“Recruitment… it’s just totally broken”
This week I was at an event in Bournemouth visiting the excellent Spear project there, and the collaboration they were doing with a job agency, Pollen.
One of the young people on the panel that formed part of the event is an advisor in a job centre, and she, and a recruiter I was also talking to, both expressed enormous frustration at the state of the jobs market. Why? Because, ironically, it’s become too ‘frictionless.’
In labour market economics there are three main ‘frictions’ that get in the way of perfect matches between jobs and people looking for them:
- Geography (there’s a job in Sheffield, but I’m in Aberdeen)
- Skills (there’s a job in my town, but I don’t have the right skills to be able to do it) and…
- Information (there’s a job in my town, and I have the right skills to do it… but I don’t know about it.)
There’s some interesting things happened with the first two, but for now I want to focus on the third: with the rise of the internet, information frictions have radically reduced.
That is a good thing: people knowing what’s out there, and firms being able to be put in touch with candidates… that’s great. But the question I asked Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides just last week (who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the frictions theory) was this: is there an optimal level of friction that makes things work better, or does the theory suggest that zero friction is the goal?
With my background teaching Newtonian mechanics, I’d say that a friction-free world is not a great thing. It means low energy moving things around… but it also (as you’ll know from any snow day) means a complete nightmare trying not to fall on your backside.
In the context of recruitment, what I’m hearing from lots of graduates (and experiencing as someone doing a hiring process) is that applying for jobs has just become too easy. You see a job on LinkedIn, you hit ‘apply’. Done. What that means is that candidates aren’t really thinking about whether the job is a good match. As I put it to Professor Pissarides in an email:
With such low-friction in a job market, does this mean very low energy for candidates, who then are tempted to put low effort in to the process? In such a system, does low friction end with poorer quality applicants, who just use the energy they have to scatter-gun hundreds of applications, rather than really putting time into a few?
So my thought is whether the theory affirms that a little friction might be a good thing, as it makes a demand on the applicant, and thus filters some of the dross at their end – which means a better application, and a better experience for the employer?
Strikes me that one way of reading our current situation is that there has been such an unthawing of information, we are now struggling to know what to do with it all, and thus algorithmic systems (with all their inherent risks/biases) become a requirement to stay afloat. Better – I’m wondering, but may be reading the theory wrong – to have some friction in life to keep us engaged in fewer, more important things?
This idea of the thawing of information, creating ultra-fast, friction-free flows, sounds wonderful. And certainly, having so much information at our fingertips is incredible. But it also leads to overwhelm, and – ironically – to lower effort on our part.
So I’ve been mulling this idea of what it might look like to put some frictions back into life. My guess is that it’d look something like the ‘slow’ movements of slow cooking, slow radio etc… but in relation to recruitment, a rethink of the process that slows people down and actually asks more of them in the application process, to lead to a better match.
Not an easy thing for young people, especially those who don’t have lots of social or financial resources to be able to do that slower, higher energy work… but, what is clear is that the current system is not working for them either.
Reducing flows… preventing overwhelm… feels like the inklings of a longer piece I need to think on and consider writing.
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