Recruitment landscape is witnessing a transformation courtesy of the new age applicant tracking systems (ATS) that are now available in the market. Recruiters are also experiencing the effects of this shift towards technology. As the widespread acceptability of automation in HR increases we can expect this space to undergo some tectonic shifts.
With the onset of 2019, there are going to be some new developments in the recruitment space worldwide, as each year brings with it a host of exciting possibilities and challenges. 2018 was the year when AI, automation and HR analytics were the most talked about terms in recruitment, and since the technology was still very new, these will continue to remain the mainstay of innovation in recruitment. What else is going to impact recruitment in 2019? Let’s examine.
Recruitment technology has witnessed a number of new developments in 2018 with terms like GDPR, Automation, AI and Blockchain becoming a part of public discourse. 2019 is likely to be even more revolutionary, with new developments in data analytics, & AI and machine learning, providing a favorable environment to transform the recruitment industry. However, organizations across the world will also have to step up their game to keep a tab on the emerging trends, evolve their infrastructure to implement new tools, and adopt best practices. Here are some of the major trends that will make their presence felt in 2019:
In simplified terms, recruitment is about selling roles to potential candidates. Amidst sustained talent shortages in the latest skills, it is imperative to use recruitment marketing and new marketing technologies to reach candidates through different channels at their preferred time of the day. Even after fifteen years, LinkedIn remains one of the most potent sources of highly qualified and experienced candidates as it has successfully managed to evolve the platform to fulfill the demands of the recruitment industry. Similarly, recruiters need to make sure that they are implementing best practices while performing daily routine jobs like job posting to get maximum visibility among the jobseekers. Also Read: Recruitment Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent
This is why Search engine optimization (SEO) will continue to play an important role as it provides the necessary visibility to job postings on the web. Most job applicants use search engines like Google to find jobs, and therefore, SEO will remain an essential component of recruitment marketing toolkit. Email marketing also continues to remain a vital means of communication with candidates.
In addition to all of this, one must not forget that with this smartphone generation youth, mobile apps, push notifications and Whatsapp has become a preferred source of candidate communication. There is an increase in the usage of Rich Communication Services (RCS) which in turn is leading to better engagement rates. These tools can also integrate with ATS systems are therefore ideal for improving talent engagement rates.
Talent acquisition is one of the areas where artificial intelligence has found widespread acceptance. The reason behind this is that AI has shown verifiable results in improving recruiter productivity, reducing time to hire and hence improving candidate experience making it more intuitive and seamless. In 2019, we can expect to see continued exploration of possibilities that can be achieved with the application of AI, and the various ways in which candidate experience can be further simplified.
Whether it’s the bots that are making the application process faster or apps that simulate human conversations through text boxes or voice commands, AI is making more job search more fun for the candidates, enabling them to apply to jobs quickly and engage with employers with ease. Using these AI systems recruiters will be able to proactively communicate with candidates, and provide them with a 24/7 high value interaction consistently. Also Read: Why is Candidate Experience so Important?
Background verification and assessment is another area where AI is promising to make an impact and 2019 will certainly show some of that result. While earlier employee background verification process was manual and costly affair, often managed by external agencies, with Artificial Intelligence coming in the picture, this space is also undergoing a transformation for good. AI and machine learning promise to make the employee background verification process quicker, smarter, and more effective. An example of AI application in this space includes the Israeli startup, Intelligo, which is using AI and ML to make employee background verification 90% accurate. Another startup Vervoe introduced a hiring platform that uses machine learning to screen and predict skill sets, besides automating employee background verification.
In an age where digital fraud is on the rise and where recruiters spend multiple days on finding the right candidates, it’s vital to make use of background screening technology to avoid waste of their valuable time. Also, since the process of background assessment is multi-level, complex and time consuming, it makes for a perfect area of AI application.
