The Dinosaurs of Talent Acquisition – Soon for Extinction?
October 18, 2024
The way many of us recruit today has not changed in decades.
- Hiring Managers still rely on position descriptions as the source of truth about vacancies, despite the fact that the position description is often outdated and describes what should happen rather than what does happen in the role.
- Resumes are still the accepted way candidates introduce themselves to organisations despite their over-emphasis on experience. Their existence leads those hiring to favour candidates who have done the role previously, not those who will best perform in the role in the future.
- Interviews are still relied upon as the main source of assessment, despite their perpetuation of a stream of biases and their poor record in predicting high performing employees.
- Reference checks are often considered unreliable and with many referees now able to provide an electronic response, their often-embellished responses are left unchallenged, and
- Candidates are still crying “ghosted” by companies unwilling to allocate the appropriate time to candidate feedback.
And yet despite poor outcomes for employers and candidates, we keep going back to these dinosaurs as if there was no other way.

Thankfully change is coming. AI will eventually revolutionise the way recruitment is done. But we are not there yet. Whilst software providers are introducing AI products that can bring significant efficiencies into the recruitment and selection process, the ability of AI to make recruitment more effective – defined as organisations being better at identifying high performing employees – is still a fair way off.
Whether through AI, or simply human effort, the following are the priority areas of change required to Talent Acquisition if we are to consistently enable the hiring of high performers.
- Instead of relying on the traditional position description, we need to put more time into an analysis of how the role actually plays out including its critical scenarios, and define exactly what factors, in addition to experience – skills, knowledge, personality, cognitive style and ability and behaviours – bring role success.
- We need to ditch the resume and require candidates to provide us with a range of data that helps us acquire a fuller understanding of the candidates’ past record and future potential.
- Whilst hiring managers will find it very hard to eliminate interviews from the process, the interview must be paired with other assessment tools in order to acquire a sufficient amount of accurate, relevant and reliable data. This includes personality profiling, cognitive abilities and specific skill-based assessments
- Hiring managers need to be trained in best practice recruitment and selection processes with an emphasis on how to interview to acquire quality data and remove biases from the process.
- Hiring managers must take a more assertive approach with referees, probing them when they provide vague responses or don’t address any negatives and seek more performance-based data, and
- The well-defined success criteria must flow through the entire process, ensuring we capture unbiased candidate data addressing the success criteria, remove gut feel and include decision making processes that don’t corrupt the decisions.