Recruitment demand saw revenue more than double at Recruit’s recruitment technology division.
The company behind the world’s largest recruitment portal says it has a solution to the ongoing labor shortage in the US: get rid of the traditional resume.
Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba, chief executive officer of Japan’s Recruit Holdings, which operates Indeed.com and Glassdoor, said the “recruitment process is still going on, submitting resumes, checking resumes”. “This was a great opportunity for us to move from the old-fashioned, incumbent resume culture to asking: what can you do?”
By one estimate, America will enter the tightest job market since the 1950s, and employers are struggling to fill positions for both whites and blue-collars as job seekers evaluate. their priorities after the pandemic. That hiring demand saw revenue double at Recruit’s recruiting technology division in the quarter ended September, earnings figures released this week show. The stock is up more than 80% in 2021, a surge that has made it Japan’s fourth-largest business by market value.
Modern hiring processes need to adapt to the times, says Idekoba, with many SMEs still looking to fill jobs the way they did a decade ago. He cites the example of a restaurant that hasn’t updated its job description in a decade. “You’re asking for a college degree, why?” he asks. “Forget it!”
Idekoba, who splits his time between Tokyo and Austin, Texas, where Indeed’s headquarters are located, said he recently had to wait 40 minutes in a US restaurant due to a lack of wait staff.
Instead, Recruit suggests asking job seekers and assessing assessments to see if they know how to navigate the specific tasks the job will require. It also stores the responses, so unsuccessful job seekers can use them elsewhere.
For truckers who are “in dire need” in the US, Recruit has begun offering a chat-based hiring process, according to Idekoba, as drivers spend most of their time on the road and tend to no laptop.
In addition, “there are a lot of people who can’t write resumes” or don’t have the skills to fill them out, he said, as does the problem of tens of millions of Americans with criminal records. Recruit is expanding its training options to help people write better resumes for the jobs that need them, and aims to use technology to identify skills candidates may have that could be transferred. to another field.
Recruit acquired Indeed, then a startup, for a reported $1 billion nearly a decade ago. Idekoba ran the unit before being promoted to CEO of Recruit in April of this year. In addition to recruiting and staffing, it also runs websites to find properties, used cars, and book hotels and restaurants in Japan, where it is looking to expand its software as a business. service delivery service.
Idekoba says Indeed.com now doubles the number of people finding jobs as it did before the pandemic. “20 employees per minute,” he said, “but we still can’t fix” the labor shortage.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
