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You have to like people, talking with them and getting to know them, to be a great recruiter. The funny thing is that's just the opposite of what most Human Capital Management systems try to accomplish.  HCM systems, with their 'fill-in-the-blank mindsets' subtly train the inexperienced to engage in interrogation. While data collection isn't the precise opposite of conversation, interrogation might well be.

It's a subtle thing, at first.

A tremendous source of the problem is the incredibly high volume of data flowing through the Internet. Somehow, the age old idea that recruiting is a search for the 'needle in the haystack' has evolved to become 'build bigger haystacks'. As the already overworked recruiting team struggles to find the gem in the pile, methods are increasingly driven by the desire to eliminate. While it's clear that recruiting that works is based on inclusion, most recruiters have to rely on exclusion as their primary tool. What should have been conversations become interrogations simply because the volume is staggering.

In order to solve the problem, we've made a worse one. The techniques of elimination make bad conversations.

That's often the way that early technical solutions operate. The solution of this problem creates a worse problem. The very use of the tools that we have at our disposal creates an environment that does not reward conversational recruiting. The problem is the tools, not the people using them. We have handed out hammers and it's no surprise that our people treat everything like it was a nail. In Engineering, this is called "The Law of Unintended Consequences".

Volume is the enemy. The things that make great recruiting work are intimate and mushy. You can't find the "juice" in a mob of a thousand. You find it in an extended conversation. Great relationships, like many of the most valuable organizational assets, are cultivated in small settings. 

The big temptation is to let the Internet be a big thing. Mastery of the medium involves getting it to feel small and comfortable. It's the conversation, not the volume.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.