The Future (part two) 👩‍🚀👽 EBH

Anticipate the shift and you'll stay on top

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. And feel free to share this offer with a recruiter you know who’s looking for help.

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So if Monday’s post made you uncomfortable with all the changes we’re seeing (or actively choosing to not see), where does this lead us?

(I swear this was supposed to be a simple post that just… didn’t stop)

Jobs

I suspect that 20-40% of all “professional” office-style jobs will be done by people who don’t actually work within the company.

You know how in “Office Space” Tom is the guy who takes the specs from the customers and hands them to the developers? How many of your jobs have those kinds of tasks in them? Meetings that don’t really need you or drive productivity. Committee attendance. Weekly updates. Staff meetings where everyone gets 90 seconds to talk so that the leader can “stay on top of things.” The seven thousand times Slack pings you to discover that the message doesn’t directly concern you.

If you’re a writer, how many hours a week are you writing or editing? If you’re a coder, how many hours are spent making and fixing code? 10? 15? And if you’re a recruiter, you’re insanely busy, but how much of that business is actual recruiting?

Jobs are going to get broken down into tasks requiring skills because that will increase productivity.

That meeting is still going to happen, but a bot will record, transcribe and summarize it, highlighting anything you will be responsible for.

The writing will still happen, but it will be informed by what data says readers want to learn more about, and GPT identifies the subtopics you should ignore because everyone talks about them. For example: if you write a post about how to make a stronger resume, you do really need to be the seven trillionth person to suggest that they check their spelling carefully?

The social will still happen, but the bot might suggest people who talk about this subject a lot that you might want to tag. Or re-write an old post for a new audience that you can edit.

What happening is that the “work” is getting done faster and easier, thus allowing fewer people to do more work of higher quality. Yes, the bot can “create” more, but it still requires a human to decide which idea is more useful, more valuable, and very much more strategic. Great content might be the result of a back-and-forth between the person and the bot, but in the end, it is the person who makes the final call.

If you think the demand to work at home was a big shift, wait until all of your colleagues are contractors in six different countries, all of whom are using AI to do their job better, to spend more of their time doing smarter work.

Oh, and since companies who share the most about themselves (salary, culture, thinking, etc) will continue to attract the best people, companies will be financially incentivized to share much much more.

Recruiters

Allyn Bailey has already predicted that we’ll see our first all-AI TA team in two years (I think it will be in one). But either way, recruiters will be expected to handle a LOT more requisitions because the rote tasks will be taken out of their hands. They won’t write job postings (a tool will walk the HM through that process and post it directly to the ATS where HR will confirm that they can afford to hire it before it gets sent to every job board in the known universe). They won’t source much (again, an AI tool will help HMs take care of that process because they’ll be able to do it while they stream season six of Stranger Things).

Scheduling, screening, and transactional messaging (thanks for applying, we’re excited to learn more about you, thanks but no thanks, etc) have already been taken off a recruiter’s plate.

So what’s left?

A lot, but a lot of it is semi-abstract. Great recruiters help candidates envision joining the company, and answer questions from a very non-corporate POV. They are people-people. They engage people and cherry-pick great stories to share, they listen to a candidate’s reservations and nudge them in the right direction, and often do the final negotiation.

A great deal of what a recruiter does is be the human buffer between what the candidate and the hiring managers want and what the “standard recruiting process” is. They keep candidates warm despite not being chosen (just in case). They suggest other roles to second-place finishers (just in case). They cover the gaps that automation can’t fill because automation didn’t take this specific instance into account.

This means recruiters will be handling more reqs, but the skills need will shift. They won’t process paperwork, they will focus on connecting the reason people would want to work there (yes, the employer brand) to the person who they suspect is ready to hear it.

The skill recruiters bring to the table won’t be the ability to morph into what the company is or does. It will be the ability to stand out in a crowd, to be seen by their target audience and have the credibility to engage them.

We might even get to the point where candidates have been “pre-hired” by the company in the same way you might be pre-approved for a credit card: Here’s the salary, here’s the title, here’s the team and your boss, and all this is yours if you just have two interviews where we confirm what we know about you.

Impossible? We have to accept that more and more of our “personal” data is available online. How long before LinkedIn buys access to credit firms and makes an agreement with Facebook and Google for web activity data to create “more complete” pictures of who we are as “individuals?” That Facebook personality test didn’t just tell us what Taylor Swift song we were, but was mapped to a DiSC assessment, and after taking four tests, it becomes clear to the bot that you are a strong “I” with some “C.” The number of times we go out suggests how extroverted we are. The number of times we watched Parks and Rec suggests a personality type.

