How technology is making the next phase of recruitment more human
‘What people really want is the quickest path to talk to a human being’ says global head of Indeed
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Employment website Indeed has a good vantage point for assessing the world’s labour economy. On any given day, there are more than 25 million jobs posted worldwide on its sites, which are located in 60 countries. In an average month, some 250 million job seekers visit Indeed.
In Canada, Indeed is reporting a resurgence of demand for workers. Job postings on its site are up 30 per cent from pre-pandemic levels across all categories. Even a pandemic-exposed sector such as restaurants is up 37 per cent.
Of course, Indeed isn’t a recruitment company. Instead, “We are a technology company,” says Chris Hyams, global chief executive.
Hyams, who is based in Austin, Texas, comes from the technology and operations side of the business. He’s had other software engineering roles, too, and has a Masters in computer science from Rice University.
That background is key since technology is playing an ever-larger role in hiring. Hyams believes we are heading into the next phase of recruitment, one where technology makes the process more human.
To that end, Indeed recently added a hiring platform in Canada that cuts the weeks-long process of finding a job down to a few minutes. Job seekers measure their skills against a company’s job qualifications and then immediately arrange for a video interview.
“If you think about the employer side of the equation, about 80 per cent of the recruiting process is based on administrative, repetitive tasks,” Hyams said. “Things like finding candidates, screening and scheduling them.”
Speeding up that process allows more time for human interactions, so recruiters and job seekers can look each other in the eye to see if they are a good fit.
FP Work talked to Hyams about the role of artificial intelligence in hiring, the summer of quitting and the challenges of leading a global company with 10,000 employees.
FP Work: You come from a technology background. How critical is technology to the recruitment process?
Hyams: If you go back to the days before Indeed, a job seeker would have to go to dozens or hundreds of different sites to find all the jobs that were out there. Technology is critical to taking all of the jobs in the world that we can find and bringing them into one place and making it simple and fast for a job seeker to find opportunities.
But technology can also, as we’ve seen in so many other areas of our life, make things impersonal. Applying for jobs has become so easy that people can apply to hundreds of jobs, but they’re not hearing back from employers. What people really want is the quickest path to talk to a human being.
We saw demand for video interviews increase by more than 1,000 per cent in just the month of April last year. The pandemic really just accelerated what probably would have happened naturally over the next five to 10 years. Technology can be a key component of this next phase of recruitment, of making that process more human.
FPW: We know that artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of recruitment. How does Indeed use AI?
Hyams: There is AI and machine learning involved in the search process. When job seekers search for a job, we can help hone the results they’re seeing based on the hundreds of millions of searches that are happening on Indeed every day. What we’re not doing is using artificial intelligence in any way to determine if someone should or should not be interviewed for a job. We are leveraging our data and intelligence to help job seekers find opportunities, but not to not to screen them.
FPW: Can you talk about some of the work trends you are seeing? Will it really be the summer of quitting, as some believe?
Hyams: One thing we did see very clearly around the world during the bulk of 2020, even as hiring demand grew, was that people were much more cautious about looking for new roles because the future seemed so uncertain. We have a lot of people who have pent-up interest, people who might have normally left their work are clearly taking this opportunity to re-examine their priorities.
And we’re definitely seeing the desire for more flexibility or the desire to be closer to family, and to move to a location where people can have a higher quality of life. All of those things are coming together right now to create what looks something like a great mass quitting. But I think some of it is just a natural holdback of people being more conservative for a period of time, and people re-evaluating their priorities.
That’s really an opportunity for some employers. Looking at, for example, the flexibility that workers would like to have to be able to take care of family and have a higher quality of life. Those employers who are able to offer that will have a competitive advantage.
FPW: What have been the challenges of coming from a technology background and leading a global company with 10,000 employees?
Hyams: I will say the most difficult time I’ve ever had professionally was February 2020, before we made the decision to take our 10,000 employees and send them to work from home. We have offices around the world. As early as February, we were starting to see the impact of COVID. We had an employee in Singapore, who had a family member in a hospital where another patient in another room had tested positive for COVID. But that employee had been in their office in Singapore, and someone from another office had visited that Singapore office and gone back to their office. And from that office, people had visited from our Dublin office, and then gone back to Dublin, and people from the Sydney office had visited the Dublin office. Thank God, no one tested positive. But we saw multiple offices exposed.
I have never had the health and safety of 10,000 people and their families on my shoulders before. We made the decision on March 3 to send everyone to work from home. And the evening of March 3, I slept better than I have slept in a very long time.
Financial Post
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