How Technology Is Helping the Recruitment Function in 2020

Create a successful recruitment process by utilising technology

This year has brought a lot of uncertainty across the globe, but despite the challenges we’re currently facing, modern technology has allowed many companies to continue working and many employers to keep on hiring. 

If anything, these challenges have sped up the timeline for the biggest recruitment tech trends of the year and presented a unique opportunity for businesses to experiment with and implement new processes to help keep their teams connected.

Recently, we hosted a live panel discussion to discuss the top tech recruitment trends for 2020, with some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. Here, we’ve picked up the key advice and insights shared by our panelists to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

1. Video Recruitment

‍Video recruitment isn’t new, however, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, use of video recruitment will be accelerated in 2020 and will likely be here to stay, becoming a key part of many recruitment processes going forward. 

Video interviews are used in lieu of an in-person interview and can be especially helpful for remote recruiting during the social distancing restrictions of the current climate. These interviews take much the same format as a regular interview and can be a good opportunity to ‘meet’ a candidate without being there in person.

Pre-recorded videos are particularly useful as part of the pre-screening process as candidates record themselves answering preset questions in a short clip. These clips can be reviewed and used as a starting point for identifying appropriate candidates that may be a good fit for a role. 

“It’s very important that trialing and testing take place to ensure that bias and discrimination are not increasing because of this technology. A business we worked with experimented with the option of allowing candidates to not be in the frame or only submit audio and this resulted in a significant rise in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander applicants. ” - Sascha Gray, VP Sales at Weirdly

2. Artificial Intelligence

There are many different interpretations of what AI is and, when it was first introduced to the recruitment market, its definition was fairly open for interpretation. This created an opportunity for many vendors to position AI in a way that suited their needs and lead to situations where solutions were over-promised and under-delivered. As a result, the recruitment market has been hesitant towards AI. This is starting to change as recruitment teams are looking to find innovative ways to integrate automation into their hiring process so that they can spend less time on admin-heavy processes and more time on inherently human tasks. 

True AI is all about a program learning a subset of rules that can then be used to adapt and learn in different situations to make human-like decisions. In recruitment, AI is useful in the early stages of the hiring process as it can be helpful in matching people with the right roles. It has the ability to help recruiters to make great decisions because of the magnitude of data points it can call on to make a recommendation. If used correctly, AI can help to minimise human bias and help to prevent discrimination.

“We’re starting to see a really interesting era for AI, where people are looking at how AI and humans can tie in together and businesses can benefit from the best of both worlds in empathy and automation.” - Mike Keating, Co-Founder at Attract.ai 

3. Soft Skills

Soft skills are becoming increasingly important in today’s workforce as technology and automation take care of more of the capabilities once used to measure a candidate’s suitability.

Taking the time to identify the core soft skills that are required to perform specific roles can be a really useful base for creating assessment metrics to measure candidates against. Getting these metrics right can help create a universal indicator of success for specific roles, helping to hire candidates who will perform better and stay in their roles for longer.

Increasingly, more employers are leaning towards including ‘must achieves’ over ‘must-haves’ on their candidates’ scorecards to help hire talent with the right attitude to succeed in the role rather than a certain checklist of tangible skills. This is a good way to indicate future success in a role, as it focuses on matching the strengths that a candidate has to offer to a suitable role rather than weeding out people who don’t fit the mould.

“We hire for aptitude and we fire for attitude, so why don’t we start by hiring for attitude?” - Jerome Ternynck, founder and CEO at SmartRecruiters

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4. Data Governance and Security

Data privacy is more than just a trend, it is something that companies should be taking very seriously as more businesses gain access to personal information that is stored online. These rules are in place to protect both companies and candidates. It is important for companies to take the time to work out if they are actually compliant with data security laws. The first step companies can take to ensure compliance is to understand where their data is being stored, before going on to look at how to manage that data. For example, are multiple copies of resumes sitting in email inboxes, recruitment software and other communication platforms? If the answer is yes, then it is likely time to consider implementing a process to streamline and store personal data efficiently, all in one safe secure place. 

Data security has shifted from being just a box ticking exercise for security teams and should be a priority to everybody in an organisation as each employee has an important role to play in keeping personal data safe. 

Another important factor to consider is if your clients and partners are assessing their own security practices and if they’re having expert third party vendors assess them. If they can’t provide you with a report confirming their compliance, then that should serve as a red flag that they could potentially be putting your business at risk.

Finally, you need to make sure you have a crisis management plan in place, in case of a data breach. You may also need to consider if your partners have one on your behalf too. The reality is, the most secure systems can have breaches and if you have a plan in place you will have a better outcome when it comes to system down times and lost revenue.
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Using tech to be more human

As technology continues to advance and the capabilities of what is possible for recruitment teams to achieve increases, it is likely that technology will allow employees more time to focus on building connections and strategic planning. Technology is allowing recruitment teams to get back to doing what they do best, working with people and helping them thrive. 

"The implementation of HR tech should be to augment, automate and ease the heavy-lifting of admin tasks, this allows HR professionals to get back to the job that they wanted to do and put the ‘human’ back into Human Resources." - Tim Griffiths, Co-Founder & CSO at Xref