That approach puts the recruiter in a VERY different position, rather than being the salesperson, they become a kind of producer (like a movie or music producer), the person who is tasked with inventing a process, looking at what exists, evaluating what everyone wants, and making solutions happen.

Imagine HR saying you need a new head of nursing. The Producer-Recruiter checks in with the HM, three people that the role would report to, comp&ben, and defines identifiers of potential great hires (previous experience, what past connections said (or didn’t say) about them in LI reviews, what they talk about online professionally, organizations they are in (and if they are leaders or volunteers, etc). They ask the bot to scrape anything the targets have written and analyze writing style and personality types. They ask the bot to identify “differences” between top candidates. This leads them to pick two people who, based on signals far more subtle than what they say in a resume, are great potential hires. The producer “pitches” the prospect to the hiring manager, who agrees to pre-offer the candidate a new role.

A brave new world of recruiting.

Interviewing and Job Search (two sides of the same coin)

I’ve joked that it feels like we’re soon reaching the stage were the company’s bot will interview my bot and someone will email me when I get the job. Okay, so maybe it’s not a “ha ha!” joke so much as an indication of how the interviewing arms race is going to proceed.

With all the data available publicly on both sides of the table, we have to assume interviews are less “let’s discover more about each other!” and more “let’s confirm what we found and talk about how that fits” which is a far more effective use of everyone’s time. Candidates will walk in knowing what we say about our culture and have a sense of how much of that is real and how much is spin.

There’s a spectrum between “newbie” and “expert/connoisseur.” When you first looked for a job, you were a newbie. You had a limited frame of reference. You may have liked that the company told everyone that they were “people-forward” but not had a concrete sense of what that meant.

Three jobs later, you’re an expert. You can read nuances between the lines of a career site or Glassdoor review. You ask better questions. You are able to appreciate subtlety.

That’s going to be every candidate. They will look askance at “big” splashy claims and ads and look for more of the “no really, what it is like when the wheels start to fall off the wagon on a project on Friday afternoon? Does everyone go home and come back Monday refreshed? Or does everyone just plan on eating delivery pizza for the next day or so while they hunker down and hash things out?”

Employer Brand

You are either going to love or hate this one.

As the bots take over more of the day-to-day “work” of recruiting, the value of a proper and well-executed talent strategy increases.

And employer branding will be the driver of that strategy.

The first thing to consider is that while EB will still own the “pretty pictures/pretty words” portion of recruiting, 90% of that work will be bot-driven. That allows more time for EB to focus on the company’s talent position, to define how it is different from competitors, to embrace more messaging around “this is why we’re a good relative to other companies” and less about “we’re pretty great!”

Right now, recruiters can do and say what they want to candidates (not always, but let’s be fair: how often has anyone audited what recruiters are sending prospects?). They are individual actors with very loose boundaries and guidelines on what they can or should say to a candidate. We entrust them with the expectation that they will focus on useful messaging, but as single actors, they don’t have the benefit of a wider perspective. They threw something against a wall, saw what stuck, and are going to go with that, no matter how old that message is.

EB will own more of the role of defining what position the company takes, defining better ways recruiters can communicate it (well, that the bots will communicate it for the recruiters), seeing patterns, identifying opportunities, and working with HR to shape the /kind/ of person should be brought into the company.

If recruiters become salespeople, EB will take stronger hold on what marketing is: less “pretty pictures/pretty words” and more of the why.

If recruiters become producers, EB will become studios, feeding resources, tools and content to help recruiters to help them achieve their goal.

What’s the bottom line?

One year ago, the idea that a “machine” could research material and write a serviceable 10th grade paper on The Great Gatsby would have sounded insane. Today, there are free tools doing exactly that who are decimating testing and evaluation company’s stock price. It went from “sci-fi” to “oh wow” to “ugh really?” to “yikes now what?” in between Marvel movies.

And there’s no slowing down.

You and I know that “the usual” process of recruiting hasn’t been satisfying to anyone in decades and probably deserves to be reinvented as an AI-driven app. The more companies see recruiting as a cost center, the more they will look to automate it down to someone’s part-time job. But this isn’t the nightmare it might appear at first glance.

This is our chance to show our value, to think more strategically, and more creatively, to solve problems far better than we ever have before rather than maintain a process no one likes.

The change is going to be tough, but I am excited for what we get to do on the other side.

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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.

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

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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