Credait – The Revolution in Talent Sourcing

 “There is a dire need to humanize talent sourcing”

Job search is a very stressful and time consuming ordeal. The active job seekers are those who do not have a job, or given the unfavourable circumstance in their environment, want to move to another organization at the earliest. There are also the passive group of talented people who would consider moving to another organization, given a better salary and scope for career growth, but these people are not “actively” looking out. These passive candidates, in most cases, are referred by a friend or someone in their network, in case an opportunity coincides with the passive candidate’s qualification and interest. This is purely a matter of luck. Whatever the situation, as long as there are companies that continue to hire people, there will be a large pool of candidates who are always looking forward for better opportunities.

The biggest obstacle to job search, is how technology in the current scenario has made it so complex, or chaotic rather, in prolonging the recruitment process. In traditional hiring, a company advertised a job description in the most concise manner in the local or national newspaper. The job seekers sent their resumes in physical form, and recruiters had to patiently go through the entire process of getting to know the job seekers better. In other words, there was a “humanizing” element involved in recruiting.

At best, in traditional hiring, there was the head-hunter between company recruiters and job seekers. It is fair to say that these head hunters were the modern equivalent of “social media.” They took the time to understand company requirements better, and they spent a considerable amount of time with the job seekers (both active and passive) to find out their interests, company preference and long term aspirations. While head-hunters specialized in specific industries, the common successful trait they all shared was the ability to build relationships – the ability to “humanize” the connect between recruiters and the job seekers. In the current internet age however, the overgrowing mediums like job boards, social media, applicant tracking systems (ATS) etc., have only made recruiting worse. Technology has become a curse, ironically, with these mediums filling in and widening the gap between recruiters and job seekers. A noted human resources leader and influencer on recruiting, Liz Ryan, summarized it aptly when she says:

“Mechanization has almost completely taken over the standard corporation of institutional hiring process.”

There is a dire need, therefore, to humanize talent sourcing. This is where Credait steps in. 

Credait – An acronym for Credentials, Dreams and Traits

Credentials, dreams and traits are otherwise known as qualifications, passion and personality respectively.

Credait is a social empowerment platform for talent sourcing and directly links recruiters and job seekers. It empowers both professional and non-professional workforce. Approximately 7% of the global workforce are professionals – people with college education and hold resumes. The other 93% of the global workforce comprises of skilled and unskilled people. There are many social mediums catering to career needs of the professional workforce, however, there are hardly any medium catering to the needs of the “bottom” 93% of the workforce.

Credait serves as a universal social empowerment platform for both professional and non-professional workforce. Prominent features of Credait include:

• No more resumes
• No more reading job descriptions
• No more applying for jobs (need for job application is eliminated)
• On board skilled & unskilled workers who do not have access to internet or smart phone
• On board skilled & unskilled workers who are illiterate
• Cross border enabled – Universal talent sourcing platform globally
• Lifetime free-access for job seekers
• One time registration for job seekers
• For Recruiters / companies – No ad expenditure
• Candidate screening time reduced from months to minutes
• No constant updates of personal profiles

Credait eliminates the need for Resumes, job descriptions, years of work experience and educational qualifications in order to find the best candidates suited for particular profile. This is because Credait identifies some indisputable facts that exist in talent sourcing, while dissecting biases and busting myths associated with human resource hiring. It is important therefore, to look into the biases, myths and facts associated with hiring.

Dissecting bias in human talent sourcing

#1 – The ‘Ivy League education’ bias: Many companies over emphasize the importance of candidates having degree from highly ranked universities. Credait’s solution aims to eliminate this bias, and steer hiring companies away from the mind set associated with top ranked universities. Before the internet age, a degree from a top ranked university considered special because high profile universities had access to rich information resource.  Professors had big research grants and were highly knowledgeable to advice students. There were plenty of research publications, be it technology or business, for students to access. However, in the internet age, everyone has access to education. Reputed universities and MOOC (Massive open online courses) websites are offering free courses over the internet.

This is an age of self-learning and any aspiring student or job seeking candidate has access to knowledge in any desired field. Moreover, anyone in any company environment will agree that not everyone from a highly reputed university were the best of performers.  For this reason, the candidate’s subject expertise will visible in the Credait’s portal, but not the educational institution where the degree was obtained.

