End Game: 5 Talent Acquisition Trends That Prove The Apocalypse Is Nigh

Learn how recruitment tech has fallen on its SaaS, leading to diminishing returns and increasing commoditization

By Jim Durbin, Respondable

Part 1

5 TA Trends for the End of the World

Predictions are hard, because, you know, no one can see into the future, as much as all the “thought leaders” out there would try to convince you otherwise. Trends, however, are easy; this is why they have long been a mainstay of mediocre recruiting-related content because trends don’t require empirical evidence or even domain expertise.

Predictions are time bound; they either come true by a certain date, or they don’t. Trends, however, eventually show up because they’re simultaneously revisionist history and speculative fiction, and the past, as they say, is prologue. The only way to forecast the future is to look at the past - and because everything is cyclical, finding a trend is simply finding a narrative through line.

So, this is my rereading of history, as it were; this trend post is, I’ve got to warn you, a bit cynical, perhaps a tad too dark and maybe, even a little depressing. But so too is this industry and this profession. And if you’ve been in this business for as long as I have, well, you’re going to become something of a cynic - which is one of the core competencies of great recruiting, I’m convinced.

While this is a trends post, I’ll start with a prediction: there’s a really good chance you’re not going to even finish reading this post, because, as I said, it’s not exactly light reading, and it’s almost 4,000 words, or 3,950 words longer than the average American’s attention span.

Editor’s note: Jim is right. This post is basically a friggin’ novel so we’re serializing it into two parts.

I have liberally sprinkled some jokes and pop culture references throughout to keep things interesting, but even that little bit of levity doesn’t make what I genuinely see as the impending trends shaping TA any less depressing.

The silver lining is, it’s not too late for us to change. The bad news is, we never do.

While masked in sarcasm, these are serious thoughts. If you’ve been following the Singularity cult for a while, you’ll recognize many of them. You’ll be surprised, and hopefully, a little scared.

Kind of like recruiting, really.

Trend #1: The Software Industry Has Reached Negative Returns

Software just isn’t worth it anymore. We’re not talking about the financials, which are following the typical boom and bust cycle of bubbles inflated by zero-interest money. We’re talking about implementation and customer service teams that don’t understand the difference between a client using their software and a client using their software to do their job.

Software in the last forty years has brought amazing productivity to the US workforce. From Excel to banking apps, the use of software has changed the way we do business and led to cheery slogans like, “Software is eating the world.”

Automation and seamless integration with the back end made us faster, automated dull processes, shrunk the time to create reports and pull data, and gave us insights that we could never have dreamed were possible.

And then, it didn’t. I’m not sure when I first noticed the problem. I’ve used software to run a small business at a price that made me competitive with larger firms in recruiting and marketing for the better part of twenty years. Almost every time I picked up a software, my work product improved. I even trained others in using platforms and apps, reaching over 10,000 people who have paid me cash money to show them how to use Facebook, Google, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

The challenge is that with those 10,000 people, almost none of what I taught stayed with them. 60-90 minutes of live interaction resembled more of a dancing monkey show than real learning. In contrast, when I was paid to sit with one person for a few hours a week over a period of months, their skills, confidence, and ability skyrocketed. They learned how to use software to do their job faster and better, which then gave them time to become an expert in all areas of their job. Software plus time and training made them superheroes.

But what of the others? What about the standard corporate spreadsheets and word processing software that has been in use my whole career? Is it better? I remember shifting from Google-backed corporate software to Outlook and finding myself lost trying to find the search bar. It was absurd. By definition, I am one of the most prolific software trainers in recruiting. How could I not find the search bar? Why is my screen so small? Am I just getting old?

No to all of those things. I would pivot from Outlook to far more complex software where I once again smoothly got to work. What happened? The constant new versions of software have so many features, you find yourself yearning for the simplicity of the early crypto wallets. If someone like me, who loves learning, testing, and serving as a case study for UI improvements doesn’t understand a new software, how is someone who is picking it up for the first time supposed to be successful?

The answer is they aren’t. When you run the analytics on any major software, from Salesforce to Marketo to LinkedIn Recruiter - you find a large portion of your licenses are either poorly used or not used at all. Think 50% never log in after training under used. Go check for yourself. Very few power users do the majority of the real work and many of them are mindlessly pounding away at the keys like rats in a cage getting a pellet.

Developers will tell you it’s not their fault. They surf to a menu, or pull up a hidden list of features, or show you how to do your job the way they built the software. They have an excuse every time something didn’t work. You did it wrong. That’ ’s not how we built it!

You could call this bad requirements gathering, but the challenge is deeper. Software is asked to do too many complex tasks because there is a belief that you can track the data. Have you ever heard, “ If it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen.” That’s in 1984. I think it’s in the back of the book.

Humans can’t easily add their daily tasks in a way that generates the promised benefits. If they did, data scientists wouldn’t spend 90% of their time cleaning up spreadsheets, and people like me wouldn’t say, “it’s directionally accurate, but l wouldn’t say it’s right?”

And that is the demarcation line where software returns go negative.

Human beings don’t have the time and patience to learn every new bit of software and every change that occurs. Assuming the software never breaks or malfunctions, humans still can’t figure out how to use the software correctly in the time they have before going back to their jobs.

And we all know it. We just don’t say it, because those who buy software don’t want to hear that their multi-million dollar purchase was a waste.

There is no way to slow down. No company can afford to take a month to six weeks to train every user on every software. They need productivity gains and they need it now! We bought new software, and the beatings will continue until my dashboard is green and I can report on greater efficiency in my department!

You’ve all heard those commands. And you’ve also seen every employee using software complain that it’s dogshit, with the exception of the one person who knows just enough to be seen as the expert.

