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Welcome to AccelPro IP Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Craig Fisher, Talent Consultant & Author.
In a world where technology has made it easier than ever to overapply, Fisher explains what companies are doing to find qualified candidates, and what job seekers should be aware of before they submit their applications. Specificity, Fisher says, is the best way to get your resume in front of human eyes and find the position that works for you.
“Focus is one of the most important things. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Don't try to be a Jack or Jill of all trades. Don't apply to anything and everything. Focus very specifically on the thing that you would most likely get hired to do and get paid well to do.”
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Craig Fisher’s TalentNet Media page and LinkedIn profile.
TRANSCRIPT
I. HUMANS VS AI IN THE HIRING PROCESS
Celeste Headlee, Host. For those who don't know you, tell us what you do.
Craig Fisher: I am the author of a book called Hiring Humans, and I run a consultancy in the employer space called TalentNet Media where we help employers create a better candidate experience, hire more of the right people and help to retain those folks once they are hired.
CH: In your book, you acknowledge the fact that although you're talking a lot about the human connection in hiring, technology is making its way into this process. When we talk about AI, that's a really broad term. What are the technologies that people are using in terms of recruitment and hiring?
CF: The original technology that AI was used for years ago was basically search, and then we started with the rise of chatbots, and I installed one of the first public facing chatbots on a corporate website in 2017. It was basically just to answer simple questions job seekers might have about the company. It wasn't very smart at first, and we had to create a link to speak to a recruiter because that's the first thing most people asked. But it got better, smarter. And then it evolved into serving up jobs that people could search for in the chatbot, and then matching candidates resumes to that job would be the most recent iteration that everyone's talking about.
CH: When you say matching somebody's qualifications to a specific job, I assume what you're talking about is an AI program that sifts through someone's CV and tries to pair it up with the job qualifications that are listed in the posting.
CF: Right, and that's a flawed process. If you think about how recruiters generally have collected resumes in the first place, before AI, before most of this matching technology, candidates would apply to jobs, and resumes would float somehow to a recruiter's inbox, whether through notifications that there's new resumes in your applicant tracking system, people sending you resumes directly to the recruiter---whatever system of record you have.
The recruiter would then, after resumes start coming in, go back to his inbox, the system of record applicant tracking system, the CRM, whatever it is, and do a search with keywords for resumes that float to the top that matched the keywords that the recruiter is using to search. It's the same process that they would have if they went out to Google or to one of the job boards to perform a search, such as LinkedIn, which is also a flawed system.
Now AI is doing it faster and possibly a little more “accurately.” What we find is, in the first place, job descriptions are mostly bad; they're very flawed. And then secondly, job candidates are using the same AI technology to match their resume to that job description before they send it. And so, are they actually the right candidate? This is where knockout questions and assessments start to come in, and that technology is getting a little smarter as well.
CH: You mean knockout questions, meaning the ones that are meant to verify that there's a real person behind this who is actually qualified and can speak in a human way?
CF: Correct. And what's more pervasive now, and what's starting to become a better filter for opting in properly to the right jobs is answering questions like, do you live within a certain distance of this zip code? It doesn't matter whether or not the candidate will ever actually have to work in that office. They might have to go to that office and at least they're not three states away or in another country.
And so, if you think about how a job search is done by a job seeker, everything starts in a search bar somewhere. Whether it's on a job board or a social network, LinkedIn Apply, Google, it doesn't matter. There's a search bar and job seekers are using keywords. And most of these systems still want to give that job seeker results that are nearby, so it's not wrong of the employer to say, “You know, we need you within a certain radius of this location.”
CH: There are some things that AI is going to be better at than humans. Anything that can be done in a relatively straightforward manner, AI will do it faster. But what are the parts of both recruitment, hiring, and then also retention that need human intervention?
CF: If you think about the things that recruiters do best, they are building relationships with the company's future workforce. And we don't know ahead of time who that future workforce is going to be, so if we're doing it right, we're treating all candidates with empathy and kindness and hoping to give a very good candidate experience and a view of what the organization is all about.
