Two Masters

Interesting article by Lou Adler today over at ERE. He says:

• Your technology investment is yielding a negative ROI. While not a public session, someone described to me a meeting they had with a number of recruiting managers evaluating their satisfaction with all of the available recruiting technology. First, every tool was listed by name, including every major applicant-tracking system, every major job board, and all of the major tools. The ranking was limited to either a positive, neutral, or negative. In the summary report, not one technology product or tool received a positive ranking, and most had negatives. The moral is that high-tech will not solve your hiring problems without a lot of high touch.

It's not just that "technology doesn't solve problems" (which I agree with by the way), but that:

• ATS's are designed to solve HR's problems, not fulfill recruiter needs. But recruiters use the system and hate it and complain to HR, who then says the system doesn't work. You can't serve two masters: either hire great recruiters and give them the tools they need to win and then figure out the compliance problems on the back-end, or hire administrative temps who will manage data for compliance and who understand that nobody cares about what they think about the system.
• Job Boards are designed to solve recruiters problems, not candidate's interests. But employment managers pay for the systems and see that they get poor quality and a lot of noise for a pretty steep price. You can't serve two masters: either focus on how to attract the person who is right for your job (and that often won't include putting up a lousy job description on a public billboard) or figure that the money is going towards making recruiters feel better about their work because they plastered the job everywhere.