#HRTechChat, Episode Four Recap: Where Are the One-hit Wonders?

As late as the late '70s, musicians were still trying to figure out synthesizers. Funk wanted little part of it, but rock stars, pop stars and many others who wrote and performed popular music (and not-so-popular music) embraced the limited options at hand to push their art along its evolutionary path. The fruits of their labors ran the gamut, and most of it sounded rudimentary, experimental and inflexible. Only many years later did musicians sort out computer-based instruments and create increasingly listenable songs as the technology matured and those who focused on it gained experience and better tools.
 
Yeah, for #HRTechChat Episode Four, we got the funk out last Friday. But there's only so much good foot to get on. "Take me to the next phase," sang the Isley Brothers. The evolution of popular music is a helpful metaphor, a backdrop against which we can attempt to liken the trajectory of recruiting technology for social media. We need to trace a framework around which to build our understanding and predict the future. Your tweets last Friday took many, many tangible steps in that direction, and we'll get to your tweets. But first…
 
"Recruiting's Coming Back in a Big Way"
 
The economic news out there currently doesn't appear to point to a near-future gangbusters marketplace for jobs, but a close colleague recently shared an anecdote from a recent meeting with "some very smart people," one of whom told him that "recruiting's coming back in a big way this year." Pieces of data from the "Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2011" seem to back that up, with two-thirds of the 800 participating organizations indicating that they intend to hire in 2012.
 
Meanwhile, however, we continue to tiptoe around the big, white elephant in the room. The past few years have been brutal—brutal for job seekers and brutal for recruiters, who dance in an area of the economy susceptible to market conditions (e.g. booms and busts) in both acute and long-term ways. If it were a conversation, it might go something like this:
 
economy: "Hey! See that economic recession over there?"
recruiter: "Wait, wha—" [thud sound, then silence (for a long time)]
 
Recruiters are among the very first to feel the pain of a slowed economy, and that pain is intense; in fact, they're often the first to know that an economy is indeed slowing. Think of the engine room guys in the movie "Titanic": The ship hit the iceberg, and bam! Those guys were the first casualties, just like that.
 
When hiring tanks, recruiters' livelihood tanks, too. But the flipside is the antidote. When an economy starts to get better, recruiters are among the first to sense the uptick. Their workload can even be a bellwether of good things to come.
 
It's the inverse of how some animals' retreat to the hills portends an earthquake.
 
Technology's Impact on Recruiters' Exposure to Economic Earthquakes
 
Whether or not market conditions precipitate a boom in recruiting this year, the technology of social media is and will remain highly relevant to job seeking and talent acquisition. Integration is inevitable, and resistance of social media is futile. When economic earthquakes strike, social media helps needles (i.e. job seekers) shine so they may eventually leave the haystack (i.e. get hired), and recruiting technology for social media helps recruiters find these needles in these haystacks. Put simply, recruiters using technology to enhance their use of social media outpace peers who approach social media without technological prosthetics and leave recruiters who don't use social media at all in the dust.
 
Under the worst of circumstances, technologies available today help recruiters to produce candidates for even the hardest-to-fill position, the specialized role that leaves large swaths of the job seeking population reeling because their resumes (now residing in social media, coincidentally) don't meet the available job's requirements. Economic downturns exacerbate and underscore this dynamic. When the pickings are slim—i.e. during low unemployment—hiring authorities are less discriminating; there just isn't enough available talent of high enough caliber to be choosy. The inverse is just as true. It may be a typical, gross overgeneralization to say so, but generally, hiring authorities have plenty of time to wait for the just right job seeker when the economy is underperforming; they can gloss over the typical job seeker and wait for the atypical, stellar one. And the recruiter who sources and presents this job seeker to the client first will earn the hard-earned fee in booming, foundering and floundering economies.
 
One Hit Wonders
 
Some artists write hit after hit after hit. The Beatles come to mind, as does Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Elvis, the king himself, is another. Then there's Sammy Johns, king of nothing. Who remembers his one and only hit, "Chevy Van," a hit in May of 1975? Probably not many, and really, who wants to? OK, it was a pretty good song, actually. But most of you probably remember Norman Greenbaum's one hit, 1970's "Spirit in the Sky," and can sing along to it.
 
The point is this: High technology has its massive success stories. It has its one hit wonders, too, and some are better than others.
 
Fifteen years ago or so, the dotcom boom saw plenty, good and bad, enter the fray. Let's talk about the bad ones. Premised upon bad technology ideas were entire companies with nary the semblance of a business model. Private equity galore backed these players nevertheless. Go figure. As the dotcom crash followed, many of these companies fell by the wayside as victims of their bad reasons for being.
 
Aside from the spectacular crashes and burns, however, plenty of good, promising companies and their peers also faltered as mutual victims of their aggregate redundancy, employing technologies trying to solve same or similar problems, executing on business models trying to achieve same or similar objectives, and vying for same or similar customers.
 
But it was mostly the business models that didn't fit the technology model, the Web itself, a newfangled phenomenon with consumers and target audiences and businesses still new to using it.
 
The Hits Keep Coming
 
We must brace ourselves for the inevitable: Many companies emerging today, in the social media space, will be one-hit wonders. Fortunately, however, today is not the late '90s all over again. Actually, many readers probably wouldn't mind reliving the late '90s—before the crash.
 
Social media isn't like dotcoms. The Web isn't new. People understand the basics. Being online is the default mode today, and that's a big reason why the interest in social media technology has reached a tempest. Unlike the dotcoms a decade-plus ago, companies playing in social media have a map.
 
And the map is the key. Aside from the Big Three (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), how many other social media networks are job seekers using to find the jobs they seek? That's right: not many, if any. Many of them may embrace Google+, too, but even that is conjecture. "The year 2012 will be a make-or-break one for Google+," says Jindrich Liska, CEO of Jobmagic. "Google needs to show an ability to woo users to its social network" if the company wants to avoid becoming just another also-ran in the social media wars.
 
Think about that: Smart people are taking a wait-and-see approach in judging the ability of Google, unofficial King of the Internet, to successfully launch a viable social media network.
 
At this point, companies creating new social media networks run a high risk of writing just one hit song that we won't remember 10 years from now. Their songs might not even be hits. And only the companies whose technologies outpace the competition in helping recruiters to recruit job seekers via existing social media networks will be around 10 years from now, when recruiters surely will have sorted out increasingly sophisticated and flexible, yet still experimental, technology for social media–based recruiting.
 
It'll be music to job seekers' and hiring authorities' ears.
 
The TMT #HRTechChat Poll—Still Time
 
As with every #HRTechChat, TMT has a related poll. Would you like to take it? It's just one question. Go here.
 
#HRTechChat Episode Four Coda
 
Your tweets—they were numerous, and they were sage. Later this week, the coda will feature some of the tweeted highlights from last Friday's chat, as well as our take on the many tweeters' well-received wisdom. That would be the #HRTechChat Episode Four Coda. Stay tuned for it.