#2 – The ‘personality/cognitive test’ bias: Many companies, by involving external agencies, request candidates in initial interactions to undergo a personality/cognitive test. There are academically brilliant people who can score on the genius scale at an IQ test, but who can never become the CEO of a fortune 100 company, or perform even a mid-level leadership role effectively. This is because IQ tests (or any standardized test) focus on the cognitive skills central to success in colleges, but not successes in business. This is because there are absolutely no tests that measures on-your-feet thinking skills that are critical in business, to weigh good vs. bad decisions.

The problem with cognitive/personality tests is that it enables a test taker to manipulate the results in a way candidates feel will be viewed favourably in line with the job description and company type. Unfortunately, these tests are enforced even before the first interview and ideal candidates are already eliminated.

#3 – The ‘pre-defined experience’ bias: Let’s say some job description specifies that a candidate requires 10-15 years of experience, or something like a minimum of 10 years of experience.

What if there is an ideal candidate with everything that a hiring manager is looking for, but only has 9 years of work experience? Problem is, even before such a candidate and the hiring manager can interact, the ATS will have already eliminated that candidate, even if he had 9.5 years of experience.

Also, let’s say a position requires 10 years of leadership experience in a software company where the candidate is required to lead a new product development. But what if a candidate with only 5 years of experience applied, but he had started his own software development company as an entrepreneur, but it did not take off as expected. Although he has only 5 years of experience, this candidate would be more than qualified to lead a new product development owing to his entrepreneurial background, having rich experience in all failure points towards a new product development.

However, an ATS will eliminate this candidate, and many chances that an inexperienced recruiter might overlook his resume because it only shows 5 years of experience. If on the other hand, a hiring manager noticed this entrepreneur’s experience, he would definitely consider his profile for a few interviews. However, hiring managers hardly review resumes and assume that recruiters, ATS, etc. will find the ideal candidate.

#4 – The ‘specific industry experience’ bias: Let’s say a position is for a client partner’s role in a medical technologies company. The job description requires that a candidate has good relationship management skills with a background in medical devices. However, let’s say that a candidate with excellent client engagement strategy applied but he had a general engineering background and not necessarily in medical devices. The ATS will out rightly eliminate this candidate. What is critical for a client partner’s role is the candidate’s ability to maintain amicable relationships with clients and grow the business with forecasted sales.

This person doesn’t necessarily need a strong medical devices background, and to maintain relationship, a strong socially interactive candidate will easily pick up on the basic medical devices knowledge to connect with clients. This is true for any role requiring leadership or people management where a medical devices or consumer products company can hire any candidate with a different industry experience, because the emphasis is only on effective people management to derive best results and not necessarily having the right industrial background.

Busting Myths in human talent sourcing

Myth #1 – The perfect candidate syndrome: This “pursuit-of-perfection” attitude is ruining the recruiting process, and a root cause for leaving many jobs seekers in vain. The advent of social media recruiting with specialized aggregator tools, and engagement of specialized RPO’s to find the “superman” candidate is causing more harm than benefit. The problem with this obsession towards the “perfect candidate” syndrome is that companies feel they have invested heavily in all types of recruitment technology and processes and these can somehow identify that superman candidate. But the reality is that various recruitment technologies and RPO’s have presented a value proposition that getting the dream candidate for companies only to grow business from hiring companies. Let us consider the following example:

An actual job description in 2020 expressed the need for a Director of social media strategy. He required 15 – 20 years of experience in digital strategy. This is because, being a retail consumer products company, the management wants to expand its foot print in social media and be able to identify the right audience and create a fan following. However, one can immediately deduce that this job description was written by a person who lacked common sense. Consider the following scenarios:

• The company wanted to increase presence in social media through mediums like Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc.
• Facebook was the first among social media entity that was established only in 2005.
• The company/artist pages feature in Facebook didn’t come into existence until 2010.
• It wasn’t until 2012 that popular brands and artists began to have a good following in Facebook and hence the need for B2C companies to increase their foothold in finding the right audience by means of a digital/social media strategy.
• This implies that a social media strategy is a new field where nobody could have more than 8 years of experience. At best, let’s say some person realized the impact of social media strategy, then even that person would only 10 years of experience, given the Facebook’s company page feature came to existence only in 2010.
• Then how in the world can someone post a job description for a director with over 15 years of experience in social media strategy?

