7 Innovative Tech Tools Recruiters Should Leverage Today
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Today’s Question: What recruiting tech tools are you most excited about? What general trends or specific technologies do you think are disrupting recruiting and hiring for the better? Share your insights with our readers!
1. Video Technology (and Maybe Virtual Reality One Day)
One of the things that I have seen make a big impact in hiring – and I imagine it will continue to make a big impact – is video interviewing.
In 2015, I was recruiting for a company that made the decision to replace its second-round interviews with pre-recorded video interviews. The process before that was: We would conduct a recruiter phone interview, a hiring manager phone interview, and then, finally, an onsite interview where the candidate would meet with various people.
In the new process, we replaced the second round-interview with a pre-recorded video interview. In the new process, the recruiter would send over a link after the first interview and the candidate would then have 48 hours to complete a video interview where the questions were already recorded. This streamlined the process, and instead of waiting for hiring manager feedback and then going through the process of scheduling a second-round interview, we often had the candidate ready to come on site within a week. This change in our process cut our time-to-fill metric by an average of two weeks.
The nice thing is that virtually everyone has access to a camera these days, whether it is built into their computer or on their smartphone. Typically, everyone is capable of completing a video interview.
As virtual reality starts to advance and become more accessible, I can see it replacing video interviews. You can have people from across the globe all come together to interview a candidate who is in their own living room. The whole thing could take place in a virtual meeting room.
Gone are the days when you would fly someone out to the company headquarters because you wanted a face-to-face meeting. As technology advances, I imagine video interviewing and, eventually, virtual reality, will be staples of corporate recruiting.
Text messaging is rapidly becoming an integral part of the recruitment process. A growing number of HR departments and recruiters see this means of communicating with potential job candidates as a successful channel for acquiring and onboarding new talent. The era of print recruitment advertising is long gone, and with millions of open job postings available on thousands of job boards, it has become increasingly difficult for employers to broadcast open opportunities in a way that reaches the target audience quickly and affordably.
Email recruitment advertising has been a stable go-to tool for recruiters for the purposes of laser-targeting an effective recruitment message. However, as open rates decline and inbox spam continues to grow, recruiters have to embrace the tiny bite-sized messages that fit in 140 characters or on the face of an Apple Watch if they are to reach that evasive “perfect candidate.” Text campaigns are a great way to support email campaigns and reach candidates via multiple channels.
Text messaging campaigns can be an effective tool for recruiters to find new talent and stay competitive in the market. Test out a texting campaign in conjunction with proven channels like email and phone, and evaluate what methods are most effective. With technology constantly evolving, it’s imperative for savvy recruiters and hiring managers to stay on the cusp of the latest recruitment trends and tactics to continue to reach top talent.
Vendors are still investing heavily in mobile development and continuing to leverage big data. For the big data part, not only are recruiting vendors trying to help companies hire more efficiently by improving how they find talent, but they’re also taking things a step further and integrating companies’ performance and turnover data to identify the best hiring channels and strategies.
However, recruiting is just a piece of the puzzle. It’s really about the entire employee experience. Starting from the candidate’s first contact with the recruiting team until the employee’s last day at a company, improving all these experiences is imperative. So, it will be tremendously valuable if recruiting software companies can somehow help improve the employee experience. I’ve observed that a lot of ATSs are opening their APIs to do integrations to help solve for this. I’ve also seen some companies, such as Greenhouse, acquiring other companies that are focused on onboarding and employee management, such as Parklet, in order to provide a seamless solution.
We’re seeing a lot of movement in the predictive analytics space. We work with a company called Joberate that takes publicly available social media data and turns it into actionable intelligence around employees’ job-seeking activities. Essentially, it identifies employees that seem to be looking to leave their organizations. That plays directly into measuring attrition and retention rates right down to the department or individual employee level and enables companies to identify areas of concern before they happen, whether it’s the potential departure of a key employee or a department that needs to improve employee engagement.
New screening technologies are significantly increasing the success rates of hiring. The old-fashioned behavioral interviewing method and its siblings are almost a half-century old. And, they are so commonly mentioned on the Web that they can be easily tricked by savvy candidates.
For me, the (as yet) largely unrealized potential for more widespread use of data science in hiring and recruiting – as well as retention and managing turnover – is very exciting.
Using data from ‘what’s been true in the past’ to create models for what is likely to happen in the future can be a powerful decision tool that augments the intuitions and experiences of HR professionals. Where relevant data is plentiful and the processes to collect are already in place, the potential for a small investment in data science to generate significant value is high. You don’t necessarily need “big data” to get started or get business value from data science. Why guess who might be a good fit for your firm when you can use data to predict who is more likely to be a good fit?
Currently, mobile technology is extremely important to the way business is conducted, and recruiting and hiring are not exceptions to this. It is very simple for job seekers to search for jobs via their phones and other mobile devices, making other, older methods of job searching obsolete in many ways.
Social media is also a new technological tool with the potential to continue to transform the hiring and recruiting processes. Utilizing mobile and social is an important consideration for organizations who want to engage job candidates in the digital age. Organizations need to be open to using mobile and social channels to reach out to, recruit, and track candidates who are increasingly connected through devices like cellphones and tablets and are largely engaging through social media channels.
