In today’s knowledge economy, the quality of human capital serves as a competitive advantage. Therefore, the functions of sourcing, hiring, training, motivating and maintaining an engaged workforce are of decisive importance for organisations.
In this context, the role of human resource managers is undergoing a sea change, which includes working closely with those managing the business operations. Due to this, the HR department is now a strategic partner that aligns the organisation’s priorities with recruitment and employee engagement strategies.
HR managers have to make the effort, more than ever before, to understand recruitment trends.
For, recruitment trends are changing every year, if not faster, which is in sharp contrast with the situation in the past, when recruitment trends would continue for years together.
A few patterns are noticeable in the talent acquisition life cycle. Some of these are:
Social media
Social media is now inextricably woven into all aspects of life, making individuals more social than ever before. Social media is now having an impact on the hiring process.
To start with, the availability of potential employees on different social platforms and the possibility of identifying, attracting and attracting them through these platforms cannot be debated. This has made social media a definite sourcing channel for large number of organisations.
All of us leave our daily footprints in this channel and the amount of data about prospective candidates that is available there cannot be imagined.
A large number of experiments are being conducted on how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools can identify patterns and make inferences about abilities, interest levels and fitment of potential candidates.
According to a recent study by MeritTrac and SHRM, about 80% of organisations have already adopted or is looking at adopting social media profiling tools and online simulations in the near future.
Just-in-time hiring
Organisations have been focused on reducing the ‘inventory cost’ of talent. So, HR departments are being asked to hire for a specific job/ assignment as and when it is required.
This demands agile recruitment processes, creative sourcing models and tailored assessments delivered innovatively.
This shift in hiring strategy will significantly impact existing campus hiring approaches. The start-up ecosystem is taking a lead in this by establishing best practices for others to adopt.
Reliable certifications
With the changing demand–supply dynamics in hiring, talent-sourcing teams will be more focused on sifting through talent to identify the right one.
This would make the hiring process more efficient.To help them succeed in this, organisations will prefer candidates with reliable skill certifications.Certifications are a testimony to their ability to perform at job.
A layer of assessment will be included in the hiring process to ensure the candidate’s fitment to the job he or she is being hired for.
Mobility
The end-to-end recruitment process of a candidate is tedious, which becomes a nightmare in a mass recruitment scenario.
To find the right talent, HR departments have to manage a large number of documents, test scores, interview schedules and interviewer feedback for hundreds of applicants.
Collating all this data for each applicant to make a well-informed hiring decision is often a manual and time-consuming process leading to longer time lags between the selection process and the offer resulting in high dropouts and disengaged candidates.
With an increasing adoption of mobile and digital solutions, there is a possibility for HR to embrace innovative mobile technologies and streamline the recruitment process.
In this context, organisations have been leveraging the power of mobility to integrate their entire recruitment process from sourcing to assessing, interviewing and on-boarding on a single platform. Such integrations and delivery on mobile platforms are making the process paperless, convenient, error-free and efficient.
Quality of hire
With the cost of operations increasing constantly, HR departments are pushed to optimise hiring costs. Cost and speed of hire will continue to be an important matrix in tracking the performance of hiring teams. Process innovations and automation will be the key to optimising cost and speed of hiring. Yet, the most important matrix organisations will look for will be the quality of hire.As organisations strive to make hiring efficient and effective, the total cost of ownership of talent will depend a lot on ‘Quality of Hiring’. Organizations have already been focusing on best ‘fit’ candidates rather than just looking at the best candidates. The emerging technology landscape, mobility,
APP’ification of life, Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are expected to cause a colossal shift in the way recruitment will be handled in the future. However, even with all these changes, technology will not replace human resource departments. Yet, it will replace those who do not see these transformations happening in their environment.
(Ravi Panchanadan is the CEO of MeritTrac Services)
