If you had a magic wand, what part of the recruitment process would you create technology to solve? That was a question we asked in a recent informal survey of recruiters and their answers may, or may not surprise you. 

A lot of recruiting technology already exists to solve a myriad of issues but sometimes those tools lack understanding for how to use them properly or plainly there’s just no budget to buy them. 

Scheduling Interviews

One recruiter told us scheduling was her biggest pain point. “I just can’t stand scheduling, and figuring out like, what about Wednesday? What about Tuesday at nine? What about navigating that problem? But there’s probably an app for that already. It’s just our organization is not utilizing it yet.” She’s right about that…there are a number of interview scheduling tools already on the market. But even with this software, it still remains a top challenge for most Talent acquisition professionals.

Removing Bias

With diversity and inclusion becoming much more of a priority we do need more tech to address the issue. Some vendors are stepping up to remove bias by removing pictures and names but the conscious bias of some people may be hard to avoid. For instance, what about the bias of experience? Some companies still wont hire a person if they don’t work in that industry because they are unwilling to train them or give them a chance to learn. This is more a cultural problem that leaders must address.

AI is starting to make some inroads on this especially inside the ATS/CRM, to help remove some of those biases to shortlist individuals. A number of startups like Blendoor are beginning to tackle this. They use augmented intelligence and people analytics to help you hire and manage a diverse workforce.

BONUS: Check out this spreadsheet with 30+ hiring tools for diversity.

Hiring Managers

Hiring managers are a frequent complaint for recruiters. Perhaps we need an app that helps them interview better? One recruiter said, “it’s really about asking good questions so they can really cut through the garbage and get to somebody’s soul pretty quickly. And so I think that the power of the questions they ask is really underestimated. So if we could just kind of repeat that and teach everyone or, you know, have AI come in and do it for us that would be awesome.”

The Black Hole

The applicants’ experience and losing them into the black hole is still a huge problem where technology needs to step up. Why can’t the ATS automatically send out status updates and prompt recruiters to follow up more? Of all the problems in this article, the black hole is one that can surely be solved with better technology that focuses on the candidates experience from application to rejection. (see Rejobify)

Job Ads

We definitely need a better way to write a job advertisement. “I wish a creative job ad tool existed reflecting the persona of the candidate that you’re looking to hire”, one recruiter said. “if I could turn to a robot and just tell it all about the type of person that I want to hire and why they should come work here and have it pump out a great sounding ad with a 30 second video clip would be truly awesome”.

Reporting/Attribution

Reporting and analytics from a recruitment marketing perspective is still a problem. Even if you’ve stitched all your reports together, even if you’ve got a professional data person on it, it’s still really tough to get good, accurate year over year reporting that you can benchmark. Most recruiters don’t have the skill set to bring all this data together so a tool that simplifies it for them would be a winner.

If you had a magic wand to create some new recruiting technology what would it be? Feel free to leave a comment with your idea.