What does a doorwoman even do?

Hold a door open expecting a tip?

So you pay their salary, and your guests pay them too.

That’s a good cost-saving right there when times are tight in hospitality.

And you don’t even need to pass that saving on to your guests, indeed you can charge them more because they have that tip money spare!

All it takes is to replace them with an automated door, or not even that.

All logical and good, yet a fallacy nonetheless.

What’s the cost of a warm welcome, the image of your hotel, someone who can advise your guests on directions or a local eatery?

A sense of luxury that makes guests feel special, with a lasting impression that may even make them want to come again.

A difficult ROI to measure perhaps, and yet for some, the doorman makes the hotel.

The Doorman Fallacy was coined by Rory Sutherland, a British behavioural economist, describing our tendency to undervalue human interaction and overvalue the functional aspects of a service.

It doesn’t hold everywhere of course, given Netflix’s usurpation of Blockbuster’s monopoly.

But look at the survivors in shop retail, eating out and even cinema, and it’s the experience they provide that sets them apart from their online competition.

And so to recruitment, an industry that has worked hard to automate, transactionalise and reduce the burden of human interaction wherever possible.

The automated doorman of the ATS delighting candidates everywhere.

Something that will only get more delightful as AI reduces the requirement for transactional recruiters who don’t actually like humans.

I’ve been spending time talking to job seekers this week, all of whom are scathing about the lack of humanity in recruitment.

All will say that recruitment is broken, and yet it is not in the slightest.

It’s Ronseal.

It does exactly what it says on the functional automated tin.

Yet isn’t that therefore an opportunity?

When looking at functionality, could the question be “How can we improve the experience of the people we’d like to employ?”

Yes, the ROI of candidate experience is as hard to measure as a doorman, especially with short-termist KPIs.

But when fill rates and retention shoot up, when the bottom line is positively impacted, and you can show this through looking back over time - it becomes straightforward to show how candidate experience, the most human of considerations, can be the priority.

Here’s a look at the commercial link between candidate experience, employee experience and profitability.

Put the candidate’s experience first, then technology enables, rather than replaces for its own sake.

Such as AI solutions with the candidate first -

How far away are we from this kind of proposition?

You may think your adverts and technology are the gateway to your vacancy.

Yet it’s candidate experience that is your doorman and starts before a candidate even steps foot in your process.

So it should thread through everything you do, from current strategy to the adoption of future tech.

Regards,

Greg

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