It doesn't matter if you actually hire that one candidate. Maybe their next door neighbor is the perfect candidate for your job, or someone they go to church with. If they walk away with a good experience, a good feeling, a good relationship, then they're more likely to refer someone appropriate to your organization.
Recruiters should be building relationships. AI can do a great job of taking some of those non-recruiting related activities off of their plate, such as scheduling and testing, and leave room for them to do the thing that's most important, which is relationship building.
CH: In this very digital, technologically advanced age, it is always surprising to me how quickly a bad experience in a hiring process spreads. If one of my colleagues goes through a particularly bad situation, everybody knows about it and everyone is telling everybody else. That seems to me to be unchanged. What do you think about that particular human part of hiring? How do both the job seeker and the hiring manager manage that?
CF: I think the problem is we're relying too much on technology right now. We're letting the machines do most of the heavy lifting. Part of the reason for that is we've made it too easy to apply to jobs. LinkedIn Apply, mentioned earlier, is a really good example. With Indeed Apply, your profile is already built. You're just going to click a button and have that submitted to the recruiting team. If you're very diligent as an employer, you add some knockout questions or some opt-in questions into that process if you're doing it right, but most don't.
Recruiters are left with hundreds, sometimes thousands of resumes that aren't a fit for that job. Just by definition, the majority of those people are going to get ghosted, and that's what we hear about with LinkedIn when we're talking to other white collar job seekers, not hourly workers. I think recruiting is not broken for hourly jobs, but certainly for non-hourly jobs, it is broken a little bit. We hear so much complaining, if you're unemployed in that sector right now, because it's draining and it's difficult and there's nowhere to talk about it really.
CH: And dehumanizing.
CF: Very. Yes.
CH: Another complaint I hear from hiring managers is that over the years, say the past 15 years, their departments have shrunk. At the same time that they're getting a massive increase in applicants for every opening, they have fewer and fewer resources. They say that's why they're relying more on this technology. How do we break that destructive cycle?
CF: I think that what we're being sold, as organizations, by HR technology companies is that, yes, you can do more with less and you should. But I don't think that's a good way to do business. It sounds great on paper. Yes. Let's shrink our departments and still try to hire great people. But if you're still trying to hire, why is your department shrinking? Also, most hiring managers are really only in that position because they were good at their old job. They're not actually good at managing or hiring. They're not experts in this and we don't give them training in any of these things.
There are some companies moving towards a job mastery model where the people who are building the products get moved into management. And that's bad because the best people for those products should just be getting better at that.
There's this new movement towards skills-based hiring. If it's done properly, some of those skills are also soft skills. They're pretty hard. But just because you've got the tools on paper that I need, that doesn’t necessarily mean you're going to be happy doing that job or that you'll be a good fit for it because of that, or that you'll stay in that job and be productive.
Things like enthusiasm and things that are difficult to test for, can be tested for. There are plenty of psychometric evaluations that will say, are you really into this job or not? And sometimes those things can be a better barometer of a good match with a five years’ experience with that one tool versus someone with 10 year’s who’s not really going to be that into it.
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II. SPECIFYING THE APPLICATION AND THE JOB DESCRIPTION
CH: Let's go back to something you said before, which is that people are applying to too many jobs. It's too easy, I think you said, to apply. What kind of advice can you give to job seekers, first? What resources can they consult to know when is the best time to look for work, not necessarily when they're unemployed, but maybe they're looking to go somewhere else?
CF: Call it serial applying. Serial applying is just applying to everything. That's like throwing paint on a wall. Jackson Pollock can do it, but most people don't make very good artwork when they just throw paint against the wall. They're just splattering things all over the place. It doesn't really work. It's not effective. If you've been applying to jobs and it's not effective, maybe you need to do something else. Focus is one of the most important things. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Don't try to be a Jack or Jill of all trades. Don't apply to anything and everything.