With Applicant Tracking Systems taking over recruitment, most organizations now have their own private database of profiles, stored on the cloud. This means that candidates don’t have to carry their CVs everywhere they go for an interview. Also, we’re going to see a change in how employees interact with candidates. Video interviews will become big where employers will have a chance to directly assess the candidate on the basis of their soft skills, personality and knowledge without having to call them for a face to face round to the office. Doing so will allow recruiters to easily assess candidates on a range of skills, from individualism, to creativity and an awareness of technology.
A McKinsey report in April 2012 an important fact was stated, “Companies with diverse executive boards enjoyed significantly higher earnings and returns on equity.” While this report emphasized on executive leadership, this statement applies as much to entry level employees as to the C Suite. A higher performing workforce is one of the biggest advantages of diversity hiring. What are other advantages of implementing a diversity recruitment strategy and how can recruiters attract and retain diverse candidates? Let’s examine in detail.
When we had earlier talked about top recruitment metrics, Quality of Hire was right at the top of the discussion. While most ATS and recruitment software claim to make the recruitment process more efficient, the ultimate focus should be on hiring the best possible candidates because that will have a greater impact on the final bottomline. Therefore, it is essential to understand what exactly quality of hire is and how recruiters can measure it consistently.
Quality of Hire tracks the value that new employees bring to the organization, how productive and proactive they are and how well they fit in the cultural fabric of the company. A hiring manager is now more of a strategic partner within the organization and as a result, there is more focus on the measurable benefits that recruitment can bring to the business. Therefore, quality of hire has now become one of the most important recruitment metrics and also one of the toughest to measure.
(Also Read: Top 5 Recruitment Metrics That Matter)
People are the most important asset of an organization. Therefore, getting the best people to work for you is not an option, but a prerequisite for any organization’s success. At the end of the day, it’s not the strategies that do the magic; it’s the people who execute them. This is why your employees can prove to be your biggest competitive advantage. At the end of the year when you spell out the sales figures never forget that it’s your employees who made it all possible.
Companies that win are often those that invest in building a strong workforce. Such organizations make sure they hire only the top quality candidates for any role. Their recruitment strategy is centered on improving their quality of hire because a bad hire can not only prove to be wastage of financial resources but also have detrimental impact on overall performance of the team.
Read more about the perils of making a bad hire here:
Measuring quality of hire is no simple task as each organization and within each company; individual teams define value and performance differently. According to experts, it is an elusive metric and companies are still evolving, with companies testing out different methods to come up with their version of quality of hire. In other words, we cannot fit this metric in a straightjacket because in the end it all depends on the businesses’ priority. Quality of Hire depends on some factors such as employee performance, retention, productivity, impact on business bottomline, and employee turnover although these are not quality-of-hire measures by themselves.
(Also Read: How To Measure Candidate Experience?)
Some of the ways in which you can measure quality of hire in your organization are:
The easiest way to gauge quality of hire is to ask the hiring managers through a periodic survey their satisfaction level regarding the performance of employee. This method is quite popular as getting data from hiring managers is not that tough. Also, the survey can be conducted regularly. However, there are some drawbacks to this method as hiring managers can be quite subjective in their response. Instead of approaching the survey objectively, they might be influenced by emotional and other human factors while judging the new hire. Besides, many hiring managers would avoid filling long surveys and especially HMs who have made 10 requisitions wouldn’t certainly want to fill out 10 surveys.
If your company has a comprehensive performance review process in place, it can provide an accurate and objective measure of the quality of hire made. Comparisons of the new hires with your consistent high performers can be pretty effective to gauge their quality. Linking the new hires with performance metrics such as achieving a certain objective/target within a limited period of time is also quite popular. Whether it is selling certain number of units, acquiring new customers or achieving certain level of customer satisfaction, all these are measurable goals which can provide an accurate picture of the quality of new hire. However, this method will only work if the company is good at measuring performance and doesn’t set unrealistic goals for employees.
(Also Read: How to Improve Recruitment and Selection Process?)
