De Novo Recruitment
2019 has brought in a fresh wave of hiring trends that looks to impact the recruiting process in organisations significantly. We are witnessing the results of an era built around technology; from mobile phones to machine learning. While we have been surrounded by wonderous and exciting tools, we have never had the wisdom to use them judiciously. 2019 is also a year of adjustment and recalibration. As HR continues to reap value from the tools available, it also needs to create processes and guidelines so that they can be used in a more effective manner. With cloud adoption and machine learning assuming centre stage in every organisational agenda, talent leaders are facing challenges like never before. Also, with disruption around the corner, a greater need for agility, talent scarcity, and a far greater need for reskilling is also the need of the moment. The top reasons why recruitment needs to change in its form and perspective have been elucidated below: -
5 Reasons for Talent Acquisition to Change
The right candidate might not approach you: Disruptive Technology has led to a serious shortage of skilled candidates. And they have gotten more passive than ever. Finding random resumes on career websites will not really be helpful for the talent leaders. 'Social Recruiting', a blanket term for finding talent through the social media therefore becomes the key.
Work from anywhere culture: With the IT industry getting more flexible about attendance policies, the trend for 'work-from-anywhere anytime' is on the rise. Many startups are actually being built by 'remote' teams. This in fact helps organisations to downscale their overheads on infrastructure, and increase employee efficiency at the same time.
“Recruitment automation applied to resume screening promises to be a boon to reduce the time to hire, since it automates a low-value, repetitive task that most recruiters hate to do anyway.”
Blind Hiring: Talent leaders located in the world's technology innovation hub (the Silicon Valley) were subject to severe backlashes owing to the lack of workforce diversity. And as a result, organisations became familiar with the concept of 'blind hiring.' In layman terms, blind hiring involves removing parameters such as gender, age, race, and at times, even the alma mater from the candidate's resume to ensure that there is no unconscious bias against the person, and make room for bias free and diverse hiring in the organisation.
Automation is creating new skills: With the onset of millennials, innovative ways of recruitment and training are bound to rise. Gamification is helping talent leaders increase employee engagement and train their workforce more efficiently. AI and predictive analytics are taking over various management and decision-making positions. This year, quick reskilling to adapt to newer technologies will be the key.
Online reputation matters: Candidates have become more like consumers. They research potential employers in a similar manner in which they research products and services before they buy them. And similar to consumer behaviour, job seekers are strongly influenced by online reviews. For a general sense of the company's reputation, they may even turn to Google to review the employer, and to Glassdoor, to gather an insider's view of work life at the company. Employers are therefore wise enough to safeguard their online reputation, since it could be the very tipping point between hiring or losing the top candidates.
Top 5 Recruitment Trends
Social HR: 92% of recruiters use social media for hiring, and there are more than 100 portals that function as job boards. Over 87% of non-management and salaried employees have been recruited through social media. And more than 82% of management employees come from social media. Social recruiting goes beyond posting vacant jobs ads on the company's social network accounts, and offers so much more. Social media networks can be used to proactively search for potential candidates, develop a relationship with them, and encourage them to apply for vacant positions in the company.
While social media is credited to be one of the reliable sources for garnering information about prospective employees, it is also accused of revealing information like religion, caste, colour, political affiliation, gender, marital status, etc. These are the usual parameters of discrimination that function against diversity initiatives. Hence, it is important for HR personnel to devise methods to screen talent smartly.
Recruitment Marketing: Recruitment marketing is the process of nurturing and attracting talented individuals to your organisation by way of using marketing methods and tactics. It is a discipline that has been introduced as a consequence of the current situation in the labour market. Some of the most common elements of recruitment marketing include employer branding. This is a never-ending process in which the company's culture, employee value proposition, and employer brand are constantly communicated to the potential candidates through different channels or touch points. The goal of every employer branding strategy is to build a picture of a desirable employer of choice, and attract talent.
