Recruiting: ‘You Can’t Do That With a Robot’

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Pianobot“I just want[ed] to be on the phone and get people to go to work and make everybody happier — and make more money,” Tim Arnold, cofounder and CEO of Fyre, says of his days as a full-desk recruiter at a staffing firm in Orlando.

Unfortunately for Arnold — and many other recruiters — the job is rarely this smooth. “The problem is all the little things that get in the way when you’re recruiting,” Arnold says. “You’ve got your tracking system, you’ve got forms to fill out, you’ve got to keep your notes in order — all these different things that slow you down.”

Some companies try to streamline the recruiting process by replacing recruiters altogether, automating placements and sourcing candidates via algorithm. While Arnold agrees that we can use technology to smooth the recruiter’s workflow and improve efficiency, he feels that companies who try to automate recruiters out of existence are misguided.

“I don’t think that’s the solution,” Arnold says. “The solution is to make the recruiter focus on what they’re great at, which is selling the candidate, getting everything locked down, getting the candidate interested, [and] pulling them from where they’re working today. You can’t do that with a robot.”

Much like RecruitiFi’s Brinn McCagg, Arnold believes that technology is best used as a complement to the recruiter’s job, not a supplement.

“What we can do is give recruiters all the tools they need to make that really powerful call,” Arnold says.

Arnold’s Fyre — a browser plug-in that works in conjunction with a firm’s existing ATS — hopes to be that tool.

The Recruiter’s Major Slowdowns

Arnold says the biggest stumbling block he encountered as a recruiter was keeping all the data in the system: taking time out of sourcing and researching candidates to upload resumes and wait for the ATS to parse them, etc. To make matters worse, he often would learn that if a candidate was problematic until after feeding their data into the system. 

“Sometimes you find out this person was already called, or someone else is already working with them, or they interviewed in the past for another client and they just weren’t a good fit … and now they’re not a good resource for you to use at all,” Arnold laments. “You just reviewed this candidate’s resume, [and] imported it into the system, all this just to find out that it was a waste of time.”

Arnold believes that Fyre could solve this problem by automating this part of the process. He explains: while researching candidates online, Fyre displays as a sidebar. “What it’s showing you is information from your own database. While you’re looking at that person and thinking, ‘Is this a good candidate,’ Fyre is going out and doing all the work, as far as parsing the resume, uploading it into your ATS, and creating the person if they don’t exist. If they do exist already, [Fyre] is going to pull back all the messages [on the candidate] from all of your colleagues and show them to you in the same screen.

Warm Up Your Cold Calls

“Today’s candidates are getting hit up constantly, especially in the specialized fields,” Arnold says. “You have to stand out from the pack, if you want your message heard.”

Arnold says that Fyre can help recruiters make “warmer calls” in two ways. First, it offers them easy access to all of their colleagues’ notes about candidates, so they know if a candidate has been contacted already, or is working with another recruiter, or was a bust in the past.

Additionally, Fyre seeks out candidate information on social media platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and GitHub.

“It’s time-consuming to find all these details on your own,” Arnold says. But this personalized information, leveraged carefully, could make a huge difference in courting candidates.

As of press time, Fyre only supports integration with three of the major ATSs, but Arnold says the company has plans to “cover the whole market” soon.

By Matthew Kosinski