Recruitment: Nothing Personal About It!

One of my Whatsapp groups climbed up the listing with a sudden spike in notifications. Someone had shared a screenshot of a short post from LinkedIn and the group was going nuts with fights and debates over it. In the screenshot, the Head Honcho of some company had publicly called bluff on a Senior Executive from a Big5 MNC! The issue was about the Senior Executive ghosting the Head Honcho (and his company), after apparently accepting an employment offer. The public post from the Head Honcho had emerged after failed attempts to reach the candidate for over a month. Not sure what official purpose the public post served, but it sure seemed that many others who endorsed it just needed a catharsis! 😊 Opinions were split wide in the middle with strong for and against threads. Credibility of all involved was being crowdsourced!

Name-and-Shame in Recruitment?

Despite all the automation, recruitment will remain a largely interpersonal process with room for personal bias and manipulation. The human process that it is, recruitment has enough potential for more name-and-shame situations if one chooses to resort to them. From cooked-up CVs to two-timing recruiters (!!) to no-shows to counter-offers to offer drops… LinkedIn could just become a wash board with dirty name-and-shame posts! And of course, blatantly violating the unwritten pact of privacy between the candidate and the recruiter. Treated akin to Privileged Information that Doctors and Lawyers hold, recruitment transactions also have a sensitivity that cannot be diluted by the Recruiter or Hiring Manager with a public outburst.

With both Candidate and Employer credibility at stake in the process, could we create neutral sub-systems that can come in handy to recruiters, hiring managers and candidates alike? Sub-systems that don’t name-and-shame but serve the data required for unbiased and un-manipulated decisions. Here are a few from our Wishlist and few from watercooler sessions!

BLOCKCHAIN RESUMES

The weakest link in the entire recruitment process is the Candidate CV! When it comes to the CV… WYSI-DefinitelyNot-WYG! While ref-checks and employment verification services are in use, there are limitations to both. There’s only so much that can actually be done by way of validating qualifications, past employments and specific project credentials from the distant past. The Resume as a Candidate generated instrument is almost always exaggerated and often presents misrepresented data. The resume is all but a journal of engagements completed by the candidate, right from graduation to the last held job. It should hence be auto-built through verified inputs from institutions and companies concerned and not creatively done by the candidate. Put on a Blockchain framework, with no scope to manipulate in retrospect, the Resume could finally be looked at with less suspicion. A gargantuan task, but one that is already underway as we talk! The world’s first blockchain career verification platform is already active and operational and coming soon to Asia. Fingers crossed!

IAMIN

A sourcing desk or a recruiter spends costly hours just calling candidates from their databases, only to find out that the candidate is not looking out anymore. Job-boards like Naukri came up with the ‘Last active on:’ feature to show the freshness of a profile and reduce this occurrence. However fact is that it doesn’t still assure that we aren’t barking up the wrong tree! Candidates seen active yesterday still drop the call today saying they aren’t looking out. Of course, we now have BOTs that can call on behalf of a recruiter… a time saver but one that still costs! We also have cases where candidates develop a cold-feet after initially saying YES and turn up being the wrong ones midway! As recruitment is a relationship building process, many candidates hesitate to say a straight NO and bow out. Switch into a radio silence tends to become an easier alternative especially if they’ve gone shopping with someone else! If only a Central Active Pool System existed for candidates to Check-in and state “I Am In!” 😊 …it would make it easy to sign-out without heartburns! Also recruiters would be happy to filter out the IAMNOTIN candidates from the process at any stage as they progress and not burn bridges.

C-CIBIL

If CIBIL rating tracks and declares credit worthiness of an individual based on current and past financial transactions, why not a “C-CIBIL” for Candidate Credibility rating?! Recruiters, Agencies and Hiring Managers, as the recruitment equivalent of Banks and Credit Companies, would love a dynamic rating of candidates to consider or exclude. A credibility score based on the number and quality of Recruitment engagements a candidate has had or is having… definitely Utopian but indeed doable! With UIDAI solving the unique identifier problem, Indian candidates are now trackable assets with identifiable transactions across multiple agencies. If only Recruiting Businesses and Hiring Companies, in their own common interest, had a central platform similar to AMADEUS, SABRE or TRAVELPORT in the travel and hotels industry. Visualizing the day when the whole recruitment industry would run on a common Operating System!! 😊

GRAYLIST?

The much dreaded CANDIDATE BLACKLIST is now a reality in certain enterprises. However the qualifiers to get on it are activities that are slightly up the crime scale! Day to day transactions and exchanges that recruiters have with some candidates produce enough dope to dig into. Exposés on exaggerated CVs, a stalking candidate, lewd or inappropriate conversation content, repeated radio silence, misquoting, wrong or bad referees, obsessive no-shows and many more can be parameters to put someone on a WATCHOUT LIST if not a BLACKLIST. If implemented, this could well be the toughest system to moderate or protect from personal bias of recruiters. A slightly dated Bullhorn study had 43% of recruiters saying they would “blacklist” a candidate for applying to irrelevant positions! A toughie of a system to balance, but definitely a desirable one to have.

The wish-list for systems could go on longer but am sure you got the drift! 😊 With ‘PERSONAL BRANDS’ being the buzzword, can Crowdsourcing Credibility through subjective exchanges on social media platforms be replaced with a more data driven alternative?