support for this podcast comes from Monster Worldwide. Monster has two products that are helping to shape the future of social recruiting. Talent Been by Monster, which enables companies to source the best tech talent from the open web, and Monster Social Job Ads, which extends job advertising reach to target both passive and active candidates on social platforms, including on Twitter. Hi, and welcome to Episode 16 of the Recreating Future Podcast. There is so much social media and conference noise on our industry round new tools and approaches, it will be easy to think that we are living in a golden age of recruitment innovation. However, whenever I dig down past the hype, I wonder whether there is anything truly driving the industry forward, or whether it's just a lot of people launching slightly different versions of tools we've had for 10 years. My guest this week is Executive Editor of Recreating Daily, Matt Chani, and he's certainly someone who has an opinion on this subject. Hi everyone, and welcome to another Recreating Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Matt Chani. Hi, Matt, how are you? I'm good, Matt, how are you doing? I'm pretty good, actually, pretty good indeed. Could you just introduce yourself to everyone? Yeah, hi everyone. My name is Matt Chani, and I am the Executive Editor for Recreating Daily, which is a company that owns a bunch of content-based destinations that all focus on recruiting, the two most prominent which are recruitingdaily.com and recruitingblobs.com. You should check them out and there's my spiel, so thank you for that. Definitely, definitely. I will make sure we put links in the show notes as well so people can click through and have a look. I think it would be quite interesting to start with just a little bit about you and how you got to do what you do, because I know you've had kind of a varied career. I think when I first met you, you were doing content and blogging for Monster. Can you just give us a bit of background on you and how you got to be where you are today? Yeah, I think my career story is kind of like a Camden novel, honestly. There's no real trajectory or plot, but here I am. More or less what had happened is I just started off as a recruiter, and I realized before employer branding or social recruiting became things that the internet could be used to cast a wide net to attract more candidates than making cold calls, which I having started my career in recruiting didn't want to make because I was hung over most days, right? It was much easier to do on Facebook. So I ultimately kind of set up the first initiatives around that. It did me and Warner Brothers, in addition to doing full cycle recruiting for a bunch of very boring positions like control or ship and treasury. And from there, I just kind of started blogging and one of my posts, which was on how recruiters reader resumes got published on ERE. The next thing I knew I was up interviewing at Monster, which I thought was ironic, and I did. So I could get some some funny content and I ended up kind of starting their B2B social media and content marketing function. And from there, I just kind of worked for a few vendors in their marketing roles. And lucky enough, I was able to come on to my current role, which is covering, I guess, for lack of that word, a journalistic sense, the recruiting industry and vendors and helping a bunch of them with their marketing initiatives rather than work in-house. So really, it's just kind of been a weird but fun journey and it all kind of came from writing the right blog posts and finding the right audience. Great stuff. And I think that's why I really kind of wanted to have this chat with you, really, because you're certainly a man with an opinion. I think that's kind of fair enough to say, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Now, whether that's right or not, that's up for the day. And really, what this particular sort of podcast is about in this episode is innovation. So from what you're kind of seeing in the market, because I know you see lots of things, you know, you talk to in-house people, you work with vendors, all kinds of stuff. Do you think the recruiting market is innovative at the moment? I think it's innovative at selling things. I don't think it's products or its approach to solving problems are necessarily innovative. Is there? I think it's really good selling those products. Yeah, yeah, okay. And is there anything that you've seen that is innovative from all the sort of products and services and approaches and thought leaders and all the things that are out there? I mean, I think that there are a handful of products out there. A lot of them don't get, a lot of press are still kind of nascent in terms of their overall roadmap that stand out. And I think unilaterally what those have in common is that they're not only new, but you can understand them within like 30 seconds. You don't need some complicated pictures like, oh, okay, I understand what you do. And I totally get like what hole in the market that fills. An example of that would be a company out of Seattle called Textio that just raised some funds. And essentially, all you do is you cut and paste a job description in there. It parses that a bit against a database of millions of job descriptions to monitor how strong it is for SEO and then suggests ways you can improve it to improve yield in terms of that job posting. So that, and there's a British company where I always do some always cut and paste or resume, and they're going to tell you your market range for compensation based entirely on the language. I think those are really innovative point solutions, but I think that their growth is largely being stymied by enterprise and larger vendors who are trying to build competitive solutions in house and consistently tell their clients, you know, that's coming. A product that will do the same things on the roadmap and whether or not they deliver on that, that's a mixed bag. I think that tends to be a kind of a stock response from a lot of the established vendors to kind of stave off that, stave off that competition. I think it's interesting as well, because they're both companies that I'd not heard of, but I completely get it and I think it's a really, really great idea. I mean, I tend to find that a lot of the products that come onto the market these days are either a different version of a job board or a different version of a kind of recruitment consultant. I mean, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I'd agree with that, but I also think that a lot of the next generation job boards, for example, have taken that business model and really done what I would say is an innovative job of reinventing the category, like indeed in Glassdoor are built on the same business model as a mobster or a career builder, but at the same time, you know, we're able to really recreate the way that that whole value prop works for both employers and job seekers. So I do think there is some innovation going on even within a more established space, but at the same time, I think that what we're really seeing is the same, I guess, vendors popping up with solutions that may or may not work and any quote-unquote innovation is more or less a feature set that nobody actually needs, like video interviewing, like nobody actually needs that. Is it innovative in the sense that nobody's really implemented that and made a strong business case for it? Yeah, I think that, you know, you could look at it as innovative, all these quote-unquote candid experience platforms. They likely solve what's a pretty bad problem, but do you need a point solution to overcome lazy recruiting? I'm not 100% convinced. That's interesting. It's an interesting perspective. I mean, do you think that, I suppose, ultimately, this comes down to the demand in the market. And do you think that recruiters, particularly in-house recruiters, are actually looking for something new? Are they