Why LinkedIn is Making Hiring Managers Lazy

Have you ever heard the phrase, “the war for talent”? We work in a fast-paced global economy where increasing competition in the marketplace has made hiring the right candidate at the right time extremely challenging. More and more executive leaders are recognizing that finding and recruiting the right talent is the single most important element of a successful business. Adding to the increasing competition for the best candidates are new technologies in the talent acquisition process that pop up faster than we can determine whether or not they add any real value to the hiring process.

Neglecting the Human Element

Some of the most striking changes in this space over the last decade are the emergence and global domination of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, and the rise of resumé databases such as Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com. For several years now, these platforms have been the preferred methods of sourcing, researching, and qualifying prospective hires online. While LinkedIn is undoubtedly a tremendous resource for recruiters and hiring managers worldwide, we seemed to have fallen in love with it too fast — as we have with other technology platforms and resume search engines — and forgotten the fundamentals of engaging the best possible candidates. We’ve become masters of Boolean search strings to find candidates and let the human element fall by the wayside. In short, we’ve gotten lazy.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution for hiring managers and HR teams around the world: the informal interview. One generation ago, there was no such thing as the Boolean resumé search, online sourcing, or full-suite ERP hiring technology. Managers were expected to allocate ample time to recruiting new hires to their team during growth stages. This meant actively engaging with the local community at networking events and conferences and inviting prospects on site for informational interviews. In the last 20 years, technology has allowed us to expand our reach to every corner of the globe. However, our level of engagement appears to have decreased. The human factor has disappeared, as corporations everywhere bought into the fallacy that technology alone would solve their talent needs.

Rather than replace the limited, but reliable traditional methods of attracting talent, we must complement them with new technology as it becomes available. LinkedIn, Monster, and the full spectrum of technology platforms and resources are not solutions by themselves, but rather our weapons in the war for talent. In order to inject the human element into the process, we can take advantage of other technologies that were also cost prohibitive until recently, such as video interviewing.

Video Facilitates Engagement

Video conferencing is a well-known tool for interviewing candidates as they advance to later stages in the interview process, but this technology is widely underused. Many employers don’t realize that it has the potential to revive the engagement aspect of talent acquisition. With interview-specific services such as Async Interview, HireVue, and Montage Talent, video conferencing (or video interviewing) can be introduced much earlier in the recruiting process to facilitate engagement with candidates regardless of their location. Employers can pre-record qualifying questions for interested candidates. Candidates then respond to the questions at their convenience and don’t have to adhere to specific interview times, which can be especially difficult across time zones. These interactive sessions provide tremendous value in observing how a candidate reacts to questions or challenges in real-time and provide the candidate with a human interaction before absorbing the cost of traveling for a live interview.

Inevitably, more and more technological innovations will pervade the hiring process. It’s up to us as hiring managers to decide how and when to utilize them not only to expand our reach, but also to improve the level of engagement with our future hires.