The Hard Choice Between being a Specialist or a Generalist
When I began my life in recruiting there were no such people as sourcers, or assessment experts, or social media managers. We did it all ourselves – what is now being called full-cycle recruiting. As generalists, we were proud that we did everything even when we knew we were not the best. We gave every candidate a personalized experience and actually got to know and care about them and where they ended up. We knew hiring managers and the compensation people and often went to bat for more pay for a candidate we really thought was excellent.
But somewhere over the years, the complexity of work, the increasing number of new roles, and the rise of technologies driven by the Internet drove specialization and compartmentalization, not only in recruiting but in almost every field, especially in large corporations.
In small firms, the generalist recruiter still exists although with automation and the growth of RPO they are an endangered species.
Recruiting in large firms is now hard to define. It encompasses a series of separate skills, often done by specialized experts, and is increasingly augmented with artificial intelligence. The diagram below illustrates how recruiting has been deconstructed into many separate jobs. This has led to less personalization of the recruiting experience and fewer satisfied candidates.
NOTE: I am taking a holiday break and will resume publishing a weekly article in January. I wish you a relaxing and enjoyable holiday.
In many cases, no one is actually in charge of a candidate’s experience. Candidates are shuffled between automated tools and a variety of experts. For example, they are found by software tools searching the Internet and scraping websites, after perhaps an automated screening process they may speak to a person who is only assessing their skills and may not be responsible for presenting them to a hiring manager or making an offer. Their experience is curated by a social media expert, chatbots, and other invisible tools. Their interviews may be scheduled online and conducted via video by another expert. They often have no single contact person or, if they do, that person is not fully aware of who they are nor has any knowledge of their personality, interests, or general background.
Is specialization a positive trend?
Survey after survey shows us that candidates are not happy with their recruitment experience. And our current impersonal processes and atomization have contributed to this.
The paradox is that specialization tends to put value on precision, analysis, and data and less on personalization, creative thinking, and innovation. It often leads to overly rigid assessments based on specific skills and misses the complexities and contradictions of being human. It leads to formalistic hiring and results in the organization missing out on creative, out-of-the-box thinkers or people who are highly motivated but less skilled.
The same situation has engulfed other professions including medicine, nursing, engineering, and teaching. The requirements and expected expertise for each of these professions have risen to levels that require specialization. With specialization comes the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees and of creating impersonal, sometimes dangerous, and always frustrating experiences. With narrow fields of view, everything is viewed through the lens of expertise often missing the bigger picture.
The specialization of doctors is a good example of how specialization can lead to suboptimal results. A person goes to their doctor with a complaint. This doctor is perhaps called a family physician or an internal medicine doctor. She has an idea of what is wrong but rather than take a chance, sends you to a specialist. You go to the specialist who then does a series of tests that often result in a referral to another specialist and so on. None of them has a complete picture of your family situation, health, personality, medications, or lifestyle. The result is often a diagnosis that may be technically correct but may not fit in with the lifestyle of the patient or be a realistic solution. To correct this, a recent trend is to better train the family doctor and for them to take a more holistic approach to medical care. This might include involving the family, making sure the medication or surgery is affordable and taking into account the lifestyle, age, and wishes of the patient.
Is being a generalist recruiter better?
The generalist has many positive traits including a more complete understanding of the candidates and the hiring manager, but it is hard for them to efficiently handle the volume of applicants or to tap into the data to get a deeper understanding of trends.
They may also struggle to use the new tools that improve quality and efficiency. The tradeoff is often between efficiency and speed and personalization and engagement. It is very hard to balance these.
A hybrid model may be emerging.
The answer may be in designing processes and systems to be teams-based and networked. Rather than have recruiters work in silos, the emerging model is for cross-functional teams that combine the best of both worlds as I recently described in an earlier article.
What are your thoughts? What are you seeing and experiencing?
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