systems emerged in the late 1990s, built on relational databases. This is important. Understanding the ATS means understanding what a database requires.
Databases need structured fields. They need discrete categories. They need entries that can be compared using boolean logic. Is this field true or false? Does this value match that value? These are the questions a 1998 database could answer.
So the ATS demanded structure. And recruiters provided it.
A job requisition became a set of requirements: degree (yes/no), years of experience (number), specific skills (list), job titles (exact match). A candidate became a collection of parsed attributes: name, email, work history broken into discrete roles, education parsed into institution and qualification.
The technology didn’t ask “is this person capable of doing this job?” It asked “does this candidate record match this requisition record?” The first question requires judgment. The second requires keyword matching.
Resumes that didn’t include exact keywords were overlooked, even if the candidate was qualified. Job seekers learned to tailor their applications not to communicate their value, but to survive algorithmic filtering. The funnel metaphor took hold: applications in, conversion rates out, efficiency measured by speed and volume.
The database could only compare what it could categorise. Everything else was invisible.”
The author then details the explosion in applications driven by the ease of online submission, compared with printing and mailing applications and how this subsequently created overwhelm for recruiters.
“The technology that was supposed to expand access to opportunity became a bottleneck that narrowed it. The tool designed to help recruiters manage volume instead created volume it couldn’t meaningfully evaluate. The system built to match candidates to jobs instead optimised for rejecting candidates at scale.”
The past half-decade has seen a quantum leap in the technology’s capabilities to improve matching, as the author explains.
“Modern AI can parse unstructured text, understanding context and meaning rather than just pattern-matching keywords. Resume parsing has evolved from keyword filters to semantic understanding. Today’s AI recognises roles, responsibilities, achievements, and inferred skills even when they aren’t explicitly stated.”
Although this is true, the volume of capable people applying for certain types of roles, especially entry-level roles and executive roles, means that even highly qualified and capable people find themselves competing with, potentially, another dozen or so, similarly highly capable people, just to secure an interview.
This is where the skilful, respected and well-connected agency recruiter comes into their own.
Just as Amanda Chisholm exemplified, this type of recruiter can see and interpret what is otherwise invisible to everybody else in the recruitment process – the critical context of skills, behaviour, potential and culture.
The type of employer that doesn’t recognise this value is conceding a costly own goal.
“…..talent has become a strategic differentiator. The quality of hiring, the effectiveness of development, the intelligence of workforce planning: these now determine competitive outcomes.”
As I first wrote in September 2016, the future for agency recruiters as candidate advocates or talent agents looks increasingly promising, and Amanda Chisholm is a shining example of how effective and valuable they are and will increasingly be.
For job seekers, it really will be who you know, and who wants to represent you.
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