_”You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it’s up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time.”_
― Rich Lesser (CEO of Boston Consulting Group)
Technology is disrupting the recruitment process in more ways than ever before. There are more people today in the world who do not fit the need of the organizations than ever before. What this means is, there are fewer people with needed skills, and the need for organizations to find them quickly and attract them is fierce.
In their book, The War for Talent (Published in 1997), Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod make a case that in the next two decades, an organization’s very existence will depend on its ability to attract, develop, and retain managers at all levels. Today, twenty-two years later, their assessment stands proven with an addendum that to attract, develop, and retain managers would need the adoption of various technologies in the process of recruitment.
Since technology is playing a significant role in the process of recruitment and the role is only going to be higher going forward, we will study the top five trends that would be dominant in 2020.
Artificial Intelligence
About 52% of recruiters say that their most significant problem in talent acquisition is to identify high potential candidates from a large pool of applicants. It was emphasized repeatedly by recruiters that the challenge has been in processes that needed repeated and manual functions. How can AI bring optimization to recruiting? For a start, at a basic level, AI can automate recruiting workflow, especially those that needed repetitive and high-volume tasks.
It saves the recruiter’s time. It also eliminates the scope of human error. For example, screening resumes are considered a burdensome task. AI can automate this function. AI can also match candidates with jobs, bringing in better applicants in a short time, almost immediately, so to say. AI can also be deployed for chat-bots for the initial screening of candidates.
It’s not easy to deploy AI in recruiting. You need lots of data. It would help if you also had an outstanding Applicant Tracking System (See: www.vultus.com)
Interview Chatbots
What is an interview chatbot? Well, we all know what general chatbots are. They are chat agents that initiate a preliminary conversation with a prospect. Interview Chatbots, once a candidate applies on a company’s website, start a conversation with him. Chatbots can perform the following functions:
– Screen a candidate’s resume.
– Schedule Interviews.
– Answer the candidate’s questions.
– Improve overall Candidate Experience
If powered by AI, interview chatbots could well conduct the entire interview themselves.
There are some barriers, however. For example, would a chatbot be emphatic as a good recruiter is? Would it understand patterns in language? We all speak differently, using different words, even when meaning the same thing. And would it survive a spam attack?
As per Global Market Insights, the overall market size for chatbots worldwide would be over $1.3 billion by 2024. What percentage of $1.3 billion would be for interview chatbots remains to be seen? But one thing is for sure. It’s going to be adopted in 2020 by recruiters at a faster pace than in 2019. It’s a trend that can explode in terms of adoption.
Candidate Experience
73% of candidates say that job searching is one of the most stressful things in life. While it may sound a little overstated, although backed by a reliable survey, there is truth to it. 60% of the organizations (In a study of 500 companies) say Candidate Experience is one of the most significant transformations they want to execute.
Lousy candidate experience results in losses and could affect your reputation in no time. Study the data below:
– 60% of the job seekers have had a bad candidate experience.
– 72% of those job seekers share that experience on employer review sites such as Glassdoor, Comparably, or social networks.
Candidate Experience is not just a change in strategy. Organizations need to be equipped with the right technological solutions to enable the recruiters to execute the best candidate experience possible. Vultus equips recruiters with just that.
See: https://www.vultus.com/
A PwC survey shows that 49% of the job seekers turned down jobs because of bad candidate experience. So, in 2020 the focus will be in optimizing candidate experience by:
Implementing the right technological tools.
– Being candidate-centric.
– Being transparent.
– Personalizing the candidate journey.
Diversity and Inclusion
“In 2020 and beyond, as companies continue to build action-oriented diversity and inclusion teams, we expect to see a wave of hiring for leaders and managers that will help carry forward the mission of building a more diverse and inclusive workforce,” Glassdoor’s chief economist, Andrew Chamberlain, wrote.
Diversity in organization matters. Diverse organizations are 33% more likely to have financial returns higher than their industry average. There are tangible benefits. Diverse organizations are also safer when it comes to the breeding of unethical culture. Uber’s example of unethical practices comes to mind.
In a McKinsey report, gender diversity was correlated with profitability (You can read the report by clicking on this link: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity). More and more mid-sized organizations are making diversity and inclusion as their top priority. Recruitment will undergo a sea of change as organizations increasingly adopt Diversity and Inclusion approach.
According to Deloitte, 67% of job seekers use diversity as an essential factor when considering job offers. The benefits are apparent, but to execute diversity in recruitment, it will be a task that a recruiter will not find easy, because the data sets in screening for candidates will increase, resulting in fewer results to pick.
Vultus helps recruiters with screening candidates in alignment with the organization’s Diversity and Inclusion objectives.
HR Technology Adoption
As an Applicant Tracking Company ourselves, we understand the problems recruiters face today. Organizations are adopting flexible work schedules and remote work. The immediate challenge that poses is whether organizations have a cloud-based solution or solutions to automate workflows to:
– Optimally manage a global team through one interface.
– Deliver HR services from the cloud.
– Ensure the wellness of the employees.
– Assign tasks and track performance.
Companies adopting HR technologies like Vultus will have benefits that are not confined just in recruitment. The other benefits will be:
Better Company Brand Image. Consider this: When deciding where to apply for a job, 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer is essential.
– Higher Retention. Consider this: The average employee exit costs 33% of their annual salary.
– 4X improvement in HR Managers’ Performance.
This year will see more and more companies, even SMEs, adopting newer technologies-mostly cloud-based- to automate their recruitment and workforce management.
These are the five trends that are more likely to change the face of hiring in 2020. At the forefront, we at Vultus are committed to affect and be a part of that change.
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