With a rise in technological advancement, recruitment is becoming a perfect blend of traditional and modern practices of hiring. While the process of hiring remains more or less the same, the introduction of path-breaking recruitment selection tools and technologies are redefining the way applicants seek and apply for jobs, and the way recruiters hire. Let’s take a look at some interesting technologies enabling the following key steps in recruitment.
Pre-screening
Pre-screening is the first and foremost step in the pursuit of finding a ‘perfect’ candidate, and rightly so. The process helps find applicants that meet the basic expectations of a job description, to start with. Hundreds and thousands of candidates end up applying for a single job posting, especially if your organization is a reputed brand in the market. Besides, in case of large organizations, the number of jobs posted at any given time can be just too many! And considering how very few candidates end up getting interviewed, more than 98% of the applications just vanish through the recruitment process because they don’t fit the role. I mean, Google alone receives around 3 million applications every year, out of which it hires no more than 7000 candidates – that’s just one out of 428 applicants landing a job. And trust me when I say this, “Google’s not the only company that’s so selective when it comes to recruitment,” there are several more like that across America.
So, what I am trying to say here is that a recruiter can end up spending just so much time going through resumes and cover letters that will be no good later on. Recruitment selection tools are fast changing this state of affair! Software tools integrated with ATS are automating resume screening for HR. Recruitment tools of these kind use search functions to select resumes that have certain keywords related to skills and experience appearing in them only. In fact, the technology associated with pre-screening has made some progress. You have resume enrichment tools that find and add additional data about an applicant’s previous employers or performance using their public digital footprint. Artificial Intelligence is making a mark with pre-screening as well. These ‘intelligent’ resume screeners not only save the time and effort of manually screening applications but also gauge the quality of your hire by predicting how likely or unlikely it is for a certain candidate to do well in your organization.
Interviewing
Interviews present the right opportunity for a candidate to substantiate their skill set with prior experiences, and gives a recruiter a deeper understanding of their personality. And we have to agree that interviews are just so much livelier and more interactive than reading a resume. Besides, interviews showcase a candidate’s ability to think, to reason, and to convince. These qualities can be highly useful for certain positions in a company. In fact, areas like sales and marketing and communications demand an impressive personality and a certain way of talking for a professional to succeed. To assist you to assess these parameters, you can now find tools, apps, and software that monitor a candidate’s voice during an interview to let the recruiter know how fit they are for the job. These tools let you gauge the level of charm or likability that a candidate can cast upon an audience. While still in the experimental stage, voice-profiling tools can play a key role while hiring for positions where voice takes a center stage. The role of technology in interviewing will no more be limited to video interviews alone; stuff previously in the realm of science fiction, like 3D holographic technology, is all set to take virtual interviewing to the next level. With Jullian Assange and Stephen Hawking already deploying this technology to make virtual appearances in the recent past, the day is not far when recruiters would be using 3D projections of candidates during interviews.
Reference Checks
When employing a candidate, you don’t wish to leave any stone unturned. You would want to hear what previous employers have got to say about your potential employee. These are the people who can give you a fair idea of what it is to actually work with the candidate in question. You must perform a couple of reference checks to validate the information furnished by an applicant. However, making phone calls for this may not be the most efficient move in this direction. I mean that’s an approach that seemed fine a few years back, but definitely not in 2017. Who has the time to call and have a chitchat with some previous employer? You now have automated reference check tools at your fingertips. You can now have access to a detailed report on a candidate’s past performance in a matter of a few days. Another advantage of automating this process is that you can stay anonymous while accessing all the classified information on a candidate and can also base your recruitment decisions on scores generated by the tools used.
While we’ve broadly covered the technology enablement for three essential steps in recruitment, this is not a comprehensive account. The right recruitment selection tools can also track competitor recruitment strategies for you, spot your ideal candidate across the American geography, show you how your recruitment strategies are performing in comparison with your peers, and tell you what exactly needs to be changed in your recruitment strategy. Recruitment tools like Talismatic add a streak of intelligence to all your recruitment efforts.