Are You Building a Recruiting Machine?

This post first appeared on John’s Try Harder is Not a Strategy LinkedIn Newsletter. 

About 10 years ago, at my Talent42 tech recruiting conference in Seattle, I watched two talent acquisition leaders give presentations just hours apart.

The first was from Amazon.

She described their vision for recruiting with a phrase that made sense, especially given I’d worked there for 6 years, and understood how the company was scaling since I left:

“We’re building a recruiting machine.”

She walked through pieces of the strategies, processes, programs (like Bar Raisers), metrics, interviewer training, technology, and operating model that allowed Amazon to hire engineers at incredible scale while maintaining a high hiring bar. It was impressive.

Then hours later, a TA leader from a smaller, lesser known tech company took the stage.

Her opening point caught everyone off guard.

“We’re not trying to build a recruiting machine.”

She explained that her company - which was scaling up, but scaling up to hiring 100s, not 1000s of engineers each year - could never out-Amazon Amazon, or any of the giant tech leaders. Competing on scale and efficiency and compensation against one of the world’s largest recruiting organizations simply wasn’t a winning strategy.

Instead, she wanted tech recruiting to feel more like an executive search firm.

Higher touch. More consultative. More personalized. More human.

Both companies were pursuing a competitive advantage, right sized for their needs. This wasn’t to say - of course - that Amazon wasn’t trying to deliver a great candidate experience, or talent advising guidance to its hiring managers. Or that the scale-up smaller company wasn’t trying to be efficient, or wasn’t investing in great programs or technology to help it scale to its next level.

Both were just highlighting how they were optimizing for different things. One was zigging, one was zagging.

Now, AI has entered the building.

Today, every recruiting organization has access to tools that can automate sourcing, draft outreach, summarize interviews, search vast amounts of information, schedule candidates, and eliminate countless administrative tasks. The recruiting machine is becoming easier—and less expensive—to build.

That’s exactly why I believe the role of the recruiter is becoming more important, not less.

Not the recruiter as coordinator. Not the recruiter as process manager. The recruiter as Talent Advisor.

When everyone has access to increasingly capable technology, competitive advantage shifts. It shifts toward judgment. Toward influence. Toward business acumen (this will be the topic of the workshop I’m leading for senior TA leaders at Recfest next month in Nashville - hit me up if you want a discounted ticket). Toward helping hiring managers make better candidate profile, compensation, and hiring decisions instead of simply helping them complete a process, or worse, complete a form.

So, should we be building a recruiting machine? Sure, for some pieces. We should absolutely leverage AI to remove low-value administrative work. But, obviously, the organizations that win the best talent won’t be the ones that simply automate more tasks than everyone else. They’ll be the ones that leverage talent advisor recruiters who are investing in the inefficient work of earning the trust of passive candidates, influencing hiring managers to adjust their profiles and salaries to the real world, pushing hiring teams to consider an imperfect candidate who has the potential to make a big impact, despite the lack of pedigree, and guiding executives on how to build out the capabilities they need on their team, which includes build strategy (and someday, bot strategy?).

Freeing up our teams by automating low level tasks, or replacing TA team headcount with AI, only delivers real value if the remaining recruiters are operating as talent advisors. Fewer, better recruiters supported by amazing technology is where most TA teams are headed.

For years, I’ve argued that recruiters need to level up to Talent Advisors.

Not because it sounds more strategic; it does. But because it’s where the value is moving. I predict the machine components of most large TA teams will not be the big differentiators. The differentiator will be the human Talent Advisors.

So, is AI creating this shift to talent advising? No. It’s just making it impossible to ignore. It’s creating urgency to move our recruiters to higher value day-to-day activities, and to ensure our TA manager conversations with execs are more strategic than basic prioritization and report-reviews.

So by all means, build a great recruiting machine. Just don’t mistake the machine for your strategy. Your talent competitors can buy the same technology.

p.s. My #1 rated talk from 2019 LinkedIn Talent Connect is out on YouTube if you're interested in getting some practical advice on how to be more strategic. Warning, I swear, and that's not for everyone, I know. But it's got 140,000 views, so it can't be that offensive, right? :)