On the surface at least, the state of U.S. employment in 2018 looks healthy with the addition of 313,000 new jobs in February, and is further boosted by the fact that it was the 89th consecutive month to exhibit employment gains 1.
But once you start digging deeper into the numbers, a whole different can of worms opens up: the HR industry fundamentally bases its talent recruitment operations on a set of flawed, inefficient processes.
The Sorry State of Modern Recruitment
Despite tremendous advances in technology, the average duration for hiring an employee in 2017 was 23.8 days, up from 22.9 days in 2014 2.
It only gets worse from there. According to a CareerBuilder Survey, 66% of the workers express regret after eventually realizing that their job was a bad fit. Half of them ended up quitting after just 6 months 3.
75% of employers have been affected by bad hires which really hurts their bottom line. The average cost of making a single bad hire is $14,900 3.
Three factors end up standing out when it comes to analyzing the reasons behind employers making a bad hire:
1. A candidate was lying about their credentials 33% of the time.
2. Difficulty in identifying the right candidate — 29%.
3. And recruiters lacking the right tools to contact a good candidate — 10%.
Even the ones enjoying the benefits of regular employment don’t seem too comfortable with their current roles as 81% of the respondents in Jobvite’s 2017 National Study admitted that they were open to new opportunities for a variety of reasons. In 2017, 50% of them even went ahead and attended an interview just to explore and keep their options open 4.
Recruiters are simply throwing good money after bad in a bid to find, hire, and replace personnel. Even the presence of several international job portals, spurred by self-proclaimed ‘Machine Learning’ and Artificial Intelligence’ technologies, hasn’t done much to improve the efficiency of the hiring process.
So is there a solution or a panacea for these troubling workforce developments?
A Fledgling Technology To The Rescue
The idea of Blockchain and digital currency has been around for a long time. But some of its related features like transparency, immutability, and smart contracts have been embraced very enthusiastically by the tech scene during the last few years.
At its core, blockchain technology injects two vital characteristics into the hiring process: trust and access.
Currently, the responsibility to make sure that a candidate is who she/he claims to be, and is professionally qualified as stated in their resume, falls entirely on the recruiting company. Such a scenario does not inspire trust very easily for recruiters.
Salvation
TrustLogics, powered by a private blockchain for storing data (Hyperledger) and a public blockchain (Ethereum), turns the tables by incentivizing and instilling an urge in jobseekers to verify their own resumes and qualifications through certified background check services.
Due to the ubiquitous nature of centralized data and walled gardens, recruiters and jobseekers are now faced with too many options, but too little access.
• Can jobseekers share their digital portfolios from one job portal to another?
• Can recruiters avoid being inundated with improperly qualified candidates on job portals?
• Can jobseekers or recruiters leverage a digital version of the highly effective employee referral system?
The answer to all the above questions is no. But TrustLogics is poised to transform that into a resounding yes.
• TrustLogics allows digital portfolios of jobseekers to be shared externally so that even non-members can view them.
• TrustLogics allows recruiters to skip the verification stage and directly jump into the suitability of a candidate’s cultural fit, goals, etc., thanks to the smart contract-powered background verification system.
• TrustLogics empowers recruiters by giving them access to an incentivized, digitally extensive Peer-2-Peer candidate referral system.
It has already been well established that employees hired via referrals are more productive and loyal when compared to employees brought in via traditional job portals or by other means 5. As a result, recruiters are increasingly viewing referrals as their optimal pathway for good hires 4.
The incentivized, decentralized, immutable platform being developed by TrustLogics will revolutionize the global hiring process by introducing greater transparency, providing complete user control over private data, enabling recruiters to leverage a referral system to its fullest extent, and by reassigning the responsibility to verify a jobseeker’s professional and personal qualifications.