January 11, 2023 – The HR and recruitment industries are rapidly evolving, especially when it comes to finding, attracting, evaluating and hiring top talent. This usually results in long, labour-intensive and expensive processes. You can avoid it by investing in HR tools and recruitment technology to find the right candidates at the right time and expedite the hiring process.
Technology and recruitment are intertwined and the first step to understanding this relationship is to understand how technology has changed the world of hiring.
How Has Technology Changed The Hiring Process
There was a time when most of the space on a resume was dedicated to the experience a candidate had gathered and the ones with maximum experience were pushed to the top of the pile because they were considered to be the most desirable.
Since then, there has been a dramatic shift in the hiring process. It has become more about skill analysis and finding the best talent rather than the most experienced individuals. It is more about the quality of the candidate and their work over the years they have been working. However, this talent and skill-based hiring shines a light on a challenge faced by most recruiters. 58% of recruiters cite the lack of skilled candidates as the biggest challenge.
This is where technology and recruitment can be used together to solve problems. Job portals like monster.com and platforms like glassdoor.co.in offer a one-stop shop for finding, screening and vetting candidates. It is no longer about whether technology is contributing to the recruitment world but how.
- Skill Assessment
Skill assessment earlier relied heavily on printed CVs and a set template of questions. With technological advancement, hiring managers now use a variety of tools to measure the skills and professional aptitude of a candidate. For example, companies deploy technical screening software to assess the coding skills of programmers. A printed resume can never tell you how well a candidate would use their acquired skill whereas a technical tool can not only prove their skill acquisition but also how adept they are at using it.
This is just one way technology is being used in the recruitment world. The latest hiring technology has the ability to evaluate whether a candidate would be a good cultural fit. Digital talent assessment tools ensure an accurate assessment of professional skills which greatly simplifies the hiring process.
Better Reach for Hiring Manager
The top candidates are not all located in the same area. They are spread across borders and technology has made it easier for recruiters and organisations to reach them. Recruiting internationally has never been easier and simple tools like Zoom can help you interview and onboard a new candidate. Relying on technology allows you to delegate responsibilities without any confines.
This is especially relevant today when COVID has changed the face of the world and business. Working from home is quickly becoming the norm and technology is the only way to accomplish it successfully.
How to use recruitment Technology inThe Hiring Process?
There are many ways to use technology at every step of the hiring process. Right from creating thorough job descriptions to onboarding new employees, there are tools available for everything which makes the task of hiring simpler and more efficient while bringing in the best candidates.
- Creating Better Job Descriptions
Research shows that men and women have specific preferences for the words they use when they are job hunting. Often, when one is writing a job description, they don’t pay attention to these small things. But it is these little details that can create a bias in your job descriptions and cause you to lose out on viable candidates. Technology can be used to spot and remove words that may create a bias that affects the candidates as well as the organisation. Some tools also detect the strengths and weaknesses in a job description and allow you to make corrections as you’re writing it. This helps you create a stronger, more diverse workforce and a better work environment.
- Resume Screening Software
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) can gather, screen and sort through resumes to filter out applicants that do not suit the role or match the requirement. Using an ATS speeds up the hiring process and your team can spend more time working with candidates who meet the criteria you have set. An ATS will also allow you to publish your job posting to multiple platforms and provide a central location for you to track the responses received and take the process forward with the desired candidates.
- Better Interviewing
Interviewing a potential candidate is a long-drawn process that can be easily automated using technology. The multiple rounds of interviews that the hiring team or recruiters have to sit through can be recorded.
For example, the preliminary interviews can be a set of recorded questions that the candidates have to answer in video format. Videos submitted by the candidates can be evaluated by the recruitment team. As the hiring process goes further, you can use video communication tools to schedule live interviews.
ATS and other recruitment tools also create a positive candidate experience because it shortens the time to process applications and the candidates receive responses much quicker.
- Onboarding New Employees
Virtual Assistants are all the rage now and they can be extremely useful when you’re onboarding employees. They welcome and empower new employees to perform well right from the start, thereby setting them up for success. Virtual Assistants can help employees navigate through paperwork and compliance documents they need to sort out as well as set up meetings. While it doesn’t replace the personal touch that an HR personnel would lend to the process, it does reduce administrative tasks.
There are a number of tools that can help you with all of these tasks. Some are easy to use with a single function while others handle multiple functions.
Technologies That Can Be Used For Hiring
If you want your company to be future-ready, investing in recruitment tools and technology is the only way. A stack of the right tools can mean the difference between a great candidate journey and a poor one. A great hiring experience means quicker response from candidates and a shorter time to hire which saves time, energy and money.
- Chatbots
Chatbots are the most useful at the beginning of the hiring process. Answering frequently asked questions and asking qualifying questions that help filter candidates are two ways chatbots can be deployed. They can also be used to schedule interviews with candidates that successfully answer the questions.
- Writing Assistants
Candidates judge the legitimacy of a company based on the job description shared on portals. If these job descriptions are not written properly, consciously or subconsciously, the candidates may decide that the role isn’t the right fit for them and you will lose out on great talent.
Words have the power to attract a suitable candidate but they also have the power to turn potential candidates away. For example, the word ‘manage’ is seen as masculine while the word ‘nurture’ has a feminine connotation. These are both words that can be used in a job description for the role of a manager. A writing assistant software helps remove such unconscious biases from a job description making it gender neutral and therefore appealing to a wider range of prospective candidates.
- Resume Screening
It takes an average of 2 minutes for a human being to thoroughly go through a resume. A resume screening software can do the same in seconds. This reduces the time to interview and hire dramatically, especially when you’re hiring for multiple roles. An Application Tracking System (ATS) can be set up to ask potential candidates all the relevant questions alongside their applications. This will further help you speed up the hiring process by filtering out candidates that don’t answer your questions suitably.
Once the application is received, keywords and custom filters can be applied to evaluate the applicants.
- Assessment Tools
Tests and assessments are a great way to evaluate whether or not a potential candidate will be the right skill and cultural fit. Knowledge, performance, skill and behaviour can all be assessed before you and your team invest time in online or in-person interviews. Assessment tools help you do exactly that – they can be customised to assess a potential candidate for any particular role, saving you time and resources.
- Video Interviews
This is probably the most basic way to use technology in your hiring process. Video interviews combine the benefits of in-person interviews and phone interviews. In-person interviews take time and phone interviews are impersonal. A video interview solves both these problems, giving you the much-needed face-to-face interaction with candidates while saving you the time an in-person interview would take. Moreover, it improves the candidate experience because they don’t have to commute for their interview.
- Virtual Reality
VR is still in its infancy but is very quickly growing, especially in the recruitment world. Companies are using VR to evaluate a candidate’s problem-solving skills, creativity, leadership skills and more. Using VR software, you can set tasks for potential candidates and see how they would respond. This makes the recruitment process more fun and engaging.
Apart from this, VR can also be used to give virtual tours of the company and show prospective candidates what it would be like to work there.
Technology is a big part of every business and recruitment is the same. For a business to grow, you need a constant stream of candidates who will become a part of your workforce and the latest tech can go a long way in helping you find, evaluate, hire and onboard the best there is.
