Businesses can lean on advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate even more complex and personal recruitment steps. (Photo: Shutterstock)
As unemployment rises and concerns about COVID's spread continue to mount, organizations need to ensure their recruitment processes are safe and efficient, while accommodating the new challenges posed by the high volumes of new applicants, cost-consciousness and a pressing need for digital processes.
While each organization has unique workforce demands, all recruitment teams should aim to create an engaging experience for candidates with as little safety risk as possible. As more workers look for new jobs, it will become increasingly difficult for teams to efficiently screen and select new hires, especially without the ability to vet candidates through face-to-face meetings.
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It can be difficult to find a balance between giving candidates a chance to prove themselves and maintaining an efficient recruitment funnel. Here are a few sure-fire digital strategies to supercharge businesses' talent planning and recruitment processes, so they can navigate today's new challenges with confidence and find their next great new hire.
Digital vs. digital transformation
Many organizations already leverage digital tools, such as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or HRIS. While these tools are examples of recruitment digitization, true digital transformation requires an ongoing commitment to solving problems and improving inefficient processes with new technology.
Challenges in the world of recruitment have accelerated rapidly because of COVID-19, which means digital transformation will, too. For example, virtual interviews and digital job previews have rapidly become the norm to replace in-person meetings or job tryouts that could be deemed risky.
Orienting organizations toward digital transformation can not only keep teams safe, but also speed up workflows, improve the candidate experience, and collect data to measure success. With unemployment rising, businesses will likely see a larger number of applicants than in the past with regards to open roles; the time and money spent to thoroughly screen applicants can quickly become overwhelming without leaning on new technologies.
To help craft a strategy that tackles these challenges and meets businesses' unique needs, there are a few key things to consider when building a digital recruitment process.
1. Virtual processes
The first step to enabling digital transformation is integrating technology into the recruitment process. Every team must find virtual ways to conduct activities that typically happen in person, like interviews or job tryouts, in order to address ongoing safety concerns, improve efficiency, and create a seamless experience for candidates.
Most teams should start with an ATS, and then integrate tools that can enhance its capabilities. Incorporating candidate assessment tools, virtual interviews, digital job previews, and onboarding can vastly improve the power of your existing ATS. Prioritize tools that directly integrate with your existing tech stack to ensure the experience is seamless for your recruiters and candidates.
2. Matching technology
It's hard to select the perfect candidate without meeting anyone in person, especially with more applicants applying wherever they find relevant openings, regardless of their former industry or role. To make data-driven decisions, recruiters need tools to assess candidates on job-related criteria like essential hard and soft skills, cognitive ability, and more.
Incorporating tools like skill assessments, virtual job tryouts, and situational judgement tests will not only help recruiters sift through a large pool of candidates, but also enable candidates to learn about the requirements of the job and if the role is right for them. Plus, as opportunities to learn about the job and company, you can reduce the risk of turnover and save you from re-recruiting after a mis-hire.
3. Automation
Digitizing recruitment also improves the efficiency and fairness of your hiring process. Many teams first explore automation with auto-emails, resumé-scraping software, or interview sign-up calendars. However, these alone may not be enough to handle the new volumes of applications teams will face. It can both harm the applicant experience and overwhelm recruiters if it is too difficult to review every application fairly.
Rather than wasting expensive work hours on high-volume, repetitive tasks, businesses can lean on advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate even more complex and personal recruitment steps. Certain tasks, like scoring a virtual interview, ranking applicants, or providing detailed feedback, can now be partially or fully automated with tools including (but not limited to) pre-employment assessments, candidate matching platforms, or natural language processors.
4. Business intelligence
Virtual processes can speed up workflows and improve efficiency for teams, but they can also create new problems if they are difficult to analyze and adopt. That's why it's critical that businesses carefully evaluate new technology solutions to ensure they can track their most important KPIs.
Business intelligence combines strategy and technology, allowing teams to clearly view the results of their digital tech stack and the processes they support. Thus, it's key to ensure that any tools that are invested in have data analytics or reporting capabilities. By transforming the raw data of the tech stack into actionable, easy-to-understand insights, it's possible to monitor processes to make informed decisions, adapt to new challenges, and improve workflows.
In the past, teams had time to incrementally adapt their processes and adopt new technology. Now, this extraordinary period of time calls for a swift and intentional focus on leveraging the best tools available. By keeping these building blocks in mind, building a digital recruitment strategy that allows teams to address challenges as they emerge gives organizations one less thing to worry about.
Barend Raaff is CEO of Harver, a full suite candidate selection platform designed to enable innovative companies around the world to hire better, faster.
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