At the start of 2018, Bullhorn research outlined that the talent shortage is once again the top challenge for recruitment professionals (52 percent).
As companies realise the strategic importance of recruitment and its role in business survival, success and growth, they are quickly learning to digitise candidate search and recruitment, in order to speed up the selection process, attract top talent and keep pace with employees’ shifting expectations.
An assortment of technologies have sprung up to help recruiters search for talent. Some invite jobseekers to use platforms – such as LinkedIn – to save their skills and experience.
Others include digital tools, such as video, to interview candidates, especially for regional hires. While others use chatbots and software for advanced screening of resumes, to help manage high volume recruitments. Some believe the latter can be especially useful to promote fairer selection, by removing favouritism or partiality.
So, if digitising your recruitment process is a help, not a hindrance, how can you make sure it works for you?
While there’s controversy still over how social media organisations are using or compromising our data, the fact remains; there’s a huge amount of data that’s already out there and very probably some of it, will be of relevance.
Company culture can be hard to define. And yet, once HRs have a handle of this, it helps greatly with the matching process. To assess how well a potential candidate will fit into your company’s culture and structure, social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, can offer a window into someone’s personality, to help with this matching process. This method will save time in the long run.
Having a strong brand is very important in the recruitment process. People often underestimate just how important it is.
As attracting talent becomes more competitive, a brand strategy will help candidates consider you, over and above alternative companies, that don’t have a strong brand.
This will include ensuring you manage your recruitment strategy online, for instance, providing interesting commentary from existing employees, through written or video testimonials and day-in-the-life type articles. Ensuring your company has a profile on social channels and any relevant publications, will help enormously too.
Data is crucial to digitising the recruitment process. Effectively, it will enable you to assess the effectiveness of any strategy that you’ve implemented, giving you a better chance of developing future strategies to deliver results.
It’s great too for the HR team, to show through metrics and measurement, the success of a campaign, to the management team, such as cost per hire and hire cycle times. It’s also a great way to help explain perhaps why top talent is not being attracted to the business – maybe because the management team is too slow to make decisions?
It will also provide a window on the channels that are working for you and those that are not so effective. This will help to cut down on any time that is not being used efficiently.
Too often, HR is called upon to ‘find someone’ for a role because the requirement has become urgent. Sadly, in today’s competitive world, this is going to limit your chances of finding the right person for the job.
Instead, a more strategic approach is required, such as acquiring a talent pool (link to blog on talent pools).
One way to do this, is to advertise job openings online, through say, your own social platforms or website. A strong talent pool helps to identify potential candidates ahead of requiring the candidates. It proves enormously helpful when a job opening does come up, saving a lot of time and resource.
It works in exactly the same way as you’d expect but, with a digital recruitment strategy, the data can be used to save details of previous candidates, previous job roles and so on.
This gives the organisation a deeper insight into the skills, expertise they’re looking for and can provide an opportunity to dive into the pool, to retrieve previous candidates, to check where they’re at. Maybe now, you will have the right job for them. This saves a great deal of recruitment advertising, not to mention the time spent on search, selection and interviews.
If you would like to know more about how you can digitise your recruitment process, contact our Managing Director, Richard Morgan on 020 7183 6232.