Predict Performance, Because You Can

To hire is to predict. Hiring technologies or practices that don’t help predict simply don’t help. And yet, more and more technological innovations applied to recruitment and talent management seem blind to prediction or, more frequently and more damagingly, antithetical to the ability to predict. Take applicant tracking systems (ATS’s). Please. We can’t seem to live without them but we aren’t living well (yet) with them. Well over 90% of large companies use ATS’s, in part to screen out applicants because the volume of submissions overwhelms human sifting. Data from last year in the US confirm: there were 89 applicants per job posted; 144 individuals, on average, applied for each entry-level job offered; Starbucks received 7.6 million applicants for 65,000 jobs; and 1 million applicants vied for 2000 Proctor & Gamble jobs. Employers call on the aid of technologies against this tsunami of candidates –who themselves are aided by technology, of course, in their ability t...