According to LinkedIn, 48% of companies use Turnover and retention metrics to measure quality of hire. Retention rates tell how many employees found the company as the right fit and therefore chose to stay on. However, the retention rate applies to overall organization and therefore they can’t be used to find individual quality of hire. Also, retention rate is more often than not influenced by the manager, the onboarding process and the quality of workplace. This is why we cannot take it as a reliable metric for measuring hire quality.
All the points discussed earlier are for measuring post-hire Quality of hire. These are long-term methods and can be used to establish a company standard for measuring this metric. However, with pre-hire tests and assessments in place, we can quickly gauge how successful the candidate will be, if hired. Lou Adler, the founder of The Lou Adler Group, a talent consultancy firm has created a unique talent scorecard that helps predict QoH. Using a mix of these strategies will help you get a fair idea of the quality of hire.
A poor hire can be the greatest detriment to an organization. Many leaders and business owners go through this disheartening experience when they have to let go of an individual who was simply not fit for the job. But who is at fault here; the employee or the recruiter? The jury is still not out on this. However, this article serves a greater purpose than fixing blames. This article is meant for recruiters and business owners to avoid creating such unpleasant situations.
As if the recruiting process wasn’t complicated enough, the added pressure of talent war can make any recruiter make an inaccurate choice. Also, there are simply not as many “hireable” candidates in the market these days as the demand for a broader skillset is greater than ever before. A growing business needs candidates that are not only subject matter experts but also flexible to adapt to the ever-changing array of technologies found in the workplace. These issues can aggravate if your organization is based out of location that has limited access to top talent. Here are some things that you can do to avoid bad hiring:
The important step of defining the candidate criteria should happen right at the beginning of the hiring process. However, in many cases the rush to close a vacancy is so great that defining what the organization really needs in a candidate is left as a secondary discussion. These decisions are made after all the job applications arrive forcing the hiring manager to perform the search again with a more specified list of criteria or settle for a small candidate pool. As a recruiter or a business owner, you should clearly define the hiring criteria to find the candidates that are best aligned with the organization’s needs.
The goal should be to clearly articulate the talents, skills, capabilities that you are looking for in a prospective candidate. This is indeed a vital step as you should aim for the most essential attributes, rather than settle for an all-inclusive feature list that brings irrelevant applications or confuses the job seekers. The process will take some time as the recruiters and hiring managers need to be on the same page. However, the result will be worth it and by the end of your discussions, you will have a clear, focused position to hire for.
(Also Read: How to Reduce Time to Hire?)
Once the final job description is ready to go live, you need to consider strategies for connecting the job posting with the best possible talent out there. In doing so, recruiters need to use active as well as passive strategies. While passive strategies depend on the candidates reaching out to the job, in active strategies you will be reaching out to the prospective talent in the capacity of a recruiter.
Passive strategies are the commonly known recruitment methods that most recruiters probably use in their organizations such as posting a job on job boards or sharing it with employees and jobseekers through referrals and social networks. Recruiters can use an automation tool to post the job on multiple job boards without spending much time. These recruitment software also automatically collect the responses and maintain a secure centralized CV database for use by recruiters.
On the other hand, active strategies differ from the traditional practices and are more expensive as they include networking and headhunting. With the rise of online professional social networks like LinkedIn, it has become easy to utilize these strategies quickly and cost-effectively.
To discover the right candidates, it is essential to focus on a narrow geographical region as it is a waste of time and resources to headhunt candidates that meet the criteria but are unable to join due to their location. Factors like commuting to work daily must be considered while narrowing your search for the right candidate. While there will always be candidates willing to move or commute to anywhere, yet as a recruiter you should keep in mind these limitations before zeroing on the perfect candidate. It is equally important to consider the range of experiences they have, or are they ready for the next level? Answering these questions will quickly eliminate resumes that don’t meet the established criteria.
(Also Read: Recruitment Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent)
Now that you have a pool of applicants at your disposal, it is time to decide on the best matching candidate for the role. While the number of applicants might be overwhelming, if you are using the right tools and techniques, it shouldn’t be difficult to filter and find the best prospects for interview. An advanced applicant tracking system which is equipped with a resume parser and semantic search technology can completely automate this task for you, helping to narrow down the prospects to the most qualified and best matching profiles. Using a recruitment software like Naukri RMS is not only beneficial for reducing time to hire, but it also removes the possibility of unconscious bias which is considered a major reason why recruiters miss out on the best hire for a role.
