Candidate experience is something that didn’t matter much back then, but today, it’s an important aspect of recruiting. Technology has revolutionized this by improving the process from the get-go: by making jobs easier to find, giving information easier, and making the process more personal for the job candidates.
Digital recruitment, sometimes called social recruitment or online recruitment, occurs when hiring managers and human resources professionals use technology as a tool to attract and hire the best talent for an open job listing. Online recruiting involves less human interaction, reaches a much broader audience, files records electronically and provides selection tools electronically. This reduces the cost for storage, as well as the cost of employees required to maintain and administer recruitment and selection procedures. The five steps involved in recruitment process are as follows: (i) Recruitment Planning (ii) Strategy Development (iii) Searching (iv) Screening (v) Evaluation and Control.
Another added advantage of utilizing digital recruitment tools is that it helps save a huge amount of time as all the essential documents related to candidates can be retrieved and reviewed in an instant. Moreover, HR teams can effortlessly screen candidates and quickly create important records. Mobile recruitment is hiring with the use of a mobile phone. An easy to use mobile experience helps the candidates to search and apply for jobs. Mobile recruitment also helps you to get maximum out of social channels. 79% of job seekers use social media when they search for a job.
Corporates are increasingly adopting technology-aided recruitment tools that can be leveraged remotely and can ensure hiring as well as business continuity amid disruptions, and the virtual model of recruitment is here to stay, according to experts. There was a rush towards new-age technology-aided recruitment/HR tools in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and new-age recruitment tools will continue to be leveraged extensively and increasingly in the future too.
‘Corporates want to have data-based and analysis-driven inputs to make recruitment decisions and they employ various modern tools to ensure candidates’ cultural and job role fitment,’ said Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer – Mettl. These tools range from pre-employment aptitude, cognitive, domain, and psychometric assessments to virtual interviews to data-driven campus hiring intelligence to predictive analytics for future skills to competency frameworks and accompanied job-role mapping. ‘Pre-employment technical assessments, advanced coding simulators and online coding interviews are in huge demand too for hiring software developers, data scientists, data mining professionals, and front-end and back-end developers,’ Gupta said.
Moreover, with traditional campus hiring getting challenging by the day, companies are adopting a virtual route for their entire process of hiring — selection, screening, interviews, and onboarding. ‘The end-to-end management of campus hiring processes like building campus intelligence, sorting the campuses, engaging the students with virtual activities, selecting through online assessments, video interviewing, and post-hiring engagement are successfully being done online with the new-age platforms,’ Gupta said. Sector-wise, IT & ITES companies, Automobile, FMCG, eCommerce, Lifesciences, Manufacturing have adopted these new-age technologies for their recruitment needs. ‘IT/ITes is the biggest chunk of clients taking our assessments,’ Gupta said, adding that the total number of candidates proctored in 2020 stood at 8.9 million.
According to Kaushik Banerjee, Vice President and Business Head of Teamlease.com & Freshersworld.com, HR Tech has now made its position strong and is working on some cutting edge technologies to give a better experience and desired output to the HR and Talent Acquisition teams. When asked if new-age screening practices will be retained by the companies in a post-pandemic world, Banerjee said, ‘For sure, post-pandemic a layer of personal touch will be added, however, to ensure they respect each other’s time and efforts in commuting – the virtual model will continue’. Digitisation solutions have added proctoring technologies to eliminate undesirable activities, Banerjee said, adding ‘our pre-assessment solution – CEAT, helps recruiters to identify and scrub 85-90 per cent of the talents at one go. Out of over 40k customers, 60-70 per cent are using this facility to identify candidates’.