I spotted an article by Peter Weddle, CEO of Weddles.com, where he uses the much touted Googlized/O’Reilly term of “Cloud Computing” and attempts to put a different spin on traditional recruitment. Unfortunately, the vision he presents falls short of the mark in terms of a Utopian recruitment cloud.
Let’s re-visit where “Cloud Computing” comes from.
Think of the heady days where the IBM mainframe was king and dumb terminals accessing locked down applications were all users could hope for. Sure enough, the rebellion against centralized control came with the personal computer.
What goes around comes around and “Cloud Computing” now makes things surprisingly centralized again but this time it’s a lot more accessible and the choice of applications will be vast. Let’s take a look back at the recruitment industry.
What we have is 1001 generic job boards and 1001 specific job boards competing for the same thing – prospective candidates’ personal data. Job boards are building their own islands of data around which they put up their credit card barriers. They make their profit from recruiters wishing to advertise job vacancies on one hand and employers/agencies accessing their CV databases on the other as well as the usual plethora of site ads.
What about the recruitment agencies? How do they fit into this picture? They don’t want to pay money to the job boards to get peoples’ data, so they’re all building their own data islands by essentially cold calling people and extracting information about other prospective candidates and storing this information for themselves: hardly efficient, but when everyone wants a slice of the employer’s pie (fixed fee or percentage), then who can blame them?
Let’s apply the vision of “Cloud Computing” back to the recruitment industry and define what “Cloud Recruiting” should be from an employer’s point of view.
- We want access to a vast pool of resources
- We want to find people quickly
- We want to know if they have the right skills
- We want to see when they’re available
- We want information about how good they are
- And MOST of all
- We want all of this to be FREE.
Curiously the same “wants” are identical for agencies, but it’s not surprising, as they are acting as a specialized, outsourced HR department. For people seeking work (or wondering what opportunities are out there), there are a different set of values.
- We want to publicize ourselves
- We want to control the information people see
- We want to control how people interact with us
- We want to share our ideas with our peers
- We want all of this to be FREE.
As Michael Marlatt says, “The future is in the cloud,” but I like to think the future of recruitment is in our hands – how we connect with the cloud is where the biggest changes will come from.
We need to flip this whole thing on its head and give the power to the users – they own the data!
Just as “Cloud Computing” is applications on tap, “Cloud Recruiting” should be a pipeline of people. The recruitment industry now needs to get its head up in the clouds rather than sticking it firmly in the sand.
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May 19th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Graham,
These are some great insights. You say most of all that people want this done for free. Do you think that is possible? And if you do, how? You also mentioned a “pipeline of people.” I’m guessing that the closest thing to that right now are social networks. Could that be harnessed? Thanks again for the thought provoking article.
May 20th, 2009 at 3:43 am
Cade,
Thanks for your comments. I think that most people’s expectations are that Internet services should be “free”. Just how free is another question! There are lots of different financial models out there. For example, targeted ads to generate revenue, charge for more advanced function but not for the basic service etc..
I think you’re right in saying that social networks are the “closest thing” to a pipeline of people but my feeling is that they’re not focused enough on the employer/candidate relationship and so aren’t quite the right vehicle yet.
May 24th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Before Cloud Computing, the employment system was already in shambles.
Hiring and getting hired stopped focusing on the person ages ago. It instead became this madhouse of chasing people as paper in the form of resumes. It also became getting known as a piece of paper, 1 or 2 sheets at most, please.
You don’t have much neither from employer nor candidate that says, “I view you as an opportunity. I would like to get to know your strengths, skills and personality so you can show us how you will contribute to our team and bottom line.” Instead, you’re instructed to send resumes and are greeted by “No Phone Calls Please!”
The Internet and Cloud Computing have made this problem exponentially worse. Before, you had to really think which employers were worth spending postage on. Nowadays, it costs nothing to copy-and-paste and press the Send buttons. Infinite databases promised by Cloud Computing exacerbate this beyond belief.
You don’t have neither systems nor people saying, “I want to see the good each applicant brings.” It’s all become more about eliminating and screening out. Sadly, some really good people get filtered out, especially by buggy, impersonal software.