This is the level of stupidity that daunts the talent sourcing space. This clearly illustrates that with the “pursuit of perfection” attitude, all these modern recruitment tools and RPO’s promise the impossible to companies. A company just jumping the bandwagon on initiating its social media strategy will obviously want the best candidate with maximum experience in this field. Therefore, an engaged RPO staff will compose the job description on behalf of the company and post these in various job boards and company website. However, as noted above, only people with a maximum of 8 years of experience would apply, and the company’s ATS will automatically reject these candidates.

On one side, the director of social media strategy position will remain open forever, and internally companies will complain that they never filled the position in over a year. On another side, deserving candidates will get to work in such a position.  This is the reality where many companies report that positions are remaining unfilled since posting, for even more than year. Ideally, a hiring manger should have composed the job description, and he/she will be expected to have the common sense where no person in the market can exist with over 5 years of experience in social media strategy.

However, with all the technological mediums and RPO’s stacking up, by promising magical solutions in finding the best candidate, the hiring manager is entirely out of the picture in the initial screening process. In this regard, how can company be disillusioned by the concept of perfect candidate? Companies themselves may be aware of this fallacy, however, when an external agency (like RPOs) promises the impossible, companies fall victim. This is the same way someone falls for a magical diet pill or exercise machine on TV that promises a perfect physique in two weeks. Everybody buys it, and over time, just forget about it, until a new diet pill or machine comes, and the whole cycle happens all over again.

Myth #2 – Finding the right candidate takes time: This is a shady advice that the many recruiting tools and RPO’s conveniently tell companies who are getting impatient in finding the right talent. They don’t want to admit (or stay conveniently ignorant rather), that all the delay in the hiring process is because of over stacking middlemen like themselves in the first place. Building up from myth #1, the impracticalities in the current recruitment process is leaving many positions unfilled, waiting for the ideal superman candidate. However the middlemen can’t undermine their own value proposition to their clients, so they will keep giving shady advice such as “find the right candidate takes time.” At some point, the company eventually caves in, and hires a candidate who doesn’t necessarily fit the position appropriately, or sometimes, they get lucky.

Over this long haul though, they would have wasted precious time in not getting a single candidate (leave along the right candidate) to execute work. Invariably other members in a team would have contributed for the vacant position’s role, and as a result, they would have been over stressed, and invariably productivity would have dipped. And when such frustrated workers resign due to stress and overwork, companies complain about attrition and not being able to retain talent. Worse, they would hire an external consulting firm to find out why talented workforce leave them.

Myth #3 – Intelligent recruiting software and aggregator tools will help determine a candidate’s future performance: If it is a fact that even in the stock market, a past performance is not an indication of future performance, then how can this apply to job candidates? Even big CEOs of top Fortune 100 firms – who had the highest pedigree in education and experience – have made very bad decisions and reputed companies have filed for bankruptcy. But it’s ironic how recruitment software is sold under the pretext of having “specialized tools” that determine future performance. One of the hottest topic in the recruitment industry today is being able to evaluate a candidate’s future performance. The technology and middlemen therefore have picked up on this new “snake oil” gimmick, and have introduced specialized “filler technologies” they may determine a candidate’s “future” performance. This is nothing but merely exploiting the specific things that companies or recruiters want to hear.

How a candidate can perform in the future depends on many factors outside the candidate as well. Companies first need to assess whether the environment and/or work culture they offer are conducive for a candidate to perform outstandingly well. What if the company or the team is marked by bad management? What if there is an incompetent or insecure boss who feels threatened by a subordinate’s performance? Is there an effective system of appraisals that rewards and recognizes the work performance of a candidate? There can absolutely be no way a hiring manager or a recruiter can assess a candidate’s future performance by ignoring various fallacy in their own system or company culture. Besides, one cannot rule out the possibility that a candidate who performed average in the previous company can actually do stellar work in the current role being interviewed for, especially when there is a great boss or company culture.

