Rise of the Recruitment Marketplace

SAN FRANCISCO - March 22, 2019 - PRLog -- Online marketplaces are using AI to quickly transform nearly every conceivable service. Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry by giving travelers (and hosts) a new approach to short-term lodging and became the largest supplier of "rooms" in nine years. Uber upended the age-old taxi industry by allowing riders to connect with drivers on-demand and became the largest provider of "rides" in eight years. Amazon made it possible for shoppers to bypass brick and mortar retailers altogether. Even the arts and crafts industry has adopted marketplaces like Etsy to connect niche artisans with buyers around the world. In each case, disruption has been enabled by technical innovation—from the internet to cloud-based services to smartphones, geo-location services, and of course AI algorithms such as chatbots and machine learning.

With so many successful examples, it's easy to think we could apply a marketplace approach to every problem and end up with a solution that is better, faster and lower cost than the way things were done before. That kind of thinking has caused people to predict the demise of the recruiting profession altogether. For years, amateur futurists – alongside a few professional ones – have forecast the rise of the robot recruiter. It's been said that technology will become so good at finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, employers simply won't need people to do it anymore.

If you're planning a workforce in this technological wonderland, there's only one problem: It's not true and robot recruiters can't do the important and highly skilled work that human recruiters do.

Also Read: How Artificial Intelligence is Humanizing HR (https://hrt.media/ab9xp)

Recruiters will be around for a long time.

Conventional wisdom holds that market disruption makes someone obsolete – or at the very least, less relevant or a low margin commodity. It's easy to assume that the recruiter would be the odd person out in the talent equation. Let's use Airbnb as an example.

Before marketplace disruption came along, brokers and management companies signed up homeowners and matched them to renters.  The matching required knowledge of the options, availability, quality of property and location, etc.  Today, platforms like Airbnb use technology to provide this information and essentially play the role of the broker or management company. They make it easy for everyone involved.

For Airbnb, the "product" is residential housing. It's not very complicated. Finding a three-bedroom, two bath home with a pool in a particular neighborhood is a finite transaction. The permutations of amenities guests are looking for this year aren't likely to be that different next year. And, once a platform like Airbnb has enough users to generate a critical mass of reviews, and therefore engender trust on both sides, the whole experience becomes turnkey.

The situations for travel agents and rideshare drivers (e.g., taxi, Uber, Lift) are similar.  The travel agent's "product" is airline flights and/or hotels rooms, which are easily quantified and objectively rated.  Similarly, for rideshare services, most humans can drive a car and follow a GPS to a destination, so the "product" is simple to objectively quantify and rate.  The result is travel agents are obsolete and rideshare drivers have been commoditized!

So why can't that work with recruiting? Why can't employers and job-seekers connect directly on an "AirWorkplace" without the middleman? Simply put, the nature of the product is entirely different and so is the demand for it.

Said another way the answer is surprisingly simple: human beings are extremely complex and very hard to quantify objectively and rate, as are job requirements and needed work skills.

In recruiting, the "product" is human talent, not houses with pools. And not just any talent, but the talent that's needed now in a knowledge economy. Unlike the most popular Airbnb houses, today's most sought-after talent doesn't have the same attributes year after year. Skills need a change at lightning speed. So does the availability of talent and the regulatory environment that impacts who you hire. Talent is complicated, dynamic and constantly changing. A three-bedroom, two-bath rental home is not. The rental home also does not have emotions or a family or career aspirations.

Recruiters are key to finding and engaging passive talent.

Another difference: Airbnb connects homeowners who are looking to make their space available. The platform doesn't need to identify passive candidates. Imagine that if you wanted a rental, you had to convince a family, who had no real interest in renting their house, that they should make their home available, and do it when you wanted to go on vacation.  Who'd be able to do that? Certainly, no chatbot.  But that's is exactly what a recruiter must do to attract passive candidates, which are usually the most desirable ones.

What this means is recruiting technology that tries to match jobs to candidates will not be relevant until it can identify passive candidates with dynamically changing skills AND convince those candidates to take a new job. This is especially critical now, as we face one of the tightest skilled labor markets in history. Unfortunately, it is unlikely any such technology will be available for quite some time.

Clearly, a new solution is needed. At Scout Exchange, we use a recruiter's historical track record data to predict which jobs he/she will be most successful at filling. Having this objective historical performance data is what allows our algorithms to be 10 times more accurate than traditional job-to-candidate matching

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