Recruiting from previously unexploited talent pools is a major undertaking, to be sure, but he believes that it lies within reach. Today’s tight labor market gives employers a once-in-a-generation chance to rethink their recruiting strategies, Fuller says.
“Is it any surprise they eventually give up?” she asks. The hidden workers she and her colleagues surveyed had applied to an average of 25 jobs each in the previous five years, often without a single response. She adds that “credential creep” exacerbates the problem, as firms pile on requirements over time. An algorithm might weed out anyone lacking a college degree, having a criminal record or a gap in employment, or deficient in just one of several very specific skills-but “none of those are particularly good proxies for measuring aptitude, work ethic, and self-efficacy,” says HBS’s Manjari Raman, another coauthor of the study. Many of those excluded could be highly productive workers, the researchers argue, including in middle- and high-skilled positions. And winnow they did: By 2020, employers typically interviewed four to six applicants for each listing out of an average pool of 250. So employers turned to applicant-tracking and recruiting-management systems to help winnow the crowds, typically using filters meant to capture those who most closely matched the requirements of the role. By the early 2010s, each job posting yielded 120 applicants, on average, and the figure continued to rise. But the result was an unmanageable deluge. The advent of online recruiting in the 1990s promised employers access to a broader array of applicants than traditional approaches could muster.
The technology-fueled exclusion of such a large pool of talent is a tale of unintended consequences, Fuller says. The researchers came to these conclusions after surveying 8,720 hidden workers and 2,275 executives in the United States, the UK, and Germany in 2020. Some may be underemployed or working on a very part-time basis, while others have been locked out of the labor market altogether. “These are people who want to work,” says HBS professor and study coauthor Joseph B. The report estimates that there are more than 27 million hidden workers in the United States alone. Applicants with unconventional backgrounds-such as caregivers, veterans, immigrants, people with physical and mental challenges, and the previously incarcerated-are especially prone to being “hidden” from prospective employers by the platforms. Why such a disconnect-and how can companies bridge it?Ī study by Harvard Business School and Accenture finds a major reason for the gap: the near-ubiquitous use of automated hiring platforms, which systematically screen out large numbers of job seekers who might well fit the bill were their résumés ever to reach hiring managers’ desks. Yet even as employers scramble to fill open positions, millions of capable candidates struggle merely to be considered. It’s been dubbed the Great Resignation: Nearly 20 million Americans left their jobs in 2021, and the trend is spreading to Western Europe, Asia, and beyond.
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