How much time do you spend listening to the youngest members of your team? By that I mean a proper discussion with ears wide open to understand their lives and aspirations.
I recently sat down and had an enlightening conversation with a few of the younger, unattached members of my team just before Valentine’s Day and the conversation turned to dating.
They discussed their favourite dating apps and talked about filtering out people over a certain distance away, above or below a certain height, education level, whether they drank, smoked or had children. The parallels between searching online for a partner and a job are quite striking, not least the key factors of location and income!
I began wondering how much fun it would be to be able to swipe unwanted jobs off your screen, tap a little heart next to the ones you liked, and then wait patiently to see if the employer “matched” with you.
Your set of skills against their set of requirements. If you had everything on the list, instant match! Then, you would set off on the journey of discovery through a series of short messages, and if you both felt the same way, set up an interview.
But, while it might sound that I’m about to develop the app, what I took away from the conversation with the team was that technology does not necessarily make things easier. Just quicker.
I heard a couple of “dating fail” stories which happened despite the best efforts of the app to match the perfect couple. Not every date is a success, no matter how much effort goes into the research and preparation.
Then there is the Catfish; “Good on paper, but not in person” I was told. In the dating world, that means a great profile photo that you later discover is about 20 years old. In the job application world, that’s potentially a vital job skill that the candidate lists but only had two weeks experience in.
Then, there’s the lack of chemistry. It doesn’t matter what your credentials, when you eventually get face to face, if there’s no spark, there’s no second date or interview.
Candidates might even find themselves missing out on an opportunity that they accidentally skipped past. In the app world, once you’ve swiped it away, you can’t go back.
So, gamifying the search for talent is not the silver bullet. Finding and developing talent in an organisation needs people to lead and manage it, with technology playing a supporting role. We’re all guilty of wanting a quick fix to every challenge, but when it comes to people, we all know that a rash decision made without the facts usually leads to an unhappy outcome. When you’re looking for talent in your organisation, you need human eyes and ears on the job, the most important and relevant processors available.
Add your comment