When HR and recruiters used to speak about technology, it meant an applicant tracking system or whether to post jobs on digital job boards or social media. Now, however, powerful digitization technologies have found their way to recruiting and are dramatically changing the landscape.
HR now has the same technologies that have been used by marketing departments to find, attract, build a relationship with, and establish strategic data bases on customers.
It is time to use these new technologies for employer branding and recruiting. Let’s use them and truly hack recruiting to significantly improve our ability to search and find candidates quickly and automate administrative tasks, measures, and metrics!
Today’s applicant tracking systems make it easy for job candidates to apply for company jobs and allow for tracking of critical information and metrics in the recruiting process. In addition, the best of them allow for instantaneous communication with job candidates on their status in the recruiting process.
With these technologies, job candidate net promoter scores can be in the 90s!
But that’s just the beginning. Companies can significantly reduce the cost of interviewing by using pre-recorded, video conferencing screening interviews, and chatbots to begin initial screening questions, especially for entry-level positions and positions in retail and call centers.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling recruiters to find active and passive job candidates in seconds. AI is already changing the roles of recruiters and is enabling companies to improve their understanding of what competencies make their best employees the best—and to discover these competencies among their hundreds of job candidates.
Facial recognition technology is also making its way to recruiting, but it comes with the risk of screening out the wrong job candidates or of discriminating against qualified candidates based on gender, race, or age. This technology is still evolving. Any assessment test to screen out candidates must be statistically validated, or it runs the risk of making bad or discriminatory decisions.
In the coming years, blockchain will be used in recruiting and will enable recruiters to instantaneously verify the degrees, certifications, and previous employment of job candidates.
Human resources leaders, recruiters, and their IT partners will need to be very discerning when purchasing new technologies to truly understand which ones provide real value and which ones are more marketing fluff than substance. Or, in the words of Silicon Valley technologists, which new technologies are a “hammer looking for a nail.” Recruiting needs reliable technologies built with an understanding of recruiting, the laws governing recruiting, its processes, and the empirical evidence of industrial/organizational psychology.
Finally, the integration of new digital technologies will mean understanding what digital technologies can do more effectively than human beings and when human beings provide better value.
More than 80 percent of digital integrations fail because the culture rejects the technology and the digitization project did not involve the workers in determining the process, properly train them, and emotionally prepare them for their new role.
If you want to be successful in implementing new technology, remember it is all about the human relationships.
The technologies are here, are already transforming recruiting, and are being continually improved. Now is the time to hack recruiting!
Watch for my new book, Hack Recruiting, to be released soon.
Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting and is a Managing Partner of InnovationOne. He consults and provides hands-on support to improve recruiting and retention, cultures of innovation, and develop agile leaders and teams. You can subscribe to his weekly blogs that will help you overcome obstacles to improve your employee recruiting and retention and to develop and nurture cultures of innovation. Go to http://www.victorhrconsultant.com.