The Current State of HR Tech
We need to be building for a different future of company-candidate engagement—not creating technology that keeps this industry stagnant while it continues to degrade the user experience.
~2-minute read
This is my take on the current state of HR tech:
Has become very expensive and increasingly less effective—especially for hard to hire, passive candidates, and smaller recruiting teams with lower budgets.
Holds recruiters hostage because they're essentially the database of all professionals.
The best talent has left the platform due to recruiter spam.
Glassdoor
Reviews have lost credibility with job seekers because they know that companies are gaming the system to be perceived as less toxic.
Job seekers know that only the most disgruntled employees post reviews, to begin with.
The platform offers very little utility for sourcing candidates.
Job boards
No content, no depth.
Primarily for companies filling entry to mid-level roles.
Job boards drive a high volume of low-quality applications that become a recruiting nightmare: recruiters cannot respond to candidates and job seekers are rapid-applying into black holes.
Employer branding platforms
Offer useless, surface-level content and high-level company talking points.
Junior-level candidate audience (largely ineffective if you're hiring senior-level or niche talent).
Candidate sourcing tools
All are designed to take the human out of the recruiting process when effective recruiting is built on human-to-human connection and trust.
Not looking at the future of the recruiting industry and instead building technology that enables the currently broken model to work even faster.
Video interview tools
An attempt to modernize the already ineffective screening call.
The tools provide a poor candidate experience, waste time, and remove the ability for connection and rapport early in the hiring process.
Employee-generated content tools
A total waste of time and money due to corporate guidelines and implementing guardrails.
Employees don’t care enough to create the content. When they do, the content is largely unusable.
Candidates see this content as hand-wavy and posturing.
In summary:
Legacy brands dominate this space. Why? Because they’ve succeeded at one thing: making every recruiting team think that they need them. And new software companies who aren’t building anything for the future use buzzy terminology to sell products that are only enabling an already broken system to remain this way.
The result: Recruiters and candidates continue to suffer.
We need to be building for a different future of company-candidate engagement—not creating technology that keeps this industry stagnant while it continues to degrade the user experience.
Note: High-growth startups — this is especially relevant for you. You have lean recruiting teams who are doing the work of teams 5X their size on a shoestring budget. Choose your tools wisely.