Now that the new year is fully in swing, I offer this assessment of the state of hiring in 2016: it is broken.
When I started Unitive in 2013, we focused on leveraging technology to disrupt the unconscious bias that plays too large a role how we hire and manage our workers. We were convicted by the amount of dollars and innovation companies were leaving on the table in the form of untapped talent. We weren't going to rest until we had changed the face how companies make hiring decisions and drastically improved opportunity access for women and underrepresented groups of diverse race, socioeconomic status and others.
Today our vision has expanded so much farther. As we test-drove the platform with CEOs, recruiters, hiring managers and chief technology officers, we learned that unconscious bias was a huge part of what's wrong with how companies acquire talent today, but that there was also so much more to fix.
CEOs wanted more top-down visibility into where day-to-day decisions accumulate into homogenous teams and company monoculture. Recruiters were baffled by the cycles burned trying to read hiring managers' minds and the feeling that the hiring process had been reduced to weeding out the worst rather than finding the best. Hiring managers felt the burden of being expected to perform an organization's most critical task--selecting the right talent to carry forward product, brand, bottom line--without real tools or training to support them.
At the end of that process, it's no wonder studies show that hiring managers over-value resume filler like what fraternity you were in or where you buy your fair-trade locally-roasted coffee when they need to focus on experience and qualification for the job.
Enter Unitive. It turns out the same system we built for removing unconscious bias from hiring does something even more powerful: When candidate-sourcers have a clear picture of job criteria, when decision-makers can tune out white noise and focus only on the most relevant data, when candidates experience the simplicity of an organized, structured recruitment process, we finally start placing the best people in the right jobs. Job fit goes up, homogeneity of talent goes down, innovation and diversity replace status quo.
It's 2016 and it's time that everyone was served by a company's talent management platform. Watch this space and join us as we invent the future of hiring.