Hey, it’s 2010. Why do we still need recruiters?!

This is a question that I asked a few years ago. With the advances in machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition during the last decade, recruiting seems like a function that could, and should be automated.

Why then do we still need recruiters? Why is Wildcog, a new company, so focused on recruiting and improvements in the recruiting process?

In short, recruiting (and hiring) is all about people. It’s about emotion. It’s about communication. It is not at all about keyword matching ratios.

I don’t believe this is a task that machines are good at yet. This is mainly because matching a resume with a job is actually a lot more qualitative than it is quantitative. Resumes are terrible things. Resumes try to distill a human being down two a few pages. They often fail miserably.

The devil is in the details and there is an arms race of sorts between job seekers and hiring managers. Call it the buzzword war; Managers tend to write job descriptions that are inaccurate because they contain a “wish list” of skills and experience. In response to this, sharp resume writers learned to stuff their resumes full of keywords so that pattern matchers (carbon or silicon based) would select their resume more frequently as a fit!

This is why companies like Google have armies of flesh-and-blood recruiters. The signal is weak and very noisy. This is why we are here. Trying to make it less lame.