The #WorkTrends Podcast
Tim Visconti, the CEO of PeopleLift, and Tim David, the COO of the same company, appeared on Meghan Biro’s #WorkTrends Recruiting Today Show recently. We are big fans of both Tims, and Visconti once said publicly that Honeit Software helps “restore trust in recruiting,” which we’ve since used in some prospect pitches. (Thanks, Tim!)
If you go to around the 12-minute mark of the embedded interview, Tim starts talking about top-of-funnel automation, then goes into a plug for Honeit, which is always nice to hear. Pre-COVID, recruiting was buzzing about pre-recorded interviews, chat-bots and removing conversations. Post-COVID, recruiter engagement, hiring manager engagement and human conversations are essential to recruiting and hiring the best candidates.
“Honeit allows you to have a human-to-human conversation, so that you’re focused on the candidate, not typing notes.”
Tim also gives a plug for Honeit Software as a diversity and inclusion tool — because it creates an equal opportunity for every candidate to get reviewed. 7 seconds to review a resume isn’t a good way to assess a diverse candidate pool.
One of the big things we hear from hiring managers, and we’ve heard from Tim, is that we help people save time (and money). When you save a hiring manager’s time — let’s say, for example, they don’t want to listen to an entire 45-minute interview, but they want to compare different candidates on 1-2 specific questions — there are numerous benefits. The hiring manager-to-recruiter relationship improves, which is good long-term, and hiring managers feel like recruiters are strategic allies, not flies that need to be swatted away (which is, unfortunately, how some recruiters come off to their hiring managers).
Engagement vs. Automation
In much the same vein, Rick Girard — host of the Hire Power podcast — has written a book about hiring called “Healing Career Wounds: Your Start-up’s Secret Weapon to Attract, Hire, and Retain Ridiculously Successful People” (here’s the link to pre-order.
Rick sent us the manuscript to review. In the first chapter, he frames up the current intersection of recruiting as engagement vs. automation, which is the essence of what’s been happening in the space for 5-10 years, if not even longer. Tim Visconti has the right answer in that podcast — you can automate top-of-funnel and task work, but you absolutely cannot automate anything to do with candidate engagement. That’s why the proliferation of pre-recorded interviews and one-way video interview tools in the last decade has been so troubling, and isn’t necessarily helping organizations get the best people.
Remember: when people talk of automation job threats in recruiting, the absolute first response you always hear is “Well, it’s a people business, we can’t be automated.” The sad reality is that some recruiters can absolutely be automated — and it’s the ones who don’t own their conversations.
Pre-COVID, as recruiting hummed along with a decent USA economy, a big focus of the tech players in the space was automation and productivity. Post-COVID, as we’re trying to figure out what work looks like and how global the talent pool truly will be, there’s been a bigger shift to conversations, the human touch, and true candidate experience, not the buzzword kind.
More on that in the next post, but for now — if you’d be interested in making sure your recruiters are value-add and focused on conversations and not tasks, consider taking Honeit for a spin.
