Let's talk abut olives....
In 1987, Robert Crandall, who ran American Airlines at the time, was looking at the first-class salads (as you do).
Someone worked out that about 72% of folk never ate the olive. It just went back to the galley on the plate. It also happened to be the fifth most expensive ingredient in the salad. So Crandall had one olive taken off every salad across the airline, and it saved them around $40,000 a year.
It's a nice story and it gets taught in business schools as a clever bit of waste-spotting, which is fair, because it is. But I think it's also the thin end of a smelly wedge. (side note, Smelly Wedge would be a great name for a 2010s british indie band)
The problem is what an organisation learns on the day the olive works.
It learns that trimming the service costs nothing. Nobody missed the olive and the numbers got better, so why stop at the olive? Next it's a bit less legroom. Then the checked bag becomes an extra. Then you pay to choose your seat, and pay again to print your boarding pass at the airport because you didn't do it at home.
The far end of all this is Michael O'Leary at Ryanair, banging on the door of the airplane toilet shouting "Is it a number two!?!? Because number two is extra!!!!"
The olive and the toilet charge are the same thing at two different ages. One is so small nobody notices and the other is brazen profiteering.
There's a word for this now (which I love)
Cory Doctorow gave it a name, and the name won word of the year: enshittification.
It's the slow decline of a service that starts out genuinely good so you'll commit to it, gets worse once you're locked in and it's a hassle to leave, and eventually squeezes everyone involved to move as much value as possible up to the shareholders. The version of the thing you first fell for is long gone by the end.
Which is what got me thinking about us.
Recruiters....Are we enshittifying recruitment?
Look at the last five years.
AI made applying almost effortless, and volume went through the roof. Applications are up something like 45%, and at the busy end that's roughly eleven thousand a minute across the market. Nearly four in ten job seekers are applying with AI now.
So we did the obvious thing and bought tools to cope. Tools to pull in more applicants, tools to filter them faster, screeners, AI interviewers. The top of our funnel got 10x larger so we used tools to manage 10x better.
I build in this space, and I love to explosion of tooling for recruiters, they are useful and recruiters really are drowning. Efficiency matters.
But I keep coming back to one question. Efficiency for who?
Because recruiter tooling has exploded while the candidate side has quietly gone backwards. People report longer waits, less feedback, and applications that vanish with no reply at all. Nearly four in ten candidates say they've dropped out of a process the moment they realised an AI was interviewing them, and most of them were never told it would be. Entry-level postings are down a long way. By their own account, the people we're supposed to be serving are having a worse time than they were five years ago.
Now obviously no recruiter sat down and went "I shall make things harder for candidates...MUAHAHAHAAAAA!!!"
Crandall wasn't aiming for a coin-operated toilet door either. It just happens on its own whenever the only thing you're measuring is your own cost and your own time, and there's nobody in the room whose job is to protect the experience of the person on the other end. That's what enshittification actually is, and it's turning up in hiring right now.
So here's what I'd ask
None of this is an argument against tools. Pull in the applicants, filter the noise, use the AI, buy your time back.
But decide first what a candidate always gets, no matter how efficient you become. Is it a reply? A reason? Maybe a human being..just for sake of it?
Write it down and then hold to it as seriously as you hold to your time-to-hire. Enshittification of recruitment won't be all at once. It's going to start with a slower reply, email feedback for candidates in late stages....wee things like that.
And if we don't watch it, it ends the way these things always end. With someone knocking on the bathroom door, asking for a pound.
Right, I'll shut my trap for a bit and ask you, what's the one thing we should always do for a candidate, however busy it gets? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Have a cracking week,
Luke
Well... that's issue seventy seven! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!