I’m in recruiting, have been for a while. I’ve also been part of the team that’s built one of these newer solutions that you may have heard of, so I have some perspective.
A lot of different products that you’ll see, that focus attention on sourcing candidates (or, solving “top of funnel” problems), are likely going to run into some of the same walls we always have. As appealing as these platforms might be, that offer a slightly more modern way of matching skills to jobs, at the end of the day they will still struggle to get things much better, for a couple of reasons:
1) We’re dealing with a finite pool of candidates, and a fairly limited pool of really qualified candidates (of course, this is subjective based on your company). So, all the awesome skills matching AI/Machine Learning, etc. in the world, isn’t going to create more people - you’ll likely still end up short.
2) Often, the very best candidates are well employed, or move from one job to another without ever hitting the open market, because they are well known and get recruited among their network. So, these platforms will often have a larger representation of less experience job seekers.
With all that said, we have had success with Hired! I think they have a high quality reputation with candidates and recruiters, and that goes a long way. Another product we’ve liked is Drafted - this looks at your employee’s networks, and then suggests people to your employees that they can refer. It’s just a nudge to encourage a referral - it’s been good.
I think that really, the most gains can come further into the process. Applying to a job (as candidate) and reviewing an application (as company) is fairly relatively easy and cheap (i.e. neither party has invested much time or attention). As you get further in the recruiting process, you’re investing more of yourself (as is the company), so it’s more important to get it right. Once you do find candidates that seem to be a strong potential fit, it’s even more crucial that the rest of the process is transparent, grounded in logic, and actually assures the the right match is being made.
We’ve chose to focus on designing a better technical interview at Karat, because of this. We do first round technical screens on behalf of companies, and we’ve built the infrastructure to support a more fair and data-driven process. The companies we work with realize that getting interviewing right takes a lot of time - and then having your engineers do all first rounds (on top of final rounds), also takes a lot of time. So, we build all the interview content in house, and then as candidates go from Karat, to the final round interviews at these companies, we track what happens closely - this allows us to more accurately assess who is likely to be a good fit in final rounds, and then we just continue calibrating that fit over time.
Why we think we’re “fixing” recruiting, is because we see the incredible amount of time lost, and poor matches made, when interviewing is done more arbitrarily, or in an ad hoc manner. By just applying consistent infrastructure, it cleans up a lot of things, and makes the process less painful for all involved. Finally, because our full focus is interviewing - we’re able to do things like offer interviews 24/7, give you the chance to redo your interview if the first one sucked, and invest in a ton of training for interviewers to provide a really great experience.
So - that's my thought - it's tough to fix a lot of these things through sourcing - the parts of the process where you’re developing a deeper relationship and investing more time are crucial to get right.