Technology Transforms Digital Recruiting
By Fara Rives, Director, Product Development, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Allegis Global Solutions, an Allegis Group company
Candidates want more interaction with their potential employers than most organizations can provide. That’s because too few human recruiters manage too many candidates to allow for adequate status updates, let alone meaningful conversations. Candidates don’t receive regular communications from employers they’ve applied to. They struggle to land interviews with those potential employers, and they fail to receive regular communications from employers after the interview.
These challenges have become even more urgent as companies compete for workers who expect more openness and interaction in the application process – particularly those in the Millennial and Gen Z generations. The good news is that new technologies, including those based on artificial intelligence (AI), can now balance the equation by augmenting overwhelmed human talent resources with automated capabilities for communication and management of the process. The human experience, the processes involved, and the way data is managed all contribute to a digital recruiting function that moves the needle on the candidate-employer relationship.
Digital Automation Boosts the Candidate and Recruiter Experience
Eighteen percent of a recruiting organization’s time is spent sourcing candidates, and 26 percent is spent screening candidates for open positions. Through digital automation of this activity, much of the recruiter’s time is freed to spend on high-value activities, such as advising candidates on their search, helping them evaluate their goals and directions, and preparing for interviews. Below are just a few examples of digital recruiting tools and practices in use today:
- Digital sourcing channels lead the way to candidates who live much of their lives in an online, social, and mobile environment. Tools such as AI-driven candidate aggregators automatically search these sources to build intelligence about candidates in a fraction of the time required for human research.
- Algorithmic match models apply AI to connect potential candidates to opportunities. Notably, improved technology better enables automated systems to look beyond highly inconsistent job titles and keywords to recognize skills and competencies that truly apply to the open role.
- Chatbot pre-screening and interview scheduling applications automate the repetitive tasks of recruitment, helping to quickly reduce the number of candidates while also allowing more time and human attention for the more critical interactions of the interview process.
Spanning the Recruiting Cycle
To have a real impact on the candidate experience, the digital strategy must span the recruiting cycle. The strategy includes pre-application activity such as recruitment marketing and sourcing, largely facilitated with the recruitment marketing platform, through to the candidate application itself. And, the process extends through post-application aspects of the journey, such as screening and assessment, scheduling, hiring manager interviews, and new hire onboarding. Aside from the hiring manager interviews, each of these activities is enabled and enhanced by AI technology.
The Devil is in the Data
Intelligence lies at the core of the digital recruiting experience, and that intelligence is maximized when all talent data is brought together in one place. Bringing candidate information together in a common data pool requires time and commitment, but the result is a powerful resource for intelligent talent acquisition.
With access to all information, an AI driven matching function can learn from all available information, connect opportunities that best fit the talent, and, in so doing, start the process off with high-quality candidates. The result is a reduced screening and management burden for recruiter that sets the stage for a more effective talent acquisition process.
Building an Ecosystem That Works
Bringing together a complex array of data sources, talent technologies, and related systems requires a technology ecosystem that is smart and seamless to the end-user. When smart development of data and AI tools leads to a mature system, the result is a candidate, employee, or flexible worker who remains engaged in their work and with their employer, unencumbered by the roadblock of information gaps and inconvenient phone tag with HR or the help desk. For recruiters and hiring managers, it means valuable time is spent doing the work that matters – building relationships that keep talent in the fold.
[Editors’s note: A collaborative culture, new technology in the workplace, organizational transparency, and digital recruiting are all qualities that are essential to engaging Millennials and Gen Zs, as revealed in our free report, “Employers, It’s Time to Grow up: Engaging the Millennial and Gen Z Workforce,” in which this bylined article from Fara Rives’ appears.]
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