I’m old. I mean, I don’t feel old. But in the world of recruiting technology, I’m old.

I’ve been around long enough to see the birth of some pretty cool technological advances in talent acquisition. When I started recruiting, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was a green screen Rolodex (look it up kids!) akin to using an excel spreadsheet to do all of your recruiting.

Sourcing technology was basically cold calling into a company and trying to get the person at the front desk to push your call to some unsuspecting employee who was about to be recruited hard with a sales pitch that usually started with something like, “Wait, don’t hang up!”

In the past year, we’ve all witnessed the rise of an entire segment of hiring technology that wasn’t really around pre-pandemic: conversational AI. This technology now moves the world of hourly recruiting into the forefront of organizations that have long treated it as an afterthought.

What’s amazing about conversational AI is that it’s a new breed of recruiting technology that is virtually invisible to everyone using it. Candidates just believe they are applying for a job and getting immediate interaction from your company. Recruiting teams don’t have to do anything, and the technology seamlessly pulls candidates through the process to completion. Unlike a traditional ATS that forces candidates to jump through hoops and recruiters to push candidates from step to step, conversational AI does away with all of that by automating it. 

Thankfully, we’ve finally gotten to a point where our recruiting technology is actually working for us, not against us. Conversational AI works exactly how we always hoped recruiting technology would — like recruiters designed the perfect hourly hiring system in a lab to fit all their needs and solve all their problems.

A candidate decides they want to apply to your job. They find the job through all the ways and means we give them (text, QR codes, URL links, career sites, etc.). They do the entire process on their phone. It takes a few minutes. They immediately feel engaged with your company, and the technology works to make sure they don’t disengage before you can actually screen and hire them.

It’s so simple it’s hard to believe it took this long to come to life, but that’s what great technology is: simple. Turns out, making simple technology that works is super hard!

What did we need to make hourly recruiting simple?

1. Creation of conversational AI that felt real to the candidate.
2. A screening assessment that could accurately predict better hires and only take 90 seconds to complete.
3. .. Check out the rest of this article over on Paradox’s Blog! CLICK HERE.

You might have seen this recently being discussed on the interwebs, but the California legislature introduced a bill that would shorten the workweek from 40 hours per week to 32 hours per week! From the WSJ:

“A bill moving through the Legislature would shorten California’s normal workweek to 32 hours from 40 for companies with more than 500 employees. Workers who put in more than 32 hours in a week would have to be paid time-and-a-half. And get this: Employers would be prohibited from reducing workers’ current pay rate, so they would be paid the same for working 20% less.”

“Democrats say a shorter workweek will help businesses retain burned-out workers and increase productivity and profits. “There has been no correlation between working more hours and better productivity,” Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia says.”

Do California Legislators Understand How Stuff Gets Built?

So, it’s not actually true that there isn’t a correlation between, hours, productivity, and profits. There might not be a massively strong correlation, but there is one! If you are building cars in an assembly plant, you can definitely build more cars in 40 hours than 32 hours, given all things are equal with the run rate of the line, supplies, etc. You can just turn the line on faster for 32 hours and make up the difference. It doesn’t work like that!

The issue is when we are talking about mostly white-collar work. Can an office worker get their week’s worth of work done in 32 hours vs. 40 hours if they focused and stay on task? Quite possibly, we see folks do this for a short period of time often. I live in Michigan and many Michigan employers will give their employees Friday off from June through August because of the nice weather or half-day Fridays, and workers just put in extra effort to make up for the lost time and productivity. But, this is done for a certain period, not on an ongoing basis.

Should the USA have a 32-hour workweek?

First, in a free democratic, capitalist society, which is what America is, I’m not in favor of the government dictating what a private business can do around working hours. We have worker protections in place already which I believe are fair and just, and economic market dynamics also force employers to be competitive.

If the government would like to make public employment a 32-hour workweek, well that is something they can vote on, and as citizens, we can decide if we want those politicians in office. I don’t think anyone in an HR role would be surprised this comes out of California. Historically, California is the biggest pain in the neck for HR pros.

Second, I like to believe that there is still an American Dream. This can be debated, but with millions of immigrants still trying to get into the U.S., I think it’s alive and well for the vast majority of individuals. Part of that dream is being able to build a business and make it successful. That takes work, more than 32 hours a week type of work. I get this potential law is for businesses over 500, but it still makes no sense for a fast-growing business.

In today’s world, workers have choices, and businesses have choices. If a business feels it is in their best competitive advantage to offer a 32-hour workweek at full salary, they can do that. They shouldn’t be forced to do this, let simple economic theory play itself out.

Okay, HR Pros, hit me in the comments – what do you think? Should California/America employers over 500 be forced to offer a 32-hour workweek at a full salary?

Want great employees? Hire great recruiters, who love your company and love recruiting!

There are over 40,000 recruiter openings right now on LinkedIn. You are currently running lean because it is so hard to find talent. Every single employee you have, and every single new employee you hire, better be really strong, or you are going to be hurting.

During the most recent ten-year run of good fortune that most organizations have had, we’ve made some really crappy recruiter hires. Recruiters who don’t really like recruiting and most of them don’t even like working for you. They are miserable. Miserable, but need a job, so they aren’t going anywhere.

The pandemic actually helped some organizations weed out miserable recruiters, at first. But the last year has burned out a ton of recruiters that were left and many are flat out miserable. They hate you. They hate candidates. They hate hiring managers. They hate the job.

Sometimes you need to give someone a gift. If they are miserable working for you as a recruiter, they will recruit other miserable people.

On the opposite side, people who love your organization make the best recruiters even if they have never recruited before. That doesn’t mean run out and make those who love your company recruiters! That might actually make them miserable! It’s the balance of loving your org and loving to recruit which is the secret sauce! But I do think you can grow recruiters, especially if you use employees who love your organization!

I keep hearing about organizations that are paying insane salaries for average and below-average recruiters, simply because they have recruiting experience. I would rather hire two people with no recruiting experience that I know will actually, at a minimum, tell people how great it is to work with our organization.

When I work with organizations to improve their recruiting I usually find a few common threads. First, they do some dumb process elements that actually detract from recruiting not add to better recruiting. Second, they don’t use their technology to its fullest, Third, and this happens every single time, they have people recruiting who hate their job and hate the company! Every. Single. Time.

So, be better! 

There is actually one more common mistake organizations and Talent leaders are making, they are not investing in developing their recruiting teams. In fact, on average, recruiting teams might get fewer development dollars than any other department in the company!

Why?

That one is easy! Because no one knows how to recruit to begin with so they don’t know what to do when delivering recruiter training!

Great TA leaders are recruiting great recruiter talent right now like no other time in history. Most are overpaying for that talent, but that’s what the market is demanding. They are also investing in their recruiting teams with great training. When I’m speaking to recruiter training technology companies and stand-alone recruiter trainers their phones are ringing off the hook!

The last piece that makes you better, faster, is dropping those recruiters who hate their job and hate your organization. You think you can’t because you’re so desperate for recruiting capacity, but losing this dead weight will actually help much more than you know!