looking for innovation? Are they looking to do things differently? Or is it just being about being more efficient at what they're actually doing on a day-to-day basis already? So basically, I think that's kind of two trends coming together in a perfect storm. One of those is that recruiters and talent acquisition organizations suddenly have budgets to burn. It's like everyone's been so resource-starved for so long, and all of a sudden the floodgates have opened and they're out there, you know, we're going to make it rain. And then I think that the other thing that's really driving the market is recruiters are this really weird fear of missing out. So I think that they tend to allocate those newly found funds into places that make them feel like they're on the cutting edge or doing something new, even if it's something that doesn't actually improve real recruiting results, you know, that they prefer sexy style in terms of over-systems of substance, I would say. Okay. Now, as broadly speaking, a content professional, you know, you're forever writing articles and producing other content. You've already sort of mentioned content marketing as we've been talking. Do you think that that is important or will be important from a recruitment marketing perspective in terms of actually communicating with candidates, you know, in allowing people to kind of express their employer brand, find and persuade the top talent for their organisations? Is it an important thing? Yeah, I mean, so I think it has already become central if you look at how they're recruiting processes on these functions, like your basic unit of currency is a job description. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. So because we've more or less democratized distribution through aggregators, like indeed, as well as, you know, everyone starts their search in Google, it becomes less about where you're putting those job descriptions and more about what you say in them and how you optimize them to be found. So I think that strategy alone, in trying to drive applicants through the, you know, millions and millions of dollars companies dedicate your driven marketing every year, you know, it really just comes down to, you know, building and optimizing the best content possible to reach the right target, so. Okay. And do you think that's likely to go beyond job postings in the coming sort of months and years? I mean, it sort of has already in terms of, you know, employer branding or employee reviews on sites like Last Door increasingly like indeed, as well as, you know, companies trying to build this presence across platforms around their employer brand. So I do think that, you know, there's definitely starting to be a shift there. Yeah. Now, whether or not that's, that's actually a thing I don't know because at the end of the day, as long as we have search engines, and as long as we have applicant tracking systems, then it really is not going to be a substantive change from the current model. Okay. So I don't see that changing anytime soon, to be honest with you. Anyone who shows their resume is dead does not understand how enterprise systems work in recruiting. Okay, which I suppose leads me fantastically onto my next question, which is something that I pretty much ask everyone who comes on the podcast now, which is, can you replace a recruiter with an algorithm? No. Well, I guess actually that's a subjective answer. It depends on the recruiter and it depends on the algorithm. To be honest with you, because there are some recruiters who were, I would say, they do nothing at best and hurt all of us in terms of professional reputation, at worst, who should be replaced by algorithms because the algorithms would actually do something. But that said, ultimately, what we've seen is that high tech has really driven a lot of the strategy and approaches in recruiting today, but it's high touch that I think really turns that into an actual relationship that's going to lead to an offer. And at the end of the day, that's what your idea is you're trying to fill positions. So I think that's really become the competitive differentiators, how well you can take those online relationships and strengthen them offline or through interpersonal communications. And I don't think an algorithm will be able to do that anytime soon, no matter how advanced semantic technologies get. Okay, so what's next? What do you think is next for recruitment? Where is this innovation or lack of innovation leading us to? What are we going to be sort of talking about in two or three years times, you think? So what I think is kind of interesting is that you can always kind of tell where recruitment's going by looking at where marketing was. It's about a five year lag time, I would say, if you're looking at the quote unquote leading edge. So if I look at what's next, I honestly think that the biggest changes that are going to happen are going to be that I think employers are going to start increasingly tasking employees with driving referrals and actively recruiting as part of their job responsibilities. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, rather than just rely on a recruiter, I think you're also really going to see a shift since companies are ultimately way awake up to the fact that all those resumes they spent years ignoring are in fact a huge database of at one point in time warm job seekers. We're going to see an emphasis, I think, from owning external search to having the search capabilities to make those profiles meaningful, and we're going to start really sourcing the systems we have instead of looking to funnel more leads into them. So those are, I think, the largest changes, I anticipate recruiting, and then obviously, if I'm really looking out, I'm excited to see what happens when an Oculus Rift gets released and goes mainstream, which will happen the next couple of years. Virtual reality recruiting. What do you think that would look like? There's so many possibilities from situational job training to being able to see what it's like to really work in an office, so like employer branding initiatives, to even being able to do test and/or real interviews. So I think that what you could do with that system is all about who's building what using the API because it'll be open. So I think the vendors have a really interesting chance to help drive that technology, and there are so many applications for recruiting an HR. All I can say is that as soon as I put it on for the first time, I realized that it was everything that Google Glass was supposed to be. Fantastic. I think I'm looking forward to that, the virtual reality recruitment future. Matt, thank you very much for talking to me. Yeah, no, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. My thanks to Matt Chani. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes and read show notes at www.rfpodcast.com, and also subscribe to the mailing list there to get exclusive content and find out about future guests. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode Matt Alder talks with Matt Charney Executive Editor at Recruiting DailyThere is so much social media and conference talk in the industry round new tools and approaches it would be easy to think that we are in a golden age of recruitment innovation. However when you dig below the hype, some would argue that a lot of the new products being launched are just slightly different versions of existing technologies that have already been around for the last ten years.In this interview Matt and Matt talk about the current state of innovation in the industry and what makes a genuinely innovative product. They also discuss why employers buy into new tools, the role of established vendors and an emerging trend that could see us looking at recruitment in very different way.Links from this episode:
http://www.recruitingdaily.comhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com
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