6 Key Impact of New Age Technology on Talent Acquisition

Recruiting the ‘ideal’ candidate continues to be the biggest challenge for companies of all pedigree.

Statistics pulled up by LinkedIn seconds the thought:

Talent Acquisition Stats According to LinkedIn

Talent Acquisition Statistics According to LinkedIn

Department heads would often have a picture in mind of what they define as the most ‘ideal’ and tailor made candidate to collaborate with them to propel company’s growth trajectory. They would expect all the check boxes to be ticked 100% and beyond. “No, we must not settle for anything less – the last candidate was close, like 95% there but not what we are looking for” is the message they pass to the talent acquisition team in full confidence. With such deliverable and high expectation, the job is cut out for stiff work from the talent acquisition team.

What makes it more difficult is the fact that premium candidates are mostly required to be plucked from the category of ‘passive candidates’ – not actively searching for a job but open or interested in considering one. In the advent of such a scenario, awareness, adaptability, and implementation ease of new age technology certainly stands to be the answer.

Let us highlight few key impact scenarios that technology stands to bring about as it becomes talent acquisition’s new best friend for life!

Reduce The Immensely Time Consuming and Labour Intensive ‘Candidate Engagement’ Activity

Talent acquisition (TA) experts would happily befriend any tool that could reduce the humongous hours invested in making those tiring but extremely important calls and more exhausting follow up calls for candidates who do not answer in the first attempt – phew! Advent of new age technology with machine driven personalized automated calls will look after this activity to screen, shoot out those calls, make multiple follow up calls and set up the initial HR round as well – this will directly reduce time effort by 70% to 80 % and thus improving the TAs productivity substantially. With this time saved Talent Acquisition team can focus greater energy towards ensuring higher quality work on other KRA’s of their job.

Derive Additional Candidate ‘Insights’ Not Mentioned in The Résumé

Going beyond the black and white dotted on candidate’s resume is more important today than ever before. New age technology, powerfully driven to capture and analyse these much-needed insights found outside the candidates self-documented information is critical. Enabling information as can be found in social media engagement is important to understand candidates thought process extension other than what is shared during a personal interview round. Recruiters can draw great value by looking deeper at what social forums a candidate participates, how active is he/she, expressions spoken through blogs and articles, other interests that call out behavioral traits. These key additional insights help identify and validate candidate’s belief mechanism, thinking pattern, behavioral mindset and other relevant information that will impact his/her performance at work, thus assisting TAs to make a more informed decision and improving on their critical KRA ‘Quality of Hire’.

Impact of Data Analytics World

Gen Y and Z being prolific tech savvy population, take their self-branding image quite passionately. This population would rather have you search them and not the other way around. They are active on social media platforms and keenly express their opinions on almost everything including their specific individual’s talent and skill set. How does Talent Acquisition professionals tap into these resources and leverage technology to find that ‘passive candidate’ is a powerful question. New age technology using a combination of AI and Big Data will help recruiters zero in on a lot of headaches and heart burn when it comes to things like:

making prediction on when a Passive candidate is more likely to be open to a switch
cloud-based data will help organize analysis to provide an accurate view of top applicants
AI is expected to simplify and summarize the abundant candidate information found today in multiple social-media platform and assist recruiters to manually sort profiles
make sense of data ‘Beyond Visual Range’ as used by pilots to predict possibility of air collision

Mobile Recruitment to Boost T2 and T3 Population

Ease of smartphone access has created an open e-commerce forum bringing the job seeker and employer on the same platform. Mobile recruitment is all set to extend this advantage to T2 & T3, thus building a richer talent pool. Enabled with technology aid on the lines of Big Data analytics, cloud based hiring and use of AI – mobile recruitment is much better equipped to impact both outreach and ease of collaboration for both parties involved. More recruitment firms and start-up companies are increasing their outreach using this medium as well as cutting down on substantial interview time by means of webcam sessions and using recorded video snippets making it easy to capture the study of body language in addition to the voice tone alone as done over the phone.

Black Box to Disappear

One of the core pain for job seekers is to either get delayed feedback or worse still get no feedback from recruiters on their application status. Top concern pointed out by candidates for companies that engage in feedback interview is the poor standard maintained by recruiters when it comes to pre-and post-communication which invariably leads to a scenario where job seekers are impacted by ‘black box’ situation, leaving candidates little idea of the next step of engagement. New age technology with the use of AI can permanently do away with this problem. AI can help be that perfect partner that maintains a consistent, timely and updated feedback communication, thus positively improving the entire interview experience for both sides of the world and optimize real time communication.

Simulation World to Identify Accuracy of Situational Leadership Traits

New age technology can create a simulation assessment tool that can throw real business/work life problems and understand how candidates react to it, their problem-solving skills, strategy they adopt, what is the thinking process, how agile a candidate is, ability to manage pressure and so on so forth. Simulation can possibly help measure the candidate’s willingness to learn and the ability to adapt to your company’s work culture setup, a trait which has become so necessary in the new age of recruitment as the focus is already shifting from ‘hire for a role’ to ‘hire for culture’. On the other side using simulation as a technology also benefits the candidate as they get a first-hand exposure to the upcoming challenges at hand, making both parties improve and raise their engagement and interest level to work for one another, which will also have a direct impact on employee retention.

To Sum It All Up

New age technology is certainly all set to drastically revolutionize the way recruitment has been managed traditionally. Single key focus would be to make every aspect of hiring easier and convenient for both job seeker and employer, thereby optimizing experience for both sides. With better technologies and algorithms will fasten the process of identifying the right candidate on one hand while enhancement on a more data driven approach would take away the uncomfortable hitch with recruiters ‘Gut and Instinct’ hiring approach. Embracing new technologies and working hands in glove with AI is the future of Talent Acquisition.