(Also Read: Choosing the Right Recruiting Software for Your Business)
However, beyond a point, recruiters have to rely on their cognitive abilities and intelligence to make the final decisions. Technology only provides assistance here. The final decision is still to be made by the human intelligence. An easy method to arrive at a conclusion is to rank the profiles based on a scorecard. Developing this scorecard is not that complicated as you can assign a number or weight to each of the characteristic and preference. For example, education can have a weight of 25 and previous experience can have a weight of 50. By scoring the candidates on these criteria, you will gain a cumulative score for each candidate which can be compared to eliminate the least qualified candidates. Once the vetting is complete, the only step that remains is formal interviews.
Interviews are subjective to a lot of terms and conditions, where the hiring manager may arrive at some new findings about the candidate previously unknown. Once the interviews are complete, the hiring team can weigh in on with their choices on which candidate should be offered the position. The last authority on the decision may lie with the company leadership or the hiring manager. However, one should make sure the final decision is based on facts and actual experience rather than perceptions. With these steps in place, recruiters can ensure to a great extent that they do not make a wrong choice while hiring.
(Also Read: Chatbots In Recruitment: How Do They Help?)
We all have heard the famous saying, “Time is money”, and for recruitment, this holds absolutely true. Time to hire is one of the top key performance indicators for the recruitment team. A lengthy recruitment process has a negative impact on the candidate experience. Also, a delay of even one day can have a compounded effect on the bottom line in terms of higher financial costs. Thus it is really important to adopt methods and tools that can shorten the time to hire.
Those who sweat in peace, bleed less in war. If you want to reduce your time to hire, the most important step would be to have a ready made talent pipeline which you can refer to when any new requisition comes. For this to happen, it’s essential to always be on the lookout for outstanding talent. Thus recruiters should source candidate proactively by identifying the roles that require frequent hiring, pre-determining the requirements such as skills, aptitude, identifying the sources that could get you the ideal candidates and reaching out to them. When you will have a ready to use candidate database for hiring, you won’t have to go through the entire process of advertising the job and waiting for the applications to pour in every time there is an open role.
(Also Read: Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire?)
While this might seem too obvious, but there are many small to medium enterprises that still do not have any documented hiring process in place. Without a structured process, the recruiters have to spend longer time to fill as they end up starting from scratch for every hire. A process is not established until it’s on paper; therefore, recruiters must map out the entire recruitment journey including all possible steps and scenarios. This is the only way one can understand the gaps and improve them. With everything documented, recruiters know exactly what to do and what not to, at every step, hence reducing redundant activities and improving the time to hire. This will also impact the costs per hire positively, improve visibility and make the recruitment process more measurable as well as transparent.
(Also Read: Steps to improve recruitment and selection process)
Automation is not just a shiny new term in the business. It’s the reality of this time and every industry is looking to automate repetitive tasks to reduce costs and improve performance. Why should recruitment be left behind? By adopting a good recruitment software, organizations can automate their entire recruitment cycle from requisition to onboarding. How does this reduce time to hire? A recruiting solution automatically screens the incoming profiles and parses them to provide structured data. It allows recruiters to search profiles matching the requirements, schedule multiple candidate interviews and even send offer letters, all with a click of a few buttons. With a comprehensive applicant tracking system recruiters can simplify and streamline their recruitment flow, increase visibility and cut their time to hire without losing on quality.
(Also Read: Recruitment Software Benefits)
One of the biggest reasons of lag in the recruitment process is delayed or vague communication between various members of the hiring team. This team includes every person involved in the hiring of a candidate, whether it’s the recruiter doing the actual hiring or a Marketing manager who has raised the request for hiring. Without a well-established communication process, getting approvals for hiring or receiving feedbacks post interview may take some time which can increase the time to hire considerably. One solution for this could be to employ a recruitment management system that has modules for capturing feedbacks and getting approvals through an automated workflow. Any solution that eases communication between candidates, recruiters and hiring managers is bound to have a positive effect on the time to hire.