Inbound Recruiting: Recruiting teams have traditionally been heavily invested in transactional, outbound, top of the funnel recruiting strategies like leveraging job boards or outsourced recruitment, where they pay to become visible before the candidates. Inbound recruiting is a recruitment strategy used to continually attract candidates with the intent of making them choose a company as their next employer. The goal in inbound recruiting is to attract, convert, and engage candidates.
Stages of inbound recruiting
Candidate Engagement: In order to keep qualified candidates or leads in the company's talent pool, HR needs to essentially have an engagement strategy. Candidate engagement is considered to be one of the most important measurements of a successful recruiting strategy.
Candidate Relationship Management: This is the next critical step in inbound hiring, and building outstanding relationships with qualified candidates in the talent pool. For instance, setting up email campaigns that are targeted towards candidates for hard-to-fill talent pools. HR needs to communicate their achievements, new job openings, career opportunities, team activities, or any other content that could attract candidate persona.
Candidate Experience: Providing exceptional candidate experience throughout the recruiting, selection, and hiring process is a must! Relevant and timely feedback, transparency, and openness are some of the elements of a positive candidate experience. Since inbound recruiting strategies are so closely linked to the creation of quality, meaningful, sharable content, and the enablement of engagement, it plays nicely into the retention strategies when it is well done. If existing employees are proud of their employer brand, the tools of inbound recruiting give them something to rally around.
Recruitment Automation Tools
Recruitment automation tools are software that make use of new technology to automate recruiting process. Automation of recruiting process has been around for a while, but is now going beyond HRIS, Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Recruitment Marketing Software. The new trend is a software that offers 2-in-1 tools, integrating both ATS and Recruitment Marketing solutions under one platform. They offer help in finding, attracting, engaging, nurturing, and converting candidates into applicants.
According to LinkedIn's data, the most important recruiting KPIs are:
Quality of hire is the top priority for 60% of talent acquisition leaders
Time to fill is the top priority for 28% of talent acquisition leaders
Advances in technology have transformed finance, sales, and marketing departments, and industry experts believe that recruiting technology will be the next big adoption. By streamlining certain aspects of the recruiting workflow, experts predict that recruitment automation will enhance a human recruiter's capabilities manifold. Collaborative Hiring: Collaborative hiring is a hiring method in which both HR teams, and teams from other departments work together to find and hire talent. Collaborative hiring is extremely important since it significantly improves the quality of new hires. Consequently, there is a drop in the turnover rate, which positively impacts the overall recruitment and hiring strategy.
5 HR Automation tools for new age recruitment
1) Pre-Recruitment HR automation
Majority of the millennials are well aware as to how recruitment was done before the advent of technology. While newspapers still post job ads, most of the advertising happens online on career building network sites, forums, or other social media forums. Job aspirants are no longer hunched over daily newspapers, but are constantly looking at notifications about their job applications on their phones or laptops. Intelligent screening software applies the knowledge it learnt about employees' experience, skills, and other qualifications to automatically screen, rank, and grade new candidates.
Resume screening automation: Recruitment automation applied to resume screening promises to be a boon to reduce the time to hire, since it automates a low-value, repetitive task that most recruiters hate to do anyway. The task of manually filtering through scores of resumes to find the ideal candidate is indeed daunting, with a recruiter spending an average 23 hours screening resumes for a single hire. Around 52 percent of talent acquisition leaders consider resume screening to be the hardest and the most time consuming aspect of recruitment. It is for this reason that recruiters are turning to technology that goes a long way to alleviate this burden. With the help of data-driven automation software and applicant tracking systems, companies are able to function efficiently when confronted with a barrage of resumes. Powered by AI for the process of recruiting, and designed to integrate with an ATS, the software learns what the job requirements are, and then learns what qualified candidates look like basis their previous hiring decisions. Using employee data on performance and tenure, the software identifies candidates who were either successful or unsuccessful employees. Such a type of recruiting software can also enrich resumes by using public data sources about previous employers and the candidates' social media profiles.
