The Future (part one) 🛸 EBH

Darkest before the dawn?

What would immediately more effective social media that defines, supports, proves, and illustrate your employer brand be worth to you?

If you answered more than $25, you kinda have to register for my newest class on better social media for employer brand. This is the discounted price. The number goes up after the class goes on-demand after May 16.

+++++

Comfortable or not, this is the now:

Job postings

Job postings suck, and all our complaining has only elevated 1-2% of them. In reality, the average score for a job posting is somewhere in the D to D- area.

Does ChatGPT write amazing job postings? No. But they will get your job posting to a B or B- level in five seconds. It takes real art (and a real artist) to make an A-level job posting, but for a zero investment of time and money, getting a B- job posting is a HUGE boost. Sadly, for most companies, the boost will be so big, they won’t even realize how Meh they still are.

Jobs

I continue to be appalled by how poorly we think about jobs. We act like it’s still 1985 and everyone works for the post office. That people don’t have side-hustles, aren’t upskilling outside of work to get their next job, aren’t inundated with messages about how they can take their skills freelance and work less to make more money (please talk to me before you take that route), aren’t thinking of ways to be famous on SnapChat, YouTube, or Tik Tok so that can quit their job and live in a van, like they haven’t investigated what it would take to move to Taiwan, Canada, Costa Rica, et al to ensure a cheaper cost of living with decent free health care.

HR teams seem to be holding this wave back, but cracks are appearing in the dam. While HR loves to think in terms of hiring 100% FTEs who are on call 24/7 and have no other jobs, that’s not the way the world actually is.

Recruiters

Right now, much of what a recruiter does day-to-day can be replaced by tech. Not just writing and posting jobs to the ATS, or scheduling interviews, but right now tech can stack rank candidates, maybe not as well as a hiring manager who has been in the relevant industry for a decade, but certainly better than most recruiters who kinda/sorta understand the space (because they’ve been asked to “understand” ten functions). Are there recruiters who can spot a true diamond in the rough better than a machine? Yes. Maybe 10% of recruiters have that skill. Sadly, 70% of recruiters think they have that skill.

Don’t be angry: machines are out-performing doctors at identifying diseases and market analysts in predicting which stock will rise and fall. We’re all going to feel this shift.

At the same time, AI can find better candidates for your hiring managers (similar statements of values in social media, a set of scores to identify skills, etc), write (and test) outreach messages to figure out what works far faster than any single recruiter (or recruiting team), making AI more effective at finding and drawing talent into the company.

Employer Branders

I know recruiters were probably feeling a smidge peeved by the above, but I am not shying away from my own industry.

First off, I get a lot of recruiting/CRM newsletters (almost every single one being published at a glacial cadence), and let me say now: We have not exactly set the bar very high. The copy is dull, semi-narcissistic, and lacking in any real value, meaning, or feeling. Is it me, or does that make it sound tailor-made for AI to produce (at a far faster rate and far cheaper)?

Our social content isn’t much better. Ignoring that our social content isn’t even particularly social, if you pick a de rigueur holiday (Thanksgiving, New Years Day, Coronation Day, et al) and read 100 posts, you’ll notice that 95% say almost the exactly same thing and have the value to a candidate as three squares of one-ply toilet paper have against the rain. Again, we’ve set the bar so low, we’re almost begging machines to take over the work (and I suspect I already see the machine writing some of your stuff).

How far away are we from Midjourney from making better graphics for our Instagram? And the language we use to respond to Glassdoor almost always sounds written by lawyers already.

Hiring Managers

80-90% of hiring managers throw requisitions over the fence to recruiters and then complain that the recruiter can’t find anyone.

They write absolutely insane requirements for a job (what, you thought recruiters invented the idea of a purple unicorn?), either asking for the impossible or being so vague as to allow that most of humanity might be qualified for the role.

Right now, any hiring manager could (and should) prompt GPT to write a decent job posting. Based on the results, it might take the HM 4 or 5 tries to really describe something semi-resembling a realistic job posting (see: low bar) that they redline for a few minutes. Just doing that would save HMs time and immediately help the recruiter understand who they are really looking for.

Despite knowing huge swaths of professionals in their own industry, it requires a herculean effort to get them to talk about their open role online, or even ask people they know if they have ideas about who might want the role. Recruiters or EBers can ask GPT to write a simple social post to ask if anyone knows a potential great fit and pass them to HM every single week until the role closes.

We’ll hold off on how having not gotten their job on a job board, they somehow assume great candidates like themselves are on those boards for a later post.

Finally, AI is already starting to help HMs interview better, focusing on skills required to excel in the role instead of everyone’s favorite, “do I like them?” criteria. Judiciously applied AI will cut interview processes and durations in half.

So that’s what exists today. On Wednesday, I’ll publish the “what’s coming our way” rejoinder.

+++++

On LinkedIn, I’m announcing that if you are a laid-off recruiter looking for a new role, I will give you free access to my Employer Branding for Recruiters video class. I suspect skills in working with a company’s employer brand will make you a more attractive candidate.

Email me if you’d like access to the course.

***While I talk a lot about it, this newsletter contains no ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

###