Careers webpage is a significant source of candidate profiles for any organization. Any candidate who is really interested in a position in a company will definitely check their website and careers webpage. If this website is not optimized for best user experience or doesn’t provide clues about the company’s vision or culture, it surely is going to put the candidate’s mind in doubt. The candidate may take longer to take his decision or may drop off completely. In both the cases, recruiters will find it difficult to quickly source candidates for hiring, thereby lengthening the recruitment process. Therefore, it’s essential to improve the company career website, or finding a solution that not only provides you a branded careers webpage but also integrates it with the ATS, thus improving your performance and reducing time to source candidates.
(Also Read: 5 Must Haves for a Company Careers Website)
A delay of a single day in hiring candidates comes at the cost of productivity and revenue. Therefore, improving time to hire is of critical importance.
Sourcing is an indispensable part of any talent acquisition process and effective sourcing is essential to build a quality and qualified pool of job seekers to hire as and when requisitions are opened. An effective candidate sourcing strategy in recruitment ensures you are not left out in lurch when the company growth or an outgoing employee creates a need for hiring. (Also Read: Importance of Sourcing in Recruitment)
Know how to build a robust sourcing strategy.
It can be a real headache for recruiters trying to find the best candidate for a new job opening. If the process is not right, organizations risk hiring incompetent and inconsistent talent that does not fit well with the business goals and values. Therefore, it is imperative to have a strong sourcing plan for recruiting to ensure right talent finds their way in your organization. Here are tips for the same.
Hiring is often a time consuming process. This can be changed if organizations put more emphasis on sourcing and employ specialists for the same. In most organizations, same set of individuals oversee sourcing of candidates and their subsequent hiring, or they may delegate this “menial” task to entry level recruiters who have pretty much no experience in talent acquisition. This is a fatal mistake. For any hiring process to run smooth, the first step needs to be taken care of by the most experienced professionals. Therefore, organizations should employ sourcing specialists for this job who have an eye for talent and proven expertise in finding the best fit candidates. Also, it pays to have a well-documented and standardised sourcing process that acts as a guide for all stakeholders to ensure all individuals adhere to the organizational needs while making a selection.
Gone are the days when posting a job on the job portals was enough. Today jobseekers are always looking for an opportunity to strengthen their career graph. Hence you should proactively utilize every single channel out there to find these candidates. Most recruiters have their own favourite, go-to channel for recruiting. But instead of stopping there, recruiters must also look out for active jobseekers on less frequently sourced channels. Think from the perspective of jobseekers. It isn’t hard to understand that candidates will be more receptive to outreach messages than simply posting the job on career website or a job portal. Whether it is reaching out on Facebook or whatsapp, nothing is out of bounds for recruiters anymore. The more channels you use for sourcing, the bigger will be your talent pool.
(Also Read: Hiring trends in 2018 That You Can’t Ignore)
If you are using a recruitment software for managing hiring process, it is essential to find one that not only automates your end to end hiring but also increases your sourcing channels and provides the best candidate experience. Making a good recruiting solution part of your innovative sourcing strategy in recruitment leads to reduction in time to hire as it automates repetitive tasks like posting the same job on different job boards. Thus recruiters have more time to fish for candidates from sources other than that are traditionally used. At the same time, a good recruiting software allows helps recruiters in sourcing candidates through social media, referrals, vendors, career site etc. from a single platform.
(Also Read: How Recruitment Software Works, its Benefits and Main Features)
Many of recruitment specialists are guilty of underutilising a very potent sourcing channels – the employee network. The employees who are already working in the organization have gathered a solid understanding of the work culture and are aligned with the business goals. Hence, when they refer a friend or someone from their network, the recruiters don’t have to worry so much about whether the incoming candidate has knowledge of the existing work culture of the organization. May be, this is the reason why employees hired through referrals stay longer and are more consistent in their performance. Also, employee referral, as a sourcing channel, is much cheaper compared to other sources where there is a constant advertising expense associated.