In a leadership role, the possibility of estimating a candidate’s future performance, based on past experience, is completely ruled out. This is because questions on past experience will only yield the following:

• Nature of work performed (examples of the type of work done in past)
• Job Knowledge (deemed specific to the industry, and invariably the best practices)
• Social skills (behaviour, mannerisms, likeability)

But all of the above cannot identify success in the current (executive) role being interviewed for. Therefore, the most accurate way of predicting someone’s future performance is to put the candidate in a situation where hiring managers closely mimics the context in the existing company, and assess how the candidate performs. In other words, the current role must be enacted where the hiring manager and prospective candidate have interactive discussion to form a conclusion. Such a scenario is the most accurate method of assessing a candidate’s future performance and it is only possible when people interact.

However, the technological intervention has completely prolonged this process, because many ideal candidates would have been eliminated through ATS or other technological mediums. This is why humanizing component is important and imperative to the candidate and hiring manager interacting from the beginning. Credait enables such an opportunity! Keep reading below to find out how.

Identifying facts in human talent sourcing

Fact #1 – Employers are just as clueless in finding talent, as job seekers are lost in finding their ideal position: Most job qualification and experience requirements overshoot the positions functional need. Employers just want to weed out inexperienced folks before they apply. This has to two pronged problem: A) It scares young talent away, and B) Job seekers have been so long without jobs they just apply for any random job just to see if they get a response. Companies although write job descriptions based on good intentions, they are clueless because they are unaware of the ideally qualified candidates they may eliminate.

Credait enables the hiring manager to prioritize the top requirements of a candidate in key words, instead of writing a highly detailed job description. This way, the hiring manager can not only work fast to fill the position of an employee that left his team, but also quickly identify new talent with the right qualifications in line with the development of a new team, without worrying to compose the perfect job description.

Fact #2 – Recruiters spend no more than 30 seconds reading a resume: One has to understand that a job description may be long, but a recruiter spends no more than 30 seconds on a candidate’s resume. This is of course, by those very experienced recruiters who genuinely feel that it’s best for them to review a profile first-hand. What they are looking for in a resume could up to them: key words, reputed company experience, education, achievements, etc. However, irrespective of what they look for, they spend only 30 seconds or less on a resume. Credait’s approach is simple, where the search results of desired skills from candidates is reflective of what the recruiter specifies.

Fact #3 – Flexibility always exits for right candidates, provided an actual interaction occurs between hiring managers and job seekers: Recruiters never forcefully insist on having the right years of work experience, and for candidates with the right attitude and social character, most job requirements related to experience are flexible. Soft skills are regarded more important and not greatly emphasized in job ads. This is why Credait eliminates the need for specific years of job experience.  Instead, it offers another simple solution to work around years of work experience.

Fact #4 – People hire people they like! – This statement alone is enough said. This is a highly subjective influence that subconsciously influences a hiring manager’s decision. The same goes of all members in a team who interview a prospective candidate. Overall, managers hire people who are their type and this can’t be ignored. The hiring manager also doesn’t necessarily express this up front, but they the “matching chemistry” always influences over qualification when it comes to the person hired.

Head-hunters and RPO’s vehemently differ from this approach because they spend so much time in filtering the right candidates based on qualification, however, the decision of the hiring manager is final. It is imperative to note that successful factors mostly have nothing to do with a resume or work experience and these cannot be conveyed over a resume. Again, in the end, people hire people they like. Through Credait, the hiring manager is able to identify the traits of prospective candidates that are reflective of their own personality and/or reflective of the hiring team.

Fact #5 – Hiring managers and recruiters have communication gaps – Whether it is filling the position of an employee who quit, or hiring people to develop a new team, the hiring manager will have a vision of whom the ideal candidate should be. While they make the final decision in hiring a candidate, given the current recruitment process, they never come during the early screening process. They are hardly involved in composing the job description – which are usually old and outdated – and they just, in most case, convey verbally on what they look for in an ideal candidate to the recruiter.

The manager might assume, or take for granted, that the recruiter knows how the team functions. Worse, the strategic initiatives proposed by top management in the company to grow a new team is not clearly reflected to the recruiter. Although key staff from human resource take part in a company’s strategic initiatives meetings – so as to hire the right talent based on new plans communicated – recruiters don’t understand the criticalities of new initiatives discussed in a manner comprehended by a hiring manager. The manager therefore assumes that recruiters are aware on which candidates to identify.