Focus very specifically on the thing that you would most likely get hired to do and get paid well to do. Make some lists. This is how you start. What are all the things that you've done in the last 10 years? Include everything that goes into your job: project management, sales, marketing, administrative things, Excel, all these things. Write everything down.
And then the next list is from those things. What are the things that you like to do? And the next list is, what are the things that you've done that you like to do that you might get paid for or hired for? Then, of those things, what are the things that you are most likely to get hired and paid for? Quickly, narrow it down to that: I really like to do this, but there's no market for that, so it's going to end up being this. And maybe I can work some of this other stuff that I love into my day job.
And I call that making your day job, your dream job. Because if you bring that sort of creative or marketing slant to a more traditional job, one that's not so creative, maybe you're better at that more traditional job because of it. You can bring some of those elements of things that you love to do into the thing that you're going to get paid to do.
CH: How, then, do you factor in the idea of growth, in terms of: here are the things that I have done and like to do, but here's this whole thing that is maybe tangential to what I've done in the past, but I want to move into that career?
CF: If you think of your career as looking out over a large pond, and where you want to go is across the pond, it's going to be difficult to swim there. You can't walk there, straight ahead. You have to go around the pond. Here's the place you are and the things you've done. Adjacent to that are companies who would love that knowledge of the company that you've worked for and the things you've done for them. All the companies at your last firm did business with accounting companies, logistics, the company that measures your electric bill at your corporation. All the vendors might have some interest in what you did with that organization.
And in moving tangentially around the pond, you're going to acquire new skills by stretching yourself and saying, “This company would love me to be a customer success person back to my old organization and that's not something I've done before, but I'd actually like to do that. I just hadn't thought of it.” There are plenty of opportunities if you have conversations versus just applying to jobs that you might be a fit for. There's a methodology for making those conversations happen.
CH: Then let's flip it to the other side, because you also said that job descriptions are, in general, horrible. That's been my experience as well. How does the employer go about improving the way they decide what skills are required for a job, including those soft skills you mentioned, and then turning that into a job description?
CF: It's a multi part process. My team has been working on a large project for JPMorgan Chase for the last year plus, to rewrite their job descriptions. First, you decide what needs to be changed and you enable some SMEs in each job family. These are your subject matter experts in IT logistics and risk. There's going to be multiple job families in every department, so if you're a company approaching the size of JPMorgan Chase (they have over 13, 000 jobs) that means hundreds of job families. You have to have SMEs for all of those.
And then you write strict criteria: no more than five bullets under any required skills, no more than four bullets under any ‘nice to have’ skills. You create a library of bias terms. You remove all acronyms from any job. You make sure they make sense. You put in a cadence where you're speaking to the candidate first about themselves. Get them interested—you're this kind of person, we're this kind of company—and looking for people like you—imagine what we could do together!
That's a very simplified version of what we do for this project. When you're very strict about it and you're consistent across all jobs, then eventually you'll have a pretty good reflection of what those jobs actually do and how candidates actually fit into them and can opt in.
CH: You mentioned biased language, and I know that AI has raised some legal issues because there's bias built into the algorithm. Our audience is mostly legal professionals. I wonder if there are any other practices connected to tech or AI that could pose a legal risk for employers.
CF: There is a law local to New York City, called "NYC 144," and it was enacted in 2021. It requires any organization that is using AI to match job candidates to jobs to audit the tools being used for that. Every year. That falls to the vendor who creates those tools, so any company using matching technology is responsible for going through an audit process, gaining a number of licenses required to hand to the employer to say, “yes, we've passed the audit for this year. There's not a bias problem in our process here.”
It's not perfect, but it's starting to grow, and we will see more of that. There's a similar rule in Chicago and in California, and this is similar to how salary transparency and other things started, as well.
