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A match made in recruitment heaven
20/04/2017
A look at how one company is disrupting the recruitment market, featuring Vincent Maillard, keynote speaker at our upcoming Cegos L&D event. The recruitment industry has been slowly moving towards digital in recent years. What is traditionally a world of endless paperwork and hard-copy resumes is gradually giving way to new recruitment platforms and apps.This is probably a good thing.Recruitment processes are often slow and painful, especially for the job seeker. Hours spent filling out application forms, sometimes with seemingly pointless questions, are too often met with silence from the recruiter, or a merry-go-round of interviews and Skype chats that ultimately lead nowhere.Eventually, job seekers and recruiters get a match. But it’s usually an arduous and frustrating journey to get there. No wonder the recruitment industry is ripe for disruption.LinkedIn was one of the first disruptors to emerge from Silicon Valley, and there are others who are taking the game even further down the road of digitalisation.One such app is Blonk – heralded as the ‘Tinder’ of the recruitment world. For those unfamiliar with online match-making, Tinder is the famed dating app where potential star-crossed lovers can check out a person’s profile, then swipe left or right to either show an interest or continue searching. If both you and your ‘interest’ swipe right, it’s a match, and you get to start a conversation. Tinder filters out the people you’re not interested in, so wastes less time than those apps where you can easily be pestered by someone who doesn’t rock your boat.The app has proven immensely popular, and has led to countless pairings and marriages since it first burst onto our smartphones in 2012.Blonk promises to do the same for recruitment. Only, instead of marriages and babies, company and talent will form a happy and fruitful partnership for years to come."We started Blonk because we felt the recruiting industry was facing the most important transformation phase of its history,” says Vincent Maillard, Blonk’s co-Founder and CEO. “Digitalisation has just started to impact the recruitment world and much more remains to happen. Today, despite multiple new tools, HR leaders, hiring managers and candidates feel that the hiring processes remains too long, complex, and often with frustrating outcomes. We want to play an active role in shaping the future of the recruiting industry.“A significant trend is towards discovery versus search, especially amongst the new generation,” says Vincent. “The best talent now expects to discover attractive projects and working opportunities via digital tools, and Blonk is built to meet this demand.”Indeed, with ‘mobile first’ being the mantra across the business world, more and more recruiters will be taking the mobile route to the talent market. And the best talent will be waiting.An app like Blonk may seem a gimmick to some. But people said the same about online dating at the outset, and now it is a $2 billion-dollar industry in the US alone.Sophisticated and intelligent algorithms help make the matching process a smart one. In fact, the app gets to know the user better with every swipe, since it cleverly notes the user’s preferences and increases the accuracy of future offers.There’s also the option of anonymity to help those head-hunters looking for passive candidates.Blonk was created just three years ago, and already the company is expanding into Europe and Asia. Such apps could well be the future of recruitment, it seems, and quite a few tired job seekers will be pleased about that.Vincent Maillardwill be a keynote speaker at ‘Leading and Managing in the Age of Disruption’ – a Cegos special event in Singapore on Friday 19th May, 2017. Click here for details and registration.