(Also Read: Purpose of Having a Dedicated Employee Referral Program)
Recruiters make a critical mistake when they only source candidates once an opening is there. There are other recruiters too who discard any “extra” CVs from their folders once the hiring has been completed. This is a strict no-no if you want to maintain a quality talent pool. Hiring takes a long time even if we have employed the best recruitment software. One of the best ways to avoid this delay in hiring is to keep growing your database of sourced CVs. This will ensure you have some candidates ready when a vacancy arises in the organization next time. It pays to have a talent pool that you can readily refer to whenever necessary. You will save a lot of repetition, reduce hiring time and improve productivity.
Talent acquisition is more than just advertising for open vacancies, shortlisting the matching profiles and selecting candidates after an interview. Hiring the right talent is multipronged process with as much as the company’s future at stake. There are plenty of things to watch out for; for instance, is your recruiting strategy biased towards a particular gender? Are you accidentally hiring candidates that are overqualified for the role and hence hard to retain? Is your employer brand reliable enough to attract top class talent? These and many more questions should cross your mind while making the next hire.
Talent acquisition is the process of finding and hiring relevant talent for fulfilling an organizational need with an eye on the future. It is a term used interchangeably with recruiting to a fault. Recruiting or hiring is more about filling the open positions. Talent acquisition is a strategic investment in creating leadership with the focus on future of your company.
Hiring new talent is arguably one of the hardest tasks for any recruiter. Talent acquisition process can be even trickier as the hiring is done for key positions and will make a greater impact than everyday recruitment. A simple mistake can cost heavily. Rapid technology advancements have changed the game entirely and therefore as a TA specialist, you need to evolve your strategies with the changing landscape. Using the same interviewing methods and techniques, or same sourcing practices can lead to missing out on the top talent. Candidates have become more tech savvy. They are using different ways to identify the right job opportunity for them. Surveys show that job searching is now predominantly done while on the move, on mobile. As a talent acquisition leader, you need to accept and embrace these changes and adjust the TA strategy to attract talent to your company.
(Also Read: How to Improve Recruitment and Selection Process)
With tools and technologies permeating every sphere of life, more data is being created with every passing second. Data analytics can help structure and make sense of this data to predict human behavior, patterns and choices. Using tools that can access, structure and analyze data related to jobseekers can help you get insight into talent demographics, their behavior and choices. Even within an organization, the data related to high performance employees can provide an understanding of which talent will perform better in future thus giving a factual basis to your hiring decision. (Also read: Recruitment Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent)
To fully embrace a data-driven approach to talent acquisition, adopt a system of recruitment metrics.
Measuring crucial data points is important to know which efforts are paying off and which are not. You should be able to identify the right metrics for your business as per the organization goal and business strategy. Some of the important recruitment metrics that you should be concerned about include retention rate, cost to acquire, time to fill and offer to acceptance ratio. These metrics are individual to every open requisition. Measuring these data points should not be difficult if you have a well-structured hiring process in place and you are using well-rounded recruitment software. Analyzing these metrics can provide important missing links in your talent acquisition process.
(Also Read: Top 5 Recruitment Metrics That Matter)
The top talent will not stay open to job opportunities forever. The brutal competition for talent means you need to work within tight deadlines and shorten the recruitment process. Set a timeline for candidates by emailing them a turnaround time within which they have to respond to the job with their profile or availability for an interview. Ensure that all internal stakeholders involved in the interview process stick to a 24-hour timeline for all vital steps of the process. When making the offer, make sure to mention a timeline for response. Setting up deadlines shortens the hiring process, makes it more productive and also presents your organization in a more professional light.
(Also Read: Chatbots In Recruitment: How Do They Help?)
