When the Machines take over “we are all dead”

Just this past Wednesday I was listening to the Recruiting Animal do a show with my friend MM. During the show he said, “are you an internet sourcer” or are you “a phone sourcer”. And that got me thinking.

There is a profusion of sourcing tools and technologies out there today. Every day a new one comes along that can do better searches for you-- can provide better access to social media--can break down Boolean and find you the perfect candidate. And as these new tools and technologies come out I am shocked and amazed to hear recruiters saying “wow, one of these days they won’t even need us” or “with the cost of entry being so low what value does a recruiter bring”. And I kind of think that at times we are sliding into that futuristic fantasy where we believe that one day our “Judgment Day” will come and our lives as recruiters will be over.

I don’t believe that is true for a second… let me tell you why.

Because, the real talent that recruiters have comes from our human interaction with the candidate. No candidate was ever closed over email. At some point you have to pick up the phone and engage with the candidate, make a human connection that allows them to say, “Hey, this person is pretty cool and seems to be working in my best interest”. Here is an interesting story from my own recent past that illustrates the point:

I work for Hewitt Associates on the HRO team. Back in late December of last year we had to hire a large number of nurses for a client that we had just signed on. We also had to hire them in a geography where we had little knowledge of the landscape. Being good sourcers, we found a statewide list of registered nurses that included all of their email addresses. We loaded all 3000+ names into our CRM tool and sent them all an initial email letting them know that we would be interested in speaking to them about opportunities.

We got next to no response.

Hmmm, not what we were expecting, well, we thought, maybe our messaging is wrong, so we sent out a subsequent message trying to hit on the key messages that we thought nurses would want to hear.

Again, very little response.

Well, we were going out to the geography in question to hold interviews that very month, so we decided to hold a little intimate get together and invite the Nursing community, we mashed up Evite, and Facebook and even included a bit of twitter…. and voila, we got a great response. In fact, we filled all the roles and had pipeline left over. Not because of our cool sourcing tools but because we used the tools available to us to actually take the time to get to know these nurses as people, more than just prospective employees.

In my view because social media, including the medium of email can only connect individuals so far, people strive for real human connection, you have to shake their hand, you have to pick up the phone and talk to them, you have to make a meaningful connection so that they feel that they can trust you, and maybe just as importantly that you can trust them.

In conclusion, the machines will continue to come, but as recruiters we will continue to make human connections, and the machines will never win.

“I’ll be back…..”