Imagine, if you will, a world with no CVs or resumés. Forget for a moment the gloomy predictions of job loss and declining productivity and spend a moment to imagine instead a future where the interview — a deluded, hour long industry standard with little evidence of effectiveness — no longer existed. No CVs, no interviews, just people doing valuable work on the basis of their skills and their fit with the team they’re working in.
The evolution of recruitment
Hundreds of years ago, before the industrial revolution began in earnest, trades and craft skills were passed from master to apprentice. Apprentices often began training for their trade as young as 12 years old, having secured the apprenticeship by the grace of their family connections. The route to mastery had a high bar, with apprentices passing years as a journeyman before finally submitting their ‘master’ piece to their guild to qualify as a master in their own right.
As industry burgeoned in the 19th century, the importance of craftsmanship diminished with the onset of mass production. Finding workers was often as simple as fixing a poster on a factory gate, and the interview no more than a queue at the door.
The aftermath of the second world war brought recruitment as we know it; classified ads in newspapers, the development of the Curriculum Vitae as a form of credential and the growth of the recruitment industry. From the 60s and 70s onwards, we developed the ‘knowledge worker’ caste, the cubicle, the electronic typewriter and finally, by extension, email and the iPhone.
Despite the arrival of the internet, recruitment has not undergone a revolution. In the early 2000s, the web just made the same old process faster — job classifieds are still job classifieds, just with more words and a better search engine. Even today, we might have a more efficient recruitment engine, but it’s still fundamentally the same engine we’ve had for 70 years or more, based on wanted ads, CVs and hour long interviews.
The real revolution at work
The workplace is due a seismic shift. Not only does the shadow of automation and robotics promise a fundamental change in the requirements of the workplace, but the change will be felt all the way down into the earliest education of our children.
If we consider both physical and digital automation of work together, the effects will be enormous. The combination of digital automation through artificial intelligence, machine learning and simplified electronic transactions will result in a deep impact to traditionally desirable professions like law, finance, accountancy, insurance and banking; imagine the impact to your company’s accounts payable and receivable teams if error prone purchase orders and invoices were replaced with the perfect record system of a blockchain-style distributed ledger.
Consider the impact of robotic automation and the development of artificial awareness on manual and physical labour. Just the automation of vehicles will disrupt public and private transport systems, especially in metropolitan transit and freight distribution. Warehouses and construction will be impacted as machines become cheaper and more flexible. Manufacturing will likely be returned to developed countries as robotic labour, such as 3D printing at scale, supplants offshore labour for cost effectiveness and shortened supply chains.
Andrew Ng, the Chief Scientist at Baidu and teacher of the incredibly popular Coursera Machine Learning course has suggested that any task which takes a human less than a second can be reasonably automated by artificial intelligence. And, this is a good thing — AI is well suited to replacing repeatable, rote and mundane activities. Robots are capable of physically automating what Google refer to as the three ‘Ds’ — dull, dangerous and dirty tasks. Why would we want people to do these jobs?
Toyota understood this when automating their production line and creating the Toyota Way, a philosophy which puts respect for people above a drive for automation, even in a company renowned across the world for efficiency. Understanding that humans are in themselves an incredible feat of bioengineering and possessed of an incredible capacity to compute and process information should lead us to a natural conclusion: despite the incredible pace of development of technology, people are the most valuable and flexible resource in any business.
Engaging talent
Today we’re rushed into careers, moving from company to company and up a ladder one job title at a time. Companies recruit primarily for a job title, looking in resumés for evidence of skills and competence, the appropriate length of tenure in each job, the right academic background and a list of aspirational former employers. Disturbingly, there’s even some evidence that the layout of a resumé can materially affect the chance of being invited to an interview.
Similarly, there is little good science to justify the validity of interviews as a means of identifying talent. In fact, the time of day or the order in which candidates are interviewed can make a meaningful difference to the outcome of a hiring process. When we’re discussing something as critical as identifying the best people to join our companies, it’s hard to feel confident in a process so demonstrably flawed.
Despite advances in screening with technology, it’s still not widespread or well understood enough. In technical roles, like software development, there is a dangerous over-reliance on technical tests which is especially damaging when hiring junior staff. Whilst useful as a screening tool, technical tests are an entirely artificial measure of the ability of an engineer, and have very little to do with the way teams work day to day. Critically, most technical test only focus on current ability and not the more important traits of capacity and desire to learn.
Despite the growth in the use of technical tests, companies rarely screen the mindset, personality or team fit of the individual, especially in technical roles. Interviewers do an inadequate job of exploring their own unconscious biases for hiring, which can lead to an uncomfortable level of conformity among the personalities within teams. This is bad for identifying talent, and a disaster for diversity.
The Challenge Economy
The next revolution in the workplace, I hope, will be recapturing the spirit of the itinerant journeyman. The German term, “Wanderjahre” referred to the period in which a young craftsperson would move from place to place after their apprenticeship. A large component of this journey was to experience different workshops and cultures, developing skills and mindset as part of the quest for eventual mastery.
Evolving from our post-industrial recruitment processes will be driven by the realisation that automation is inevitable in those sub-second knowledge worker tasks, or dull, dangerous and dirty manual labour where it is more cost-effective not to pay a human. In this world, people will be valued for the flexibility which sets us aside from the machines.
To make the most of this flexibility, the 20th century career for life will start to disappear. Instead of falling into patterns set by our parents, a path decided on our behalf before university age of becoming an accountant or a doctor, I hope that we will start to understand the capabilities and natural preferences of students while they’re still at school. Allowing children to discover their own craft, and supporting them in developing skills which will lead into an enjoyable and valuable career is critical to the workforce of the future. Arguably, apprenticeships already do a much better job of this than college or university education, and are much more appropriate for the majority of careers.
There has been much talk of the growth of the ‘gig’ economy, where work is treated like a series of music gigs, but I prefer to think in terms of what has been called the ‘Portfolio Career’. Instead of a series of relatively low value gigs, or a single career dominated by one profession, the portfolio career will allow workers to blend and balance their experiences, much like artisans on their Wanderjahre.
The development of this portfolio will require a new way for workers and employers to find each other. Instead of hiring for job titles employers will put teams together for specific projects, or to use a design thinking term from IDEO, “challenges”. The Challenge Economy will centre around matching talent with meaningful challenges, developing skills and teams and retaining long term relationships with workers who are only occasionally the right fit for the business.
The CV and the interview are no match for this fluid, hyperactive workforce. A new way of evidencing our portfolio, our mindset and our personality for discovery by employers is needed. Similarly, employers will need new ways to advertise their challenges, rather than their staid and unchanging job titles. Matching will need to be rapid and evidence based, hopefully allowing for shorter engagements with less risk, and a greater emphasis on developing a relationship between company and worker. The obvious benefit is that a two-way trust and rapport can be developed over several engagements, as bigger and more meaningful challenges are accomplished.
It’s hard to believe that this development won’t itself be a candidate for the use of advanced technology. Recording our portfolios, our skills and mindset and matching these with challenges seems like a natural candidate for automation through machine learning and analytics. Social and skill graphs will underpin matching, with networks of interconnected talent and employers.
Perhaps the most powerful change is that these networks, the challenges and workers need not be physically co-located. We’re already quite capable of connecting with workers all across the world with services like Upwork, but the future challenge worker will be able to work from a beach in Greece or a mountain in Montana on creative, inspirational challenges, perhaps in communities designed to encourage exactly these engagements.
The future of work should ultimately not be defined by technology, but rather by the amazing capacity of the human mind to solve grand problems.