This thought-provoking piece on the RTE news page during the week has tongues wagging. In a nutshell, it draws our attention to the phenomenon of “Human Resources” without the human. They take a refreshing approach, with a high-quality contribution from Brainstorm, which was a new one on me.
The only surprising thing, is that anyone would be surprised by this development. If stressed-out hard-press HR people are offered smart tools to help them to do the admin part of their jobs, then guess what.. they’ll probably use them. Especially when, as I’ve heard, HR department numbers are getting cut, while they’re still expected to deliver the same output. They’ll need every tool put at their disposal.
At Midlandjobs, we are aware of other job board services using algorithms at the job advertising stage. Our system, does not. And even if, as a business, we were at the size and scale where we could introduce that level of automation, it’s far from certain that we even would.
When some of us started our recruitment and HR careers, it was back in the day when speculative cv’s were dropped into reception for the attention of the “Personnel” department. If you had a specific job opening, you’d take out a display ad in either the Irish Independent recruitment supplement on a Thursday, the Irish Times on a Friday or the Sunday Independent. I’m showing my age now.
While the digital job board is undoubtedly far more efficient and streamlined than that old traditional media approach, there are now some inherent temptations and limitations to systems introducing algorithms to the flow. Of which the biggest problem on the employer (customer) side is poor quality cv’s. In a CPC context, you’re also getting charged for each and every one of those poorly matched applications. Often reaching the end of an expensive campaign, with still NO hire. Then on the candidate side, you’re trusting an algorithm to “show” you only the jobs that “it thinks” you’re suited to. This is all starting to feel like the enshittification of recruitment advertising.
Midlandjobs keeps-it-simple-stupid. The local employer posts the job on our platform, the local candidate sees the job and makes their own decision on whether to apply or not. The employer then sees the job application and makes their own decision as to whether to interview or not. So what Midlandjobs perhaps loses in terms of automation, we feel we and our users also gain in terms of simplicity. Click here to see a list of our current jobs.