While we’re all thinking about recruitment strategies for the next year, it’s not exactly surprising that many talent teams are looking for ways to streamline and perfect the recruitment process. As the talent market becomes more competitive and many tech scaleups are preparing for growth, it’s understandable that teams want to reduce the time it takes to recruit and refine the candidate experience to ensure they attract the best talent. Candidates are no longer prepared to wait around for hiring managers to make a decision, and if an application process is too long, they’ll likely drop out and apply elsewhere. Hiring the right tech talent has never been easy, but right now feels like a particularly challenging time to be hiring new people as candidates hold the power. Therefore, hiring teams are looking for solutions that will avoid wasting time and help them to refine their recruitment processes.
Tech is often more reliable than people; human error is less likely, and software can usually complete time-consuming tasks like screening CVs in minutes. In addition, remote recruitment has made the hiring process more challenging for talent teams, as it’s made it increasingly difficult to determine whether a candidate will be a cultural fit or whether they’ll fit with teams. Research by Thomas claims that 57% of hires are judged as having a poor person-to-job fit today, as measured by the people who made the hire. Therefore, it’s even less surprising that hiring managers are looking for ways to revolve, refine and improve their recruitment approach for the new year. In a year where many are planning to grow and return to pre-pandemic levels of success, poor hiring decisions and lengthy recruitment processes could be detrimental to businesses.
Increasing numbers of companies are responding to the issues in recruitment by exploring technological solutions that can improve hire quality, accelerate processes and allegedly reduce the effects of bias. A new year is a perfect time to experiment with new strategies and instigate new processes for hiring teams.
Therefore, we’re investigating whether tech really is key to evolving your recruitment approach for 2022.
The world of HR tech is growing rapidly. New programmes and software are emerging every day to help with the recruitment process and your people strategy and employee engagement. For example, talent management technology can help identify staffing requirements, develop employees and recruit or onboard new team members. In addition, tech can be used for the entire hiring process and performance management, succession planning and learning and development.
But how useful is it?
Better communication with candidates
One advantage of using tech in your recruitment strategy is the ability to reach a wide variety of candidates. With more communication channels than ever before, recruiters can now talk to candidates through chatbots, video, SMS, email WhatsApp and social media platforms all through a single ATS. As a result, you can tailor your communication strategies to candidates preferences, hopefully improving the candidate experience. In addition, with all communications managed on one system, recruiters can pick up pain points in the candidate experience.
Social media advertising can also help you reach a wider array of candidates with digital talent attraction. However, this will need human input to ensure that you’re targeting the right people and skillset. So again, research is required to ensure your advertising is as effective as possible. Otherwise, you could see many unqualified people within your talent pool.
Reducing time to hire
AI in recruitment is most famously used for screening CVs and resumes, which is a time-consuming task for people. Machines can do this in minutes. It can also be used to schedule interviews, and having virtual interviews can mean hiring teams can talk to more candidates in one day. Plus, it can speed up the communications process rather than waiting for one individual to reply to unsuccessful candidates (as we all know, ignoring candidates is terrible for your employer brand). Therefore, implementing technology into your recruitment strategy can benefit both candidate and recruiter, enhancing experiences for all.
However, there are plenty of issues with relying on tech for the sake of speed. Speed doesn’t always mean success, and it can lead to more significant problems. For example, although many people think AI removes bias and improves diversity, the truth is it’s often quite the opposite. Recruitment tech is only useful if people know how to use it properly, and using it to improve diversity is a key example. AI and Machine Learning are based on what the machine is told, and relying on this software alone with no human intervention, means that you’ll end up hiring all the same kind of people. The algorithms work on keywords, and eventually, the same employers, educational institutions and experiences will appear, affecting your organisation’s diversity. That’s why it always pays to have a skilled recruiter checking up on your tech stack.
Data based recruiting
People analytics are set to be big in 2022, and implementing the capabilities into your tech stack now could be a way to get ahead of the curve. Tech could be essential to creating a more intelligent, and therefore, successful approach to recruitment. People analytics will better review your hires’ quality to inform your recruitment strategy and criteria for next time. It will also help you have an intelligent approach to sourcing talent worldwide, as you’ll know where skills can be found.
More user-friendly access to relevant talent data will mean recruiters don’t have to be tech-savvy to adopt it. More scaling businesses can begin proactive sourcing for passive candidates. Using data-driven recruiting will mean less reliance on job boards and more on custom talent search. Provided that the platform used makes data easy to read and interpret. Otherwise, we’ll see more data scientists working in the recruitment sector.
So, can tech evolve your recruitment strategy?
Implementing technology into your recruitment strategy will evolve your hiring in many ways. Whether that’s running digital attraction campaigns, using machine learning and AI to speed up processes or even changing the candidate experience. However, it’s important to remember that tech is only as good as you use it. For example, it may save time, but implementing new software to screen candidates will only help your recruitment strategy long-term if it’s set up correctly and is supervised to check for bias. Similarly, adding all data into a complex ATS is only useful if your recruitment teams can use it. Or, saying you’ll take a data-driven approach to hiring will only work if your team can interpret the data easily and use it to their advantage.
Without human intervention and knowledge, the tech will cause more problems than good. In a candidate-driven market where recruitment mistakes are particularly costly for scaling businesses, don’t be fooled into using the fastest and easiest option. Speed doesn’t always mean success, and more often than not, there are complexities around the software which make them more of a burden than you realise.
So, in conclusion, as long as you truly understand the tech stack and how it will evolve your recruitment strategy, it’s a great idea to streamline processes and make for intelligent recruitment. However, if you’re adding in tech for tech’s sake, with no real idea how to use it or how it will benefit you, it’s probably better to look for other ways to transform your approach to recruitment.
Why not outsource your tech recruitment?
Tech may be one solution to refine the hiring process, but it’s not the only one. For example, if your talent teams are overwhelmed with the volume of applications, don’t have time to hire the number of roles needed to grow or want a more innovative approach to hiring, outsourcing recruitment could help. An RPO provider embeds recruiters into your organisation. They become an extension of your talent team or act as your talent function if you don’t have one. This means they have a good understanding of who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. Your goals become theirs.
They have an advantage over tech because they have the experience and skills needed to hire talent and the dedicated time to do so. While tech can work alongside talent teams, we’d never advise that it replaces the human function altogether. We need people to keep recruitment personal and ensure that technology is working as it should. Recruitment and HR are human industries, and therefore it makes sense that we keep the human element where possible. So, if your team are stretched, why not look to outsource?
Talent Works’ flexible approach to RPO is suited to businesses of all sizes as it can be scaled up or down to meet your hiring demand and align with your 2022 strategy.
To find out more about how we can help your business meet recruitment goals, contact us.
