Recruiting Trends Extras

Welcome to Recruiting 3.0


Jun 12

Jason Warner, Master of Ceremonies, The Recruiting Conference

As recruiting industry professionals, it is valuable to take a moment and reflect on the state of the industry as we rapidly approach 2013. It is hard to imagine that just a few short years ago recruiting and HR departments were cut to the bone (or deeper), many recruitment professionals were faced with too few requisitions to fill, and the economy was in stormy seas.

So why is this Recruiting 3.0? 

I would argue that Recruiting 0.0 was the day before the Internet. Those of you who were there know who you are. I call this the Era of Paper: pre-Internet recruiting was marketed by traditional research, phone calls, and lots and lots of paper (advertising, requisitions, resumes).  Paper everywhere.

Recruiting 1.0 was the early Internet – the advent of email, career websites, and job boards. Restrac and other early applicant tracking systems began to automate small portions of the recruiting supply chain, but job postings were still a “cut and pasting” affair. The earliest social networks began to materialize around email Listservs – loosely organized nodes on the network based on rudimentary email groups. Most candidates and recruiters were still not online, but things were changing, and fast! A few early adopters were hanging out online in places like GeoCities and America Online. Recruiting industry professionals scrambled to make sense of the new connectedness that this thing called the Internet brought to recruiting. The beta version of modern recruiting was officially released, but things were continuing to evolve. I would argue this era began in the early 1990s and extended to the dot-com bubble and crash around 2001.

Recruiting 2.0 began to materialize after the dot-com bubble. Websites had proliferated to the degree that they had become common. The applicant tracking system was also now common, and brought automation to the collection of resumes, posting of jobs, and other core recruiting processes. But a key differentiator of Recruiting 2.0 was that everyone moved online. Candidates, hiring managers, recruiters… our entire persona became replicated in the online space. Early social networks like Friendster and MySpace experienced ridiculous growth. Broadband connectivity developed and costs to be online plummeted. Modern search engines improved upon the early search technologies developed by Alta Vista and others, monetized them and refined them, to spur online advertising. The “findability of candidates” became easier with the advent and adoption of Boolean search, LinkedIn, and early social networks. Recruiting 2.0 ran from 2001 to about 2010.

So that brings us to the current era – Recruiting 3.0. I would argue that this era will be marked by the following trends:

  • Data and Big Data – Never has there been more data… organizations are literally swimming in it. Recruiting and HR will be redefined by data and our ability as professionals to take data and transform and translate it into actionable business intelligence – the information that drives organizations and creates competitive advantage.
  • Relationships – The tools are different but relationships will become more paramount – the relationships that organizations are able to develop, utilizing new technologies like social media and other tools, with employees and candidates and prospects will differentiate the best recruiting from the mean. The tool and approaches will be different, but the authenticity and real human connections will remain.
  • Talent Shortage – The recent downturn in the economy may have diverted attention from the fundamentals, but the supply and demand equation related to talent remains unbalanced, and Recruiting 3.0 will be remembered as the era when talent shortages, long predicted, materialize more broadly than we have seen them in the past.

So please join me at The Recruiting Conference 2012, where we explore these challenges and trends, the technologies, best practices, and tools that will help recruiting professionals win in their jobs – and join your peers, colleagues, and other industry leaders in helping to shape and define this new era in recruiting.

Jason Warner draws from two decades of recruiting and executive leadership experience at some of the world’s most noteworthy, fast-growing companies. Follow him on Twitter @Jason_S_Warner.

Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Jason Warner draws from two decades of recruiting and executive leadership experience at some of the world’s most noteworthy, fast-growing companies.

A Corporate Recruiting and Talent Management Leader at Google and Starbucks
Jason has successfully built, scaled, and led large global recruitment and talent management functions during critical growth periods for some of the world’s most recognized fast-growing companies, including Google and Starbucks.

At Google, Jason led the largest Learning, Training and People Development group at Google – for the Sales and Operations group across Latin America, Asia Pacific, and North America. During the peak of Google’s growth, he also led recruitment for the Global Online Sales and Operations Group, which was one of the largest global recruiting teams at the company.

Prior to Google, he was the Director of North America Recruiting for Starbucks Coffee Company and was responsible for all hires in North America, the largest business unit at Starbucks, during the highest growth years at Starbucks.

An Entrepreneur in the Recruitment Industry
Jason left corporate America to focus on entrepreneurship with a clear mission: to help organizations recruit better. In early 2011, Jason founded RecruitingDash, a recruitment software company that delivers world class SaaS-based reports, metrics, dashboards and analytics from existing Applicant Tracking Software (ATS). As with other trends in Big Data, RecruitingDash turns the wealth of data in the recruiting ‘supply chain’ into valuable information and insights to improve recruitment efficiency and effectiveness for companies of all sizes.

A Frequent Contributor to the Global Recruitment Community
Jason has shared his expertise, leadership, wit and key career lessons with colleagues by keynoting and being the Master of Ceremonies at some of the world’s largest HR and recruiting conferences including ERE Expo, Kennedy Information’s Recruiting Exposition, SHRM’s Staffing Management Association conferences, the Onrec Exposition, and The Recruiting Conference. He has also served as a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, published by ERE Media. Jason is also the past President of the Northwest Recruiters Association, a not-for-profit professional association of recruiting professionals in the Seattle Area.

Additionally, Jason served on the advisory boards of recruitment industry technology start-up companies: Jobster and SnapTalent.com. He is also an angel investor in both Swap.com and Baconsalt.com.

Frequently cited in the recruiting industry, he has also been chronicled in the New York Times on recruiting-related topics, and featured in the National Best Selling book, Mavericks at Work. His articles can be found at http://www.ere.net/author/jason-warner/.

He graduated cum laude from the University of Washington School of Business with concentrations in Human Resources / Organizational Behavior and Marketing.

Jason and his family live near Seattle, Washington.

Follow Jason on Twitter: @Jason_S_Warner

Connect with him on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason-warner/3/44b/196