This disconnect, combined with the recruiter (or an external RPO) composing the job description, leads to inappropriate candidates getting screened for interviews. In Credait, the communication between hiring managers and recruiters are in perfect sync in finding the right candidate. As mentioned in Fact #1, it is best that the hiring managers sets the right search criterion and pass it on to the recruiter.

Fact #6 – Millennials’ work environment expectations can’t be ignored – Millennials are those people born after 1980’s and reached adulthood by early 2000’s. The next three decades will be dominated by millennials in the work force. These people grow up in a technological revolution encompassed by mass connectivity. Some key facts with respect to millennials:

• They value open and honest dialogue
• They have a great need to have their aspirations and goals heard
• They don’t necessarily ask for entitlement, however, they want to know how they can get better continuously and how they can grow
• They respect and demand a sense of empowerment
• They are inquisitive and always striving to learn new things, experience new culture, and crave diversity
• They have the tendency to switch jobs often if they experience saturation. Only by giving them new responsibilities will they stick around longer. They want challenges and the freedom to derive their own solution
• They don’t just look for jobs, they place importance to a career. Their mind-set can be categorized as entrepreneurial
• They do not like overload of redundant information (even in job descriptions)
• Since 2014, they form the majority of the global work force. By 2030 they will be 75% of the global work force
• They crave simplicity: less information, more effectiveness, etc. They demand respect of their time and getting their attention is very tough. This is why they hate filling out job applications for over 45 minutes in ATS
• They are always looking for better opportunities
• Many employers express that retaining millennials is tough

It is imperative to understand then, that very detailed job descriptions won’t appeal to millennials. Yet another reason to eliminate job descriptions. Through Credait, millennials can empower their top talents alone to get noticed.

Fact #7 – Internal reference systems will always remain limited: One of the top selling points of modern aggregator tools in recruiting, is that they emphasize a lot of importance, to employee reference in finding new talent and innovative methods to propose to expand internal reference. No one can deny that internal reference is best method to find talent, after all, an existing employee knows best on how the company functions and how its work culture is. The problem they overlook (or rather choose not to disclose) is that internal references don’t work for the same reason. Some facts to consider by breaking down the source of hiring:

• Internal Referrals : 22 – 25%
• Career section on website: 15 – 20 % (only for branded companies)
• Job boards: 18 – 20%
• Social media 2 – 5 % (This is how low the impact of social media recruiting is!)
• College recruitment: 4 – 7 %
• Third party agencies: 3 – 7 %

Although internal referrals are the best source of finding new talent for companies, many companies have struggled to exceed the 25% limit over the past decade. They have even implemented great rewards (including financial bonuses) for internal reference, however, they have struggled to increase the percentage. There are many factors for this cause:

• Employees are mostly referring their close friends through internal reference, or at best, a colleague from the previous company. Not everyone has a very large network / friends. In this case, they only refer people if the value proposition for their friends are better in their existing companies. What if the existing company has a bad management or hasn’t given employees a fair appraisal in a long time? The last thing anybody would do in such an environment is refer their friend
• Every employee, although they may know many people, not all the people in their network/friend’s list are qualified to join the existing company. For example, if the existing company is an engineering firm and one position requires an electrical engineer, not all friends of an existing employee will be electrical engineers
• Even if an internal employee makes a reference, chances are that other candidates are also in the interviewing process, and the referred candidate may not get hired. In this case, the employee doesn’t get the referral bonus. This brings about an important point. Although rewarding for internal reference is a great system, it isn’t necessarily a great motivator for internal employees to proactively keep referring people at a regular intervals
• For personal reasons, even though a referred candidate is a perfect fit, they may choose not join a company, by citing commute, relocate or family issues

For the reasons mentioned above, internal references will always remain limited, and the fact that many new “recruitment aggregator tools” will try to increase internal references is unjustified. When it comes to recruitment, 75% of the talent search has to come from sources outside of internal reference. And the whole mishap that happens in this 75% due to numerous mediums is what is causing the prolonged delay in recruitment. A major advantage with Credait is that will be in expediting the recruiting process, by reducing screening time to one day. Overall, Credait will be a disruptive platform in professional talent sourcing, and a revolutionary platform in non-professional talent sourcing.