As “the Great Resignation” continues, employee turnover remains a key challenge and source of anxiety for businesses around the world. In the U.S. alone, last November saw a record 4.53 million workers quit their jobs. But oddly, hiring teams are scrambling to fill open positions.
In theory, a mass exodus of employees leaving their jobs would mean there’s an overflow of qualified candidates in the hiring market. But new research suggests that isn’t the case.
In a recent report, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, researchers from Harvard and Accenture analyzed the growing issue of employers struggling to fill open positions. Their most significant finding? Automated hiring technology, which companies adopt to make screening more efficient, is actually contributing to their candidate shortage problem.
According to the study, a staggering 88% of employers admit that their hiring process is filtering out qualified, high-skilled candidates because they failed to meet the exact criteria of a job listing.
“Within advanced countries, the rapid pace of automation and technology innovation contributed to the growth of many different hidden worker pools,” the report states.
Opening the pool: job listings must evolve alongside hiring technology.
These recent reports suggest a fundamental flaw in the way businesses utilize hiring technology. They implement more and more automation, but fail to adjust their job descriptions to make automation effective rather than detrimental.
Typical job descriptions seek to capture “the perfect candidate”: a worker who meets every one of a hyper-specific set of skills and attributes. Under a manual screening process it’s easier for an HR worker to exercise judgment by earmarking a candidate who looks promising despite lacking a specific “requirement”.
But most automated hiring technology lacks the nuance of human judgement – and job descriptions must change to reflect this absence of contextual flexibility. For example, rather than include a twelve-item list of attributes they’re looking for in a role, they should instead list the four or five essential skills the role can’t do without.
Some companies are even moving towards the much more radical philosophy of “open hiring” – where an employer hires candidates with minimal or no screening, foregoing the typical hiring process for a more experimental approach in which candidates prove their abilities by doing the job itself.
Open hiring won’t become the norm – in many industries, it’s downright impractical – but it points to the lengths companies are willing to go in order to avoid talent shortages and drawn-out hiring processes.
It’s true that hiring technology is rapidly evolving, and we’re not far from a world in which automated candidate screening becomes much more nuanced and contextual. But struggling employers can’t afford to wait for technology to catch up to their needs. They’ll have to abandon the idealized “perfect candidate” and reframe their job descriptions to be more inclusive.
The downside is that they’ll be spending more time sorting through candidates – which is far less dire than the alternative: staring down at an empty talent pool that was drained by their own technology.
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