What sane CEO would buy into this paradigm? Other than all of them, who have worked through the golden age of software and assume that 2-10X productivity is baked in, just the way it was when you switched from pencils in a ledger to a spreadsheet or when you no longer had to buy your sales reps the new Thomas

Guide to drive around Los Angeles because they have maps on their phones.

The SaaS industry has been a source of growth and media attention for over two decades The beauty of subscription software is the cost of additional licenses is near zero, allowing software companies to scale quickly and profitably.

That time is coming to an end, as VCs pull back and the warnings of a SaaS winter are broadcast in Slack and discord channels across the country. Is anyone concerned? Is there anyone in the trenches who bemoans the lack of software innovation from yet another startup?

No. Software is now considered yet another thing that just doesn’t work. And as we all know, you can’t automate something correctly unless you have perfected it. But let’s not attack the software companies where ping pong tables are considered culture. Let’s put the blame where it belongs, on human Agency,

Trend 2: The Death of Competence in Humans

I have some competent friends. They can sail a boat, butcher a hog, con a ship, splint a leg, give orders, take orders, work on cars, cook a meal, comfort the afflicted, and I’ve probably stolen enough from Heinlein for you to get the point.

The ability to get through the basics of life and do all the things that every human civilization has done since the dawn of time is now at risk. We don’t have enough competent people.

Heinlein sniffed at specialization - he wrote that it was for insects. In a complex word where every job is being dissected to determine how much automation could be applied to your role, we have trained entire generations to be good at only one thing. It’s cheaper that way. You hire people for expert ability, teach them to stay in their lane, and never give them the opportunity to even ask what their impact is besides hitting a KPI that somehow aggregates across the company to show you really are going to do well in your Q3 report.

When I interview people, I have the hardest time getting them to explain why they perform tasks a certain way. Many say, “this is how we do it,” which if you trace it back, has so many vestigial tails that Jared Diamond could write a whole new book your college-aged son can quote back to you incorrectly. My favorite is the hiring manager who always threw away the first resume in a printed stack of resumes because they assumed it was bad luck. In reality, it was from watching their trainer throw away the fax cover page because that was once a thing!

These behavioral remnants are everywhere. Human beings are doing things in corporations that they don’t understand because they were taught it was important and then those things are automated. It hurts my heart to see it.

This isn’t a new problem. I was once tasked with auditing an admin department that had grown from 3 to 10 people when the sales floor had grown from 20 to 50. I would sit with each person and assess their workload, then take over one report that they hated doing. I’d learn the report, take it over, distribute it to the right people, and then, I’d stop. I’d stop delivering the report, and then wait for anyone to complain. No one ever did. In a short time, I took over 50% of all reporting and was “doing it.” Then for fun, I created a new report. Every executive demanded a copy, and it was very popular. It was a map of our sales reps with stars in each of their cities. I went with stars over bullseyes because our people were “stars.” I thought dollar signs were a bit too much.

These admins didn’t know why they were doing their jobs. No one ever told them, and they just did as they were instructed with no sense of whether it was important. The problem now? All of us are admins. Everyone needs the new TPS, in the new format, and although Office Space has entered cult status, we built a workforce who thinks completion of a task is what makes the company go. We have no clue how most of what we›re working on impacts the company. If we did, we’d rise up Braveheart style. I missed my dad’s funeral for work and three months after I leave, no one remembers the sacrifice. That has to hurt your heart a little.

It’s not that humans are dumb. Don’t let anyone dismiss half the population so easily. It reminds me of the stories of young boys struggling at math, who could calculate batting percentages in their heads on the fly while pretending that nasty Big League chew was spitting tobacco. It wasn’t a matter of competence or intelligence. It was a lack of caring.

Companies demand deterministic data to feed their analytics machines, but it’s very rare to take the time to use that data for anything but improving the reports. Do you know how many times I’ve seen people crow about more of something because it showed progress?

You do this long enough to a human, they become a machine. Then they’re replaced by a machine, only to find out that copying a dull human makes you a dull machine.

We have killed competence by demanding people act like machines, so we can gather data on them to replace them. Then it surprised Pikachu when the process fails catastrophically.

Let me show you something human. I’ll admit a fault so that I trust myself more.

I have a bad habit of accidentally insulting people. For example, I often write that Human Resources employees don’t understand data. The #1 response on the board, the survey says, is “I look at spreadsheets all day!” Let me say that again. “I get data, I look at spreadsheets all day!”

You can’t see it, but your finance director is trying to hold back a laugh. It’s okay though. Their kid just taught them to use Magic Erase on their new Android phone and my notification alerts just told me your finance team proudly added photo-editing to their list of skills on LinkedIn. Finance may know data, but their fancy houses are just down the street from the glass quarry if you know what I mean.

Competence is one thing you cannot teach. It has to be earned. It takes time. It takes the right mindset and the right environment. And most important, it can be destroyed with mindless tasks and interruptions like notifications on your phone, laptop, and iPad that ring simultaneously because the new version released automatic syncing when not ENOUGH of you were manually doing it on your own.

Maybe it is the fault of the software. Or Canada. Let’s Blame Canada and stream some more videos while we work because pretty soon, the machines are going to go all Sorcerer’s Apprentice on your workflow.

Jim Durbin is the Managing Principal of Respondable, a recruitment consulting agency in Dallas. TX. With over 20 years of experience in improving talent acquisition, he›s worked in all four major categories of recruiting, pushing the boundaries of better hiring and better technology. He›s been known as the Indeed Whisperer, the Social Media Headhunter, and just a guy in the Stetson. His background includes digital and social marketing, programmatic advertising, headhunting, AI, media, and technology. He›s trained over 10,000 recruiters to be better sourcers, and currently is engaged in developing the next generation of recruitment marketers.

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