What’s the most difficult part of the recruitment process for your company? Is it finding the right candidates? Keeping them engaged during the selection process? Sorting resumes? Onboarding? Sharlyn Lauby’s new book, The Recruiter’s Handbook: A Complete Guide for Sourcing, Selecting, and Engaging the Best Talent, delves deeply into all of these topics, but what caught my attention most is how the right HR tech can make even the most well-designed processes more effective.
Innovations in AI and data analytics have created exciting new opportunities for the HR industry, but you don’t have to buy the latest and greatest tech tool to improve your recruiting process with software. Chances are, there are some features of your current software platform you could use more effectively right now to find higher quality candidates in less time. Here are just a few.
More than half of job seekers search for jobs on their mobile devices, and among Millennials that number jumps to 78%. The prevalence of mobile job search remains high across most occupations, with blue collar jobs seeing the highest rates. White collar jobs that require people to sit at a desk see lower mobile search rates, but even among computer occupations, mobile activity still accounts for over 45% of searches.
What does all that mean for your recruitment strategy? It means companies need a functional mobile experience that will make it easy for candidates to find jobs and apply on their smartphone or tablet. The Kronos Workforce Ready mobile app, for example, uses predictive smart search to help candidates find position details and job requirements. Users can easily apply online, and the app is designed to reduce bounce rates and abandoned applications. It also connects to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile to auto-populate the application with key information.
This is a huge topic that could cover a lot of territory, but with the limited space we have here, let’s just take a look at three helpful functions:
One of the most challenging aspects of technology for recruiting is that it can’t evaluate natural human language, and that means some candidates are screened out because they don’t use the right buzzwords—even when they would make excellent employees. Ultimate Software is tackling that problem with its Xander AI platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand text-based responses and even gauge sentiments. This technology applies not only to recruiting, but also throughout the Ultimate Software HCM product.
Onboarding begins before the candidate starts on Day One, and it’s a key factor for retention. Handled well, onboarding can increase your first-year retention rate to 91%. Vibe HCM does an excellent job of helping companies improve the onboarding experience using tools like these:
By monitoring and tracking key recruiting metrics, you can pull insights from your recruitment data to predict which candidates will fit best in your culture, how long they are likely to stay, how long it will take to fill a position, and what you can expect your first-year attrition rate to be. Analytics dashboards put all this information at your fingertips, and with the right tools you can drill down into key metrics based on employee demographics or other data.
For example, this analytics dashboard from ECI breaks down employee terminations by demographics like gender, ethnicity, and location:
How does this benefit you? By giving you the information you need to finetune your recruitment process, resulting in reduced cost per hire, better retention rates, and higher employee productivity.
New tech innovations do hold a lot of potential for HR, but standard capabilities like a built-in ATS, candidate support, and onboarding can still make a huge difference over legacy HR software and processes. Even if you’re not ready to jump into AI yet, start by evaluating your current software to see whether it’s time invest in a more efficient, data-driven platform.
