The war for talent is burgeoning, as organizations vie for top talent and face operating and cost pressures. On the one hand, job seekers are deciding which organization to join depending on factors such as the candidate experience to learning opportunities provided by their potential employers. At the same time, recruitment professionals are increasingly turning to technology to meet their talent needs. Intelligent recruitment is the new normal- where hiring experts would intersperse technology to acquire the right fit, for the right role at the right time. 

Emerging Tech and Tools

Applicant-tracking-systems have served as useful automated tools to reduce a recruiters’ burden of manual tasks, allowing them to focus on more value-adding work.

Emerging technologies such as Big Data and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are already changing the function. These new technologies and tools are transforming the hiring journey by helping recruiters identify, assess and on-board candidates better.

A data-driven approach is helping recruiters find the best fit. Predictive modelling is helping organizations to assess, anticipate, and pre-empt outcomes or candidate behaviors based on actual data:

• Internal organizational records of employee data such as attrition, employee lifecycle information, engagement surveys and feedback, can help predict the future performance of an applicant. 
• Employee and candidate information from a variety of social media channels and platforms can help assess cultural fit. 
• Business indicators such as GDP forecasts, turnover numbers, production performance etc. can be used to model the talent-needs based on data trends. 

The inflow of data, when embedded into workforce analytics solutions can yield useful insights to help HR make real-time and relevant hiring decisions. 

Companies that can hire more quickly also save more: a lower time-to-hire is directly correlated with a lower cost-per-hire.

Recruitment Analytics

• Recruitment marketing: Becoming a talent magnet involves painstaking efforts to understand what drives and motivates a particular kind of talent to join particular organizations. Creating a strong employer brand is an ongoing data-heavy commitment. For example, conducting sentiment analysis on interview responses and social media posts can help HR establish the strength of the EVP. Data can help gather an outside-in view. Mining data from employer review sites like Glassdoor can help build or course-correct the employer branding strategy. 
• Diverse and detailed sourcing: Knowing where to find “your type of talent” needs multiple data-sources, and using those insights correctly. From online job portals, to hackathon groups, analytics helps continuously gather current and potential profiles. It helps recruiters tap into multiple talent pools, and hire based on myriad factors like skill-fit, personality-fit, culture-fit, etc. 
• Efficient Screening: High-volume recruitment starts with efficient screening. AI-based intelligent parsing of resumes can help eliminate the poor quality profiles at the outset, allowing recruiters to better assess more valuable, soft skills and cognitive skills which are the need of the hour.
• Candidate experience: The perfect candidate experience is invaluable in today’s talent market. Data can help recruiters actively engage with ongoing candidates through real-time updates and insights. For example, conversational chatbots can assist recruiters by engaging candidates at crucial points in the recruitment and onboarding journey. 
• Assessment: When carefully designed, analytics algorithms can help reduce biases and human errors, giving a more realistic view of the candidate. 

A New Recruitment Mindset

Making adequate use of emerging technologies in recruitment demands a new recruitment mindset that leverages technology to solve human problems. Even as the tools recruiters use become more sophisticated, the end goal remains the same: to attract the right people for the role by creating a compelling candidate experience with a human touch. Design thinking and data analytics can equip recruiters with the right capabilities.

This article was first published in People Matters.