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III. TRANSITIONING TO A SPACE THAT WORKS FOR YOU
CH: Let's talk a little bit about remote work, because recently I saw a number of studies that came out in the fall of 2023 that showed over 90% of companies now say they expect at least a partial, if not a full return to the office, whereas only 2% of leader surveys said they would allow employees to work 100% remotely. Why, after the explosion in enthusiasm for remote work, especially from employees, why are businesses demanding a return to the office?
CF: It seems counterintuitive, right? And most people who don't have any responsibility for the corporate real estate or some of the bottom line things would agree. What we have as a problem is companies still own all of this office space. It's not being transformed into something else quickly enough.
There is a case and some studies to say that certain types of in person work are more productive. IT, for instance, can be one of those. There's also a quest for control. You can't manage and control your workforce nearly as well remotely as you can in person.
All of these are, I would say, secondary to wellbeing and wellness, and all of the things that we've become used to since COVID. We changed the way our childcare works, our homeschooling, lots of things. We were told we could move to different places and now we're being asked to move back. Just today I read that Dell, I don't want to pick on Dell because I like Dell, but they've told workers they can work remotely, but they won't get promoted. And I'm seeing more of this.
CH: How should job seekers respond? If I'm a person who took my employer at their word and moved to a remote location, maybe to take care of ill parents or for whatever reason, and they're demanding I go back to the office, if I decide to find a remote job, how do I make myself attractive for those dwindling number of remote positions?
CF: My thought process on this is if you're going to actively go after any kind of specific white collar job, that you should be very specific about it. Pick a handful of companies to start with five, maybe. Do some research about those companies and write it up as if you're doing it for your own consulting agency. I'm going to be a consultant to these companies about the job that I want, and I'm going to do some research about that job, about how it's done by each different company, about their results, anything that I can find. Interview some people doing that job or people from that organization, and then publish it to LinkedIn and tag all the people at those organizations that might hire you for that kind of work.
CH: Oh, that’s such a great idea.
CF: Right. It's much better than applying to jobs. You've already done the research to get the job and you're just publishing it and tagging everyone and saying, “Hey, I'd love to do this job.”
CH: How long have you been in this business?
CF: Since 1995.
CH: I have to ask, what keeps you in it?
CF: Yeah, recruiting is addictive. I don't technically recruit all that much anymore, but it's part of some of the projects that we do. Helping people and organizations come together is not altruistic, completely; there's money involved, of course, but it feels better than just selling something most of the time. It's a good community. It's an interesting, very tight community of professionals that do this.
CH: One of the most common questions that we get is about career transitions: when to make them, when you know the time is right. And you, albeit quite some time ago, had to make a real massive change and transition. I wonder, from your experience, did you learn anything from that that might be helpful to other people who are trying to make this choice?
CF: I like to say that I make pivots all the time, and I think you pivot your way to a big transition. When I started doing this thought leadership business around employer branding and recruitment marketing, it was really about social media strategy for hiring. This is back in 2009. I started doing some of this and I owned a staffing firm at the time. What I was writing about on Twitter was popular and I started getting asked to go directly to organizations to speak to their sales teams and recruiting teams about it, and it sort of just became a business of its own.
But the whole time I had been in the recruiting space, I'd been developing the methodology for how to help employers help themselves. Give that away and they'll still give you their toughest searches and keep you around to help them do recruiting stuff. I still believe that's true: if you write about what you do and you're consistent about it over time, those pivots become more organic. And then when you have to make a big shift, it's because of a series of pivots that led you there.
CH: Is there anything else I should have asked you and I didn't?
CF: It’s an interesting time to be a Texan right now. We're all going through some interesting times in this country and around the world. And we need to keep a hopeful eye toward the future. Everything is going to be fine eventually. We all need to work together, and we all need to remind ourselves that we're all coworkers and associates in this world of work. We have to treat each other as if we might be working together tomorrow.
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This AccelPro audio transcript has been edited and organized for clarity. This interview was recorded on March 19, 2024.
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