COVID-19 has changed the world of work forever. It has pushed employees to rethink what they want out of their working lives, particularly around wellbeing, flexibility, as well as learning and development.

Despite this, many employers are still failing to adapt to the new reality. Although we are living through a record-breaking ‘Great Resignation’, organizations are still trying to recruit the same ways they always have.

The problem is that recruiters are still being reactive and passive with their recruitment. Rather than employing so-called inbound recruiting, they should be learning from sales and marketing, and embracing outbound methods. This is the view of artificial intelligence (AI) recruitment platform Hiretual.

Hiretual wants to create and lead this new category of outbound recruiting and has updated its mission statement to read ‘outbound recruiting made easy’. Therefore, the company has decided to rename itself as hireEZ (pronounced hire easy).

“Over a decade ago, when there were more people available than jobs, it was easy to attract hundreds of applicants with a single job posting or an online message. A decade later with more jobs than people, recruiters are doing the exact same thing,” wrote hireEZ co-founder and CEO Steven Jiang in a blog post.

A passive approach to hiring just doesn’t work, according to hireEZ. “If you’re posting jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed and sending talent InMails, you might as well not be recruiting”, noted Jiang.

“Today, there’s too much reliance on waiting for talent, tools, and results to come IN, rather than going OUT and getting them. So we’re saying ‘out’ with the ‘in’, and ’in’ with the ‘out’. And that ‘out’ is outbound recruiting,” concluded Jiang.

A future of product innovation at hireEZ

In order to achieve its new mission of taking the hard work out of outbound recruiting, hireEZ has received $26 million in investment; the round was led by Conductive Ventures.

Talking about the deal, Conductive Ventures managing director Carey Lai commented: ”When Steven shared with me his vision of ‘outbound recruiting made easy’, I immediately understood how this could transform an industry that’s ripe for change.

“We are excited to partner with hireEZ and support their growth journey. They have a reputation for innovation and are poised to fundamentally change how teams build their workforces of the future.” 

This money will be spent on product development and innovation as hireEZ wants its technology to enable recruiting to be proactive, rather than reactive, by helping jobs find people, rather than people find jobs.

A major area where hireEZ will focus its efforts will be integrations with other platforms – this means that data from hireEZ’s platform will flow seamlessly into customers’ applicant tracking systems or candidate relationship management technology.

Also, hireEZ will focus on providing recruiters with data-driven insights about candidates, as well as ensure that it removes bias from the hiring process and connect recruiters up better with hiring managers.

Finally, the company is working hard to enable its customers to move beyond email, and instead, it will use voicemail and text messages to engage with candidates. Jiang is hopeful that this will be available to hireEZ’s clients like Deloitte, VISA and Wayfair by May this year.

The outbound recruiting revolution is just beginning. But hireEZ is clear that concrete improvement in the way people get jobs will depend on a whole sector mindset shift. Watch this space.