Last month, I attended an event sponsored by a well-known job search site that aggregates jobs from all over the Internet. They have a great search engine for locating online jobs. In fact, this company refers to its service as “search engine hiring.”
The attendees were primarily corporate recruiters charged with filling multiple positions at various levels. The discussion centered on recruitment advertising and understanding the metrics involved in determining the “Cost per Applicant” and the “Cost per Hire.”
It got me thinking.
There is no question that measuring ROI is important. However, when hiring is viewed as a supply-chain problem, people are equated to products. Maybe that’s why we now call it human resources instead of personnel. Today’s hiring process is being run like a factory and we are turning individuals into commodities to be ordered according to specs.
Does the internet make that inevitable?
I don’t think so. When NETSHARE went from a hardcopy publication delivered via mail to Internet delivery in 1995, we saw the Internet as a more efficient way to distribute information. We still believed that the key to success is about connecting people, sharing networks. That belief has remained in place.
What this job site was selling was akin to classified ads for the web. That’s how all the early job boards started; digitizing print classified ads and making them available to a worldwide audience. For job seekers, this means sifting through ad after ad and trying to make your credentials match the criteria in the job listing. This was never a good career management strategy, nor a good hiring strategy. That’s how job candidates stop being people and start becoming a checklist of qualifications; product specifications. But the Internet also expands the possibilities of connecting with like-minded professionals, and hiring authorities, to share experience, ideas, and expertise. After all, people hire people, they don’t hire specifications.
Life is about relationships not transactions. So when you run your hiring process as if you were filling an order, you should not be surprised if you find a shortage of willing talent. Likewise, if you continue to treat your career as a series of transactions, you will find that it becomes transactional, which will limit your hopes for long term growth and true career satisfaction. On either side of the desk, if you see life as a web of intersecting relationships, you will find that you always have a safety net when you need it.