Social media and employee referrals have become too important sourcing channels to ignore. In addition to job boards and your own career site, make sure to post your requirement on social channels that have a significant audience of job seekers specific to your industry. Leveraging LinkedIn works well in cases where candidates are looking for attractive offers passively. Leadership talent is most likely to refer to their network for new opportunities and less likely to seek employment on job boards. Therefore utilizing the relevant social media channels for sourcing talent is essential to your overall strategy. At the same time, try try making good use of your employee’s referrals as the hiring through your trusted employees has more credibility and is also a time saving process.
(Also Read: How to Improve Talent Sourcing in Your Organization?)
Actively following the above mentioned practices for talent acquisition can leave a marked difference in performance and quality of talent being hired in the organization.
The excitement of the New Year has settled in and everyone is back to the meeting rooms formulating strategies to make the most out of 2018. Recruitment saw an onset of technology based tools and solutions in 2017 and the whole year was witness to an unprecedented growth of HR technology. Now that HR has finally warmed up to the use of latest technology, it’s time to see where we are headed in the coming days when it comes to performing their single most important function; recruitment. Hiring top talent is one of the top priorities of every organization, it will be yours too, and that’s why you need to be up on your feet all the time, doing things that others are not doing, thinking out of the box in order to win this race.
Here are the top hiring trends that we think are underutilized right now and will come up in a big way this year:
We cannot emphasize enough the benefits of using an ATS for recruitment. Not only does it helps you automate the entire flow of recruitment but also ensures better candidate experience, hence improving the employer branding. We will discuss in specific about the latter separately, but the point is ATS is no longer a choice, it’s an essential part of every organization’s recruitment efforts.
However, in an era marked by rapid advances in analytics and AI, mere automation is of little consequence, especially when your intent is to hire and retain the best talent. For that, you need software that thinks like a human, a cognitive solution capable of providing data based accurate answers, an AI-powered Applicant Tracking System. Your recruitment software, essentially the most important piece of technology at your disposal should be able to intelligently assess data and provide an accurate predictive pattern to hire high performance candidates.
(Also Read: Choosing the Right Recruiting Software for Your Business)
This Artificial Intelligence can be inbuilt in the ATS in the form of a recommendation engine which employs advanced machine learning to become increasingly successful at matching vacancies with candidates. This all hope is not without a basis in reality. According to the 2017 Bersin Human Capital Trends Report, 38% companies believe AI and robotics will be fully implemented in their company in 5 years. Will your company be one of them?
The goal of video interview is to shorten the hiring time by getting an accurate and fair assessment of the quality of hire. These are more efficient as the recruiter can quickly scan the candidate through their verbal responses, intonations and non-verbal cues without having to be physically present for the interview every single time. It also reduces hiring costs as the added expense of flying in candidates from different locations is eliminated. After analyzing the candidate through the video interview on various data points, you can arrive at a conclusion regarding their suitability for the current role and if needed, call for a face to face session in person. However, there is more to smart video assessment than just this.
Application of artificial intelligence in HR can help collect much more data than is humanly possible. Hirevue, a video intelligence platform collects more than 25,000 data points in a given interview and uses machine learning algorithms to analyze them and return accurate predictions regarding an employee’s skills and work performance in future. Just as email and online methods of recruitment took over phone as a quicker and better way of communicating with the candidates, AI- assisted video interviewing can soon replace the need of the candidate to be physically present for an interview.
Employee referrals are the most effective source of quality employees and this has been proven time and again. Yet, we have still not found an effective way of extracting the maximum potential out of the employee referral program. The number of candidates sourced through referrals is so minuscule in some cases that HR thinks of it as an added liability instead of an opportunity. This can change in the near future as we witness standalone tech powered employee referral tools trying to disrupt the ways in which HRs execute their referral programs.
With smart social recruiting at their heart, these referral tools work at the root cause of the problem: employee engagement. Utilizing artificial intelligence, these Referral software can learn many things about employee behavior and predict the activities which elicit maximum engagement from employees. If you want to source the best candidates, employee referral programs with dedicated referral software will have to be a core part of your recruiting strategy.
