One thing the staffing industry has a lot of is data. The problem today is it’s mostly unstructured; CVs sit on redundant legacy databases, interview notes and feedback tends to be unstructured comments within those same databases or written by hand across CVs. In other words, it’s mostly useless. The way the databases are structured often makes it very cumbersome to access data and most none have evolved beyond simple Boolean search operators, returning a lot of information but making it laborious for the user to work through lists of potential applicants. In addition to this they’re all 1 way systems, ie Candidates can’t update their details.
Linked In has changed this, which is why it’s such a popular tool with recruiters. Just as with other job boards before it, long came the call of “The end of the Agency Recruiter”, but if anything LinkedIn has just strengthened Recruiters businesses – Firms still outsource their recruiting to agencies as searching and filtering candidates is a laborious time consuming business.
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However, as technology emerges that can automate that sourcing and filtering of candidates, where jobs are marketed directly to jobseekers, we expect to see more firms reducing their reliance on agencies, building stronger in-house teams that use emerging online platforms as their primary sourcing and attraction models.
We think as VMS and FMS technologies converge, the recruiting landscape will look a little different. MSPs will remain in place on site to manage the function, using blended VMS/FMS platforms that provide access to private talent pools, accessible only by end users, not agencies. This has already been happening in the permanent hiring space and we expect the contingent space to catch up on this over the coming years. The technology is here today to automate the above, and with smart systems learning users behavioral patterns and curating and improving recommendations and ranking applicants, we aren’t far from a system approaching an AI that can very accurately predict who a firm will hire from a set of applicants, based on previous hiring patterns.
The term is overused but this is Big Data and it’s here to stay, and it will affect so many parts of all our lives we’d better embrace it fully. The staffing industry as a whole doesn’t have a reputation for embracing new technology, as we all know, so it will be interesting to see how staffing firms will look in years to come. My prediction: fewer humans doing more things with technology enabling a higher workload per head.
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