Technology and the changing face of recruitment
It would be easy to get lost in the possibilities of improving your recruitment effectively with the use of technology, and even if your team is full of very capable technophiles, there is always the risk of using a tool that adds expense without much of an impact.
Let us look at some refreshingly specific ways that a meaningful difference is being made to industry practice...
Advances in artificial intelligence
Some of the more obvious advantages of AI-powered tools are streamlining and automating time-consuming tasks. San-Francisco-based recruiter Mya Systems put over $11 million into Mya, which takes candidates through pre-screening steps and uses machine learning and natural-language processing to get better at it. Millions of messages are handled by Mya, who Forbes says is going to revolutionise recruitment: ‘Mya is disruptive in every way,’ writes Louis Efron. ‘She instantly engages with applicants, poses contextual questions based on job requirements, and provides personalized updates, feedback, and next-step suggestions.’
If you could use a cheap robotic solution to sort out the preliminary candidate-facing work – screening CVs, responding to simple questions, and scheduling interviews – wouldn’t you?
Social media for recruitment
Using social media platforms to identify candidates is by now an established practice. Job site aggregator Betterteam estimates that 94% of recruiters advertise jobs and contact candidates this way.
The mainstay in this space – now such an integral part of recruiters’ toolkit is LinkedIn. With millions upon millions of job seekers, job posts and personal-brand-burnishing think pieces, its recruitment ground is fertile. Microsoft paid $26 billion for a reason.
But it’s one thing to find the right candidate, of course, and it’s another to catch their eye. Laurie Zaucha, who looks after HR and organisational development for admin-outsourcer Paychex, tells HR Tech Outlook how her teams used social-media-generated content to effectively market their company brand. ‘One way to do this,’ she offers, ‘is to create a hashtag campaign for employees to share what they love about working at your company. A successful campaign is one in which employees share their stories and moments, without thinking about participating in a marketing or recruiting initiative.’
Posting employee-generated messages on the right platform can burnish the company brand in an authentic way, allowing the company culture to speak for itself.
Location tracking
Geolocation uses IP addresses to put candidates on a map. That way recruiters can tailor vacancies by sending out an alert when a role comes up in a suitable location. Recent research carried out using Melissa Data illustrates how candidate email addresses can be scraped from websites based merely on their office location, which makes compiling a contact list rather quick and easy. Here, however, we hit a common new-frontier pitfall: just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should. The ethics of building contact lists this way have yet to be thoroughly examined, especially under GDPR.
Bringing it all together
ClickIQ brings AI and social media together on micro-campaigns in which Facebook accounts for user preferences, behaviour and history to target the audience with relevant vacancies, including passive job seekers who may be just right for the role in question. It’s the sort of advancement that moves recruiters away from the shackles of expensive, generic (if wide-reaching) general campaigns and brings value to single-role searches. ‘It is something that recruitment advertisers have been asking for,’ says co-founder Richard Collins.
Exemplars of the change
A major component of the new landscape are the apps for the blue collar worker. The Square app focuses on construction. ‘Create your profile in 5 minutes,’ we’re told. Then all that remains is to ‘Get matched’ and ‘Know your worth’.
Simulation is now becoming part of the assessment process. Think of an aeroplane simulator that throws workplace hurdles your way instead of flight paths. Mercer’s TalentSIM® promises ‘a way to give key individual contributors a sense of what it really means to be a manager and at the same time give you an accurate sense for their leadership potential.’ Managers are taken through realistic work scenarios and employers are provided with a report on candidates’ strengths and development needs. When a computer takes people through the evaluation process, a recruiter is extraneous.
Product versus Service
From Granger Reis’s perspective, we discern how different rungs of the employment ladder are being impinged upon (or upended, or soothed, or supercharged) by all of this disruption. To solve their high-volume hiring challenges, our clients and would-be clients are drawing a distinction between technology products on the one hand and services on the other
The change is taking these forms. We’re not saying that it’s going to happen; we’re saying it’s already happening.