(Also Read: Why You May Need a Dedicated Employee Referral Solution?)
Employer branding is as integral to recruitment strategy as the act of hiring itself. Why? Because the talent you are seeking is a buyer and you and many others like you are the brands that he is looking at not only for a good job but for ultimate professional satisfaction. Even if you can provide the best of working conditions and compensations, it won’t help if the talent doesn’t know this. This year we could see some smart employer branding techniques being played out as employers become innovative to attract top talent. Technology and social media can provide just the right platform for you to showcase your story, establish your message and become an employer that anyone would vouch for; in the league of Google, Facebook and others.
(Also Read: 5 HR Trends To Watch Out For In 2018)
If you are an active recruiter, chances are that you have to spend a major part of your day trying to spot the best talent out there before competition sets their eye on it. Implementing recruitment software like ATS is essential for achieving this goal. However, technology can only help those who know how to utilize it to its fullest potential. Read the following tips to get the most out of your recruitment software.
As we talk about the exploding HR technology scene, we also need to understand that the more powerful technologies we use, the greater is our responsibility to make sure we are able to achieve the best outcome possible so as to justify the investment.
Here are certain things you can do to improve your hiring efficiency through the recruitment software:
Migrating to a new ATS without knowing what it is capable of and what it is not is suicidal. Once you have made up your mind to implement a new applicant tracking software it is only sensible to understand the various functionalities and features it comes with. You might need to take help of the owner’s manual, multiple demo sessions, and trials for this. Asking relevant questions during such sessions will further help you know the capabilities and limitations of the software.
(Also Read: How Recruitment Software Works, its Benefits and Main Features)
Typically, installation of a new Applicant Tracking System comes with an onboarding process where the team is trained in the various functions and features of the software. Check if your vendor provides such an incentive. Many times it happens that the team that was originally trained in using the software doesn’t stay around long enough in the company, or they might even forget various nuances of the software with time and may not be able to pass the knowledge to others in an efficient way. In such a scenario, retraining the staff is a viable alternative to digging in the manual every time confusion arises. You can schedule a retraining session with the ATS vendor and speed up the entire recruitment process.
The prerequisite of maximizing the utility of the recruitment software is a recruiting process that is “simple, straightforward and scalable”. If your hiring process is efficient and intuitive, the implementation of recruitment software will also be effortless. If there are inherent hitches in the hiring process it, or the process is marred by redundancy and confusion regarding its flow, then proper implementation of ATS also becomes an uphill task. Without a streamlines process in place, the information being collected by the ATS is also messy and unusable and overall efficiency takes a hit. To avoid such a hopeless situation, it is essential to bring in place a measurable recruitment process that everyone agrees to.
(Also Read: Steps to Improve Recruitment and Selection Process)
The essence of technology is in its constant evolution. Recruitment software have undergone a major transformation through the last decade. From clunky interface to slick, intuitive design; from on premise to in-the-cloud, a lot has changed over the past few years. Social recruiting has become a big part of these new age tools. HR Tech vendors release updates to their software to include all these advanced functionalities.
If your system is lagging behind, there are one of the two reasons for it; either your vendor has not released an update in a long time, in which case you need to talk to them or maybe you have not taken the pain to update your system despite reminders from the vendor. In the new, cloud based recruitment software like Naukri RMS, you don’t need to do any manual task as updates also happen automatically in the cloud. Regular updates could mean the difference between achieving highest efficiency and high quality candidates and missing out on both.
If you are not able to put to use the data generated by your recruitment software, you may be missing out on extracting its maximum potential. Therefore, as soon as you implement the new ATS system, have a game plan ready to utilize the information recorded by it. While the first priority will always remain to improve productivity and hiring quality, the captured information can provide vital insights into hiring patterns which can be implemented in future for making better hiring decisions. These insights are not always in plain sight, and you may have to use analytics to make sense of the data.
Keeping these points in mind simultaneously while implementing your recruitment software will help you tap into its maximum possibilities.
(Also Read: Choosing the Right Recruiting Software for Your Business)
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