Project

• Overview / Forward

Companies had more job candidates than ever, tech skills were in demand, and organizations were learning to operate in a leaner, more agile environment in the wake of the 2007/8 recession. With the rise of LinkedIn and exploding social media usage, it became commonplace for employers and candidates to check social views and digital profiles. We saw a renewed interest in referrals and the importance of the treatment of candidates and employees on corporate success- especially their measurable impact on company performance. 

In 2016, millennials became the largest generation in the workforce.1

New technology trends and ideas emerged in the latter part of the decade and are quickly put into regular practice e.g. social media in job postings, job aggregators, sourcing tools, mobile recruiting and mobile-responsive career sites, programmatic job advertising, machine learning, job automation etc. We saw an increased concern for diversity in the workplace, pay equity and a new focus on gender neutral job description language.

In spite of, or perhaps because of the new technologies at our fingertips, two overarching problems emerged: 

What were the best ways that we could use these new technologies without completely dehumanizing the recruiting process, since candidates did not respond well to overly automated processes?
How could non-high tech companies that were not up to speed with rapid advancements in recruiting technologies compete with those that could?

2010’s Milestones:

• 2010 – The Talent Board launches the CandEs.2
• 2010 – Zip Recruiter launches its aggregation model.3
• 2011 – “LinkedIn Apply” debuts.4
• 2011 – Google Plus launches5
• 2011 – Rise of online portfolios.6
• 2013 – Social Talent founded.7
• 2014 – SparcStart launched.8
• 2016 – Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) launched.9
• 2016 – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning explodes in recruiting.10
• 2016 – Hung Lee launches Recruiting Brainfood.11
• 2017 – Harry W. Colmery Veterans Education Assistance Act passed.12
• 2017 – Google launches Google for Jobs.13
• 2018 – GDPR takes effect.14

Resources

1. Somewhere in 2016 the Millennials hit 54 million surpassing GenX’s peak of 53 million in the workforce but notably short of the Boomers 66 million peak (Boomers are now down to 41 and dropping quickly…no pun intended) Millennials are largest generation in the U.S. labor force | Pew Research Center
2. The TalentBoard was co-founded as a non-profit by Elaine Orler, Gerry Crispin and Ed Newman to annually measure the impact of the recruiting experience of candidates on the businesses they apply to, acknowledge practices that improve the candidate experience and promote the basic results at no cost to all employers. TheTalentBoard.org’s reports now cover North America, EMEA, Asia and South America under the direction of Kevin Grossman with Debbie McGrath as chair of TalentBoard’s Board of Trustees.
    “I was approached by Chris Forman – at an ERE conference in 2010 – with one simple question: “what are you going to do about fixing the negative candidate experience?” Everyone was talking about how bad it was but there wasn’t a focused solution to address it. Launched with Gerry Crispin and Ed Newman, we formed a focused non-profit organization to shine a light on the implications we have as an industry of recruiters/businesses and how we treat people,  the positive work being done, and reward the positive efforts. Still remarkable today.”
   Source: from the notes of Elaine Orler, Co-founder and former Chairman, Talent Board
3. ZipRecruiter’s aggregation model grew quickly when it aligned with accessing Google for its jobs versus Indeed.
   ZipRecruiter grows conversion rate 4.5x with the new job search experience on Google
4. LinkedIn Apply allowed job seekers to apply to positions with one click using their LinkedIn profiles. The timing of this feature was excellent as employers were struggling to reduce the application time in an effort to reduce abandonment during the application process. Unfortunately a LinkedIn profile is more an individual’s creative marketing/branding tool and not designed to be an accurate ‘job application’. LI failed to offer a secondary application ready profile that could be used to fill in a formal statement of interest. This limited the adoption by jobseekers. The Power of LinkedIn Everywhere: Apply with LinkedIn
5. Google+ (Google Plus) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google’s fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years.It was redesigned in November 2015 discontinued on March 7, 2019, and Google+ was shut down for business, privacy and personal use on April 2, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
6. “Job-seekers especially those in creative fields will often have a portfolio created on a domain with their name as an alternative to a resume. http://www.Squarespace.com is probably the most common tool that someone would use to create one of these. The benefit is that the attention stays on that individual. However, Behance might be another example of the job board/design portfolio combo.”
   Source: From the notes of Heather Hamilton 
   History of the Online Job Search |
7. SocialTalent is incorporated by Johnny Campbell and in 2013 its  launches its first online sourcing training programs
   http://www.socialtalent.com
8. SparcStart, founded by Maury Hanigan is among the first video platforms to enhance recruitment job descriptions: specifically to feature tools to have hiring managers create and connect video content to enhance job descriptions.
   http://www.sparcstart.com
9. The first recruiting association to be launched aiming to represent all facets of recruiting since the Employment Management Association was acquired by SHRM in 1999. ATAP, founded by several industry leaders with Ben Gotkin as their 1st Executive secretary and Tom Darrow as their first BOT Chair, is today a member platform of nearly 1000 recruiting professionals focused on curating a body of work that establishes standards and promotes recruiting as a profession. http://www.ATAPglobal.org
10. The buzz was evident in 2016 at the HR Technology Conference in October of that year but, it may have been in part precipitated by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg “announcing his plan to build an artificially intelligent assistant to do everything from adjusting the temperature in his house to checking up on his baby girl.” AI has since invaded nearly every application, spawned an multi-industry wide watch on ethics, privacy and human vs computer discourse that is now approaching it’s zenith and zuckergerg has changed his company’s name to Meta 2016: The year artificial intelligence exploded
11. The first issue of Recruiting Brainfood was sent on 0730 am, Oct 10th 2016. Hung Lee has created the industry’s largest public goto site for information and discourse “The internet had got too big’ for busy people to process it. Recruiters and HR people – already in time intensive, high demand jobs – were not in any position to go through the ever increasingly deluge of clickbait in order to get to ‘brainfood’ – the thoughtful and nourishing content that could educate or inspire. I had made a habit of archiving what I had found and realised that the proper thing to do would be share that work with whoever else who wanted to the same. Hence, a newsletter was born – a once-a-weekly curation of the best recruiting & HR articles that week, sent on Sunday morning. It was ‘recruiting brainfood for your week ahead’
    http://www.recruitingbrainfood.com
    Source: From the notes of Hung Lee
12. The Veterans Education Assistance Act also known as the “Forever GI Bill” enhanced education and training benefits for veterans to improve their post-service chances of competing for jobs. A critical selling point in recruiting for military services.
    Forever GI Bill – Harry W. Colmery Veterans Educational Assistance Act – Education and Training
13. Google for Jobs – Job searching powered by Google, allows seekers to view aggregated jobs but also pulls in other career-related information and has become a strong competitor to Indeed. Google Hire sunsets Sept 2020.
    Google for Jobs vs Indeed: Could Indeed Be Google’s Downfall?
14. Enacted in 2016, GDPR set new guidelines for consumer data collection. For recruiting, it means employers can only collect data on EU candidates for “specified, explicit and legitimate purposes,” and you intend to contact sourced candidates within 30 days.
    Right to explanation