Last updated on October 30th, 2023 at 04:29 pm

I remember being young and wide-eyed in business. I was unsure of myself. I sat silently at meetings listening to older people speak and trying to understand what the heck they were talking about.

I lived in fear that I’d say something stupid. I blush like crazy when I’m embarrassed. I spent years hoping that when I opened my mouth at a meeting I didn’t say something that would make me want to fall through a hole in the floor. I worried so much about what people thought about me that the actual subject matter for the meeting was often peripheral.

We automated our order processing system. It was a huge project outsourced to an external software vendor. We had endless meetings to talk about automating processes and sub-processes, and over and over the project managers said “A process has to be smart before we automate it. Garbage in, garbage out.”

I thought all software projects worked the same way, but evidently they don’t. If we had spent eight seconds looking at the traditional recruiting process before automating it, we wouldn’t have soul-sucking Black Hole recruiting systems in place at nearly every medium-sized and large organization right now.

We automated a recruiting and selection process that is literally the worst possible way to hire people.

We took an old, crusty, unexamined recruiting protocol and slapped some code on it. In the standard recruiting process we toss out nets (job ads) then pull the nets onto shore to see what kinds of lobsters crawled in. We sort through the lobsters (resumes or job applications), pick the best ones to boil and throw the rest back in the water, rudely.

We still use recruiting questions developed by Henry Ford and his peers. Our big questions are: Where did you work? How long did you work there for? What tasks did you perform?

TASKS, seriously? Wake up, my dear ATS product developers, and smell the new-millennium coffee. Who cares what tasks a knowledge worker performed?

We want to know what you got done at each job – what’s in your wake! We want to know what you changed, fixed, expanded, re-imagined and turned upside down to magnificent effect! We want to know how you conceived of your role and how you saw your mission. We want to see your brain working – the number one thing a traditional ATS doesn’t do to even the tiniest degree.

The traditional, factory-style application form was already useless when I started in HR in 1984. Whatever creative impulse first gave rise to the standard application form a hundred and some-odd years ago had long since crusted over by then. No one wanted to change the application form, and as a newbie I assumed there must be some law that required all the terse language and looking-down-the-nose formality of a typical job application.

There isn’t. We just don’t like to change things once we’ve gotten cozy with them. When it came time to automate the candidate-sifting process in the nineteen-nineties, we threw the broken process out of analog mode and into digital without a glance at its essential logic, which is nonexistent.

If we should receive two job applications from two people who both worked at Acme Explosives in the same job title and during the exact same period of three years, what will our ATS tell us about each of them? It will tell us that they worked at Acme and in which positions, for how long, the very bits of information that can’t help us choose between them.

How could our Black Hole ATS help us determine which one did an amazing job and which one barely made it to work each day? It wouldn’t! We put our trust in keywords, a bonehead move because anyone can copy and paste keywords from a job ad into a resume or application form. Once everyone understands the keyword system and how to breach its defenses, it’s useless.

We can recruit people in a human way. I know that because I’ve done it and teach people to do it every day. We can write job ads that sound like living human people wrote them. We can be honest about the challenges in a job and what would make a job fun to perform, instead of writing job ads full of Essential Job Requirements and a general air of condescension toward job-seekers.

We can speak like human beings to job-seekers from the moment we come into contact with them. Instead of sending them through robotic Black Hole portals, we can write Logical Gates into our job ads to make it clear what a job really requires.

We can ask people who are interested to write to us in a human voice and answer the thoughtful, human Logical Gate question we pose in our job ad, like this:

If this Editor position sounds like a good fit for you, please write to Jane Banks at jebanks@acmeexplosives.com and tell us why. In your message, please share your thoughts on the most recent edition of our newsletter, at the link below. Tell us what you’d do differently to make the newsletter more readable and useful for our subscribers. Thanks!

Most of the people who respond to your job ad won’t see the Logical Gate question and won’t respond to it. For an Editor job, that would be an instant ‘No thanks’ trigger.

The few people who remark on your newsletter will make their suitability for your Editor job crystal clear in their newsletter suggestions. That’s how a Logical Gate in a job ad works.

Once you know who you’re going to interview for the job opening, you’ll have to collect some information from them, particularly if your employer does business with the government. Still, there’s no reason why a sensible, human-focused recruiting process would ever require a job-seeker to sit in front of a screen typing in data.

That’s 1975 technology. Even uploading a resume is a stupid, cumbersome part of the process when everybody is on LinkedIn or Facebook or both. The ATS vendors that will survive past 2020 are going to be the ones who figure how to tame Godzilla and make the recruiting process more inviting, more reflective of the actual work to be performed and above all, more human.

We can cultivate talent hives to attract people who like our company and might want to work for us, or just be friends with us and hear about new products. We can keep our fans and followers buzzing in the hive and spreading the word about us by feeding them sweet and sticky content and coupons and all kinds of fun and fizzy things.

Why would we market to the talented people who drive our success any differently than we market to our customers?

If we don’t believe that job applicants who respond to our openings or approach us directly about job openings are as valuable to the completion of our mission as our customers are, we are not qualified to lead. If we don’t see our teammates as the core of our firm’s competitive advantages, we’ll recruit from fear instead of trust.

We’ll build impersonal, terse application portals that drive the best people away, and insist that a job-seeker grovel and beg to get a job with us. That will artificially depress the calibre of our teams without saving a dime. We can reverse that negative energy, and re-imagine our recruiting processes for the Human Workplaces we’re building.

We have evolved as a species over time. We can evolve a bit more to lose the talent-repelling Black Hole portals and the employer-centric mindset they manifest. We can trust ourselves enough to want to hire people smarter than we are, and we can attract those people by staying human when our competitors lag behind in Godzilla Land.

Every part of the recruiting pipeline is faster and more fun when there’s human mojo in the mix. Try it and you’ll see!

© Liz Ryan

Go back to Management Consulting