Have you ever taken some time to think about how technology has made hiring a lot easier? When I think about how much technology has enhanced the hiring game, it makes me thankful to be alive right now. How hard must it have been for recruiters in the past? Certainly, the internet is helpful, but imagine how it must have looked before the phone. Even doing the most basic recruiting tasks would have been an absolute nightmare. The world benefits from technology and us recruiters aren’t different.

Even as we give thanks for all the technology we use so frequently, it’s worth taking some time to think about why we adopt new technologies, how those new technologies affect us, and whether or not every new technology is worth embracing.

In my experience, when you really sit down and dissect what technology does for recruiters, the real secret of technology is not that it changes the game but that it changes the playing field. When all the chips are played, technology doesn’t so much change the ‘rules of recruiting’ it just lets us use these rules to play a bigger game with faster moves. Communications technology, especially, has a wonderful shrinking effect on the world around us and that’s the main power of technology that us recruiters have to really pay attention to. From the humble phone to more complex hiring platforms, the central benefit they provide to recruiters is the same; they extend our reach and, sometimes, make us faster.

That being said, technology cannot really change the fundamental nature of hiring. That’s not the fault of technologies, it’s just that the nature of recruiting is couched in something truly fundamental. At the end of the day, recruiting will always be about finding the connection between talented individuals and teams that need them. The humanness of that project can be aided by technology without ever truly being ‘changed’ by it.

So, new technology is something to embrace, but only when it works to further that fundamental nature of recruiting. You should definitely be skeptical of companies that offer you everything you’ve ever dreamed and have a new program as their messiah; technology isn’t a miracle worker like that. What technology does do is offer new and improved ways for recruiters and hiring managers to be more awesome at their jobs. Social media lets them put their job offers out to larger crowds, recruiting platforms let them filter and search through candidates so that they can find promising candidates, and better communication technologies let hiring managers break the ties of geography and extend their reach further than their predecessors could have hoped.

In the past, it was an endeavor to just source talent from another city. With products like Skype, LinkedIn, and TalentCube, you are able to source talent across states or even countries, if that’s what you want. All of this increased speed and scale lets recruiters and hiring managers play the talent game on a field larger than ever before and it allows them to find that love connection in talent that they otherwise might have missed. So for helping us with our job, let’s give technology a hug.