2) Post-recruitment HR automation
Recruitment automation for pre-qualification: Keeping an applicant updated manually throughout the recruitment process is yet another of those crucial yet challenging tasks that the HR team struggles with. In the current candidate-driven market, candidate experience can make or break the possibility of a top candidate accepting the job offer. Recruitment automation in the form of chatbots usher the promise of improving candidate experience. What could be better than to communicate with the applicants in a consistent manner, and engage them in some important pre qualification information pertaining to their location, compensation, intent, and special skills if any.
Data accrued by CareerBuilder found that 67% of job seekers have a positive impression of a company if they receive consistent updates throughout the application process. Recruitment automation in the form of chatbots allows human recruiters to provide consistent updates in real-time by asking pre qualifying questions related to job requirements and providing feedback, updates, and next-step suggestions. By automating repetitive tasks such as answering the same questions about a job, chatbots enhance the pre qualification capabilities of a human recruiter without any additional strain on their time.
3) Talent assessment automation
63% of recruiters say that soft skill assessment is the hardest part of interviewing. Assessment platforms assess the personality of an individual and analyse candidate behaviour for attributes like teamwork, goal orientation, and attitude, without the need for a cumbersome test, questionnaire, or survey. 76% of the companies with 100+ employees use a personality assessment test. Research has proven that if there is something that predicts eventual job performance, it is personality.
Talent Assessment platforms perform an assessment at 1/50th the cost of a traditional assessment by making use of an email ID alone. This means that soft skill assessment can now be moved right to the top of the assessment funnel. AI powered analytical dashboard gives HR the power of AI to add a position, define ideal traits, upload applicant list, and have a comparative analysis across several candidates. These assessment tools can be integrated with any ATS or HRMS.
4) Interview process automation
Interviewing a candidate to get the best out of them requires skill, tact, and intuition among other qualities, which an interviewer may not always be blessed with. This is not to say that all interviews are disasters, but with human biases aplenty, understanding a candidate's strengths and weaknesses, and their passion is not an easy task. Automation can be of immense help to recruiters in this respect. Recruitment interviews conducted in collaboration with digitised interview technology, equipped to assess factors such as their word choices, speech patterns, and even facial expressions can help decide how well a candidate will adapt to the role. Apart from these benefits, automated recruitment software also empowers candidates to schedule interviews as per their convenience at home or at a venue of their choice.
5) Expanding interviewing capabilities through Video and VR
Interviewing innovations are extremely important to the future of hiring. As we continue to look at ways of improving the interview process, the use of video and virtual reality is gaining ground. Case studies conducted by LinkedIn found that companies who have incorporated video or a virtual reality platform into their interview process, have experienced, greater insights in skill assessment, lesser unconscious bias, improved candidate engagement, increased hiring efficiency, enhanced talent pool diversity, and a positive candidate experience.
Choosing a Recruitment Automation Tool
There is a proven method for choosing the best recruitment software that perfectly fits your hiring needs.
Step 1.
Define key recruitment challenges: The first step to choosing a perfect recruitment software is identifying the recruiting goals and challenges.
Step 2.
Identify needed recruitment software's features: The second step in choosing a perfect recruitment software is identifying the features offered by the recruitment software which can help resolve the biggest recruiting challenges.
Step 3.
Finding recruitment software, which offers correct features: The third and the final step involves finding recruitment software, which offers the right combination of all the features.
HR teams who want to fill open roles with qualified and talented employees need to approach recruitment in the same manner in which sales and marketing teams find new customers. Today's job seekers have huge expectations. Creative ways must be employed to show why the organisation is the perfect place to work. An employee who left a company, but chose to return can be a wonderful asset. Such employees know the company, products, culture, and most likely, still have connections with current employees, all of which can make them immediately productive.
Using the Internet to expand one's reach and attract passive job seekers is an essential aspect of talent acquisition. Staying engaged with former applicants and considering them for future job openings saves a lot of time and builds great reputation for the organisation. With the help of technology, HR does not need to start from scratch every time they need to fill a new job. Such a transformation of HR from an administrative facilitator to a strategic partner has been made possible, thanks to a technological collaboration. Boon for some, bane for others, it is imperative to understand that automation, when applied strategically to one's recruitment process, can yield significant results.