The Role of Recruiters in the Digital Era
During the past three decades, personnel management has evolved at a very fast pace into the latest concept, which is human capital management, where organizations have started realizing that their people are valuable assets and have started investing in them. Recruitment & Selection function has now shaped into talent acquisition, and is striving to add value as business partners taking responsibility of translating the current and future needs of talent to achieve long-term goals and objectives of companies into their goals, and hunt for the right talent through various channels.
With introduction of enterprise contribution concept over individual contribution, it is of immense importance for HR to not only identify and train the key talent, but also to retain them via numerous strategies involving employee engagement, learning and development and providing competitive benefits and compensation to increase employee loyalty with the organization.
There is a very strong competition in the market for talent, and recruitment teams are in a state of war to get the right person for the right job at the right time. Recruiters often come to a situation of losing the potential candidate to the competition or getting retained by his or her current employer.
Sourcing channels have emerged from conventional news ads to job-portals during the last decade. The wave of the digital era has not limited the job search and talent hunt on job portals over the internet, but has expanded it over social media, which now is playing an integral role in bridging recruiters and candidates. During the past couple of years , LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have played a very strong role as catalysts in the hiring process and reducing “cost per hire.”
Recruiters, on the other hand, have changed their role during the past few years from conventional sourcing agents to dynamic brand ambassadors of the employers. They conduct in-depth studies on EVP (Employee Value Proposition) in the name of employer branding to increase worth of value of an employer as an entity. This, in turn, plays an integral role in the retention of key talent and markets the EVP over social media and during face-to-face interactions at campus visits, job fairs and at the time of the interviews. These developments brought in great help to the companies in attracting and retaining key talent, resulting in opportunities to fast-paced growth of the company ,having high potentials on-board and added contribution towards the goal at a relatively higher pace.
To meet all these challenges of this fast-paced digital era and effectively play their roles, recruiters should ensure to be well aware of their surroundings, competition, the sector they are operating in, and the recruitment industry in general.
Many communities and groups not only on LinkedIn and Facebook are very effective on the job hunt, but certain groups over Yahoo and Google are getting very strong and effective in tapping for a specialized skill set. They should carry social persona not only over the web but in offices and communities as they are the brand ambassadors of their employer brand and to network around to strengthen their links not only for getting candidates for open positions, but for pipelining the candidates for future needs.
Another very important aspect is to gain the trust of stakeholders of talent attraction, key talent identification, and development and retention. This will help recruiters find out future needs and understand the direction of their internal customers as well along side with management of external customers (candidates and potential candidates).