Recruiting Now, What Next?

Posted by Carolyne Burns | June - 18 - 2020 | 0 Comment

With the current influx of applications for jobs, how much harder and stressful will it be for traditional recruiters to pinpoint the best hires without the help of technology?

HR Advisor contemplates handling the COVID-19 influx of applications

If you work in recruiting or HR, these past weeks have been very difficult for you, whether you are working in an essential industry, managing your tasks from home, or simply preparing for what will happen next. And what will happen next is very important to all of us.

With millions out of work and many businesses shuttered – and many others looking at new ways to cut costs – the role of the recruiter and HR consultants is going to be even more difficult, if that is possible. Because as we break through to the other side of this pandemic, whatever that new world looks like it will certainly have an impact on how you hire, who you hire and what you do to make yourself even more valuable to your business.

Welcome to the New Abnormal

With many people anxiously awaiting the chance to begin work again, recruiters are going to find a large increase in the number of applications.

Rise in Job Applications in May as
COVID-19 restrictions ease

Expr3ss! has experienced a 38% rise in job applications across its customers on its predictive hiring platform during the month of May.

Competition will mean that highly competent people who have been retrenched will find themselves competing against many others for the same job, and they may be quite willing to sacrifice titles, perks and probably even money to get the job. 

This puts enormous pressure on the people who do the hiring. Because a difficult task will be made much harder with many more applications coming to you.

Your hiring decisions will be that much more difficult, and because of the times themselves, even more important than before. Your company’s leadership will want you to find even better talent, from the bigger pool, so the pressure for you to deliver is immense.

Just as important, the candidates are also under enormous strain. To find a job they will be sending out many applications and they will be getting many rejections. The way in which your company manages their expectations, the way you professionally handle their application (or rejection) will impact not only on you but especially on your company’s brand. 

Making room for your skills

With so much added pressure the amount of time you can create for yourself to do all the other things on your KPI list will be limited, but you know those issues – like onboarding, culture creation, staff development, succession planning, performance reviews – are all vital to the health of your company, and they are almost all your responsibility.

So we can agree that you need a bit of help to get through the next few months and years.

Predictive analytics in recruitment can provide insight to enhance the effectiveness of your recruitment.

Imagine you can fill every vacancy with the best possible candidate chosen from the top five. Those five have been selected using a very powerful software system that pre-qualifies candidates according to the businesses own exemplary staff in that role, reveals their true skill sets at a glance, their appetite for hard work, their temperament for the work and their ability to work within a team.

Source: AHRI Impact of COVID-19 Australian HR Community May Report

With the large majority of HR people working from home, 84.2%, and 29.8% experiencing their workloads being increased by up to 50% according to the AHRI Impact of COVID-19 on the Australian HR Community May Report there is a need to find technology to help facilitate an improved applicant experience, locate quality applicants quickly and offer roles to top prospects faster as they cannot do all this from their homes.

Hiring teams need to use the data available to them to assist in making predictions about candidates and their hiring decisions. The goal of predictive algorithms is to cut unconscious bias and narrow down the number of applicants to a manageable number before they are even presented at all to the recruiter, they can also highlight the top prospects with game-changing accuracy.

You no longer have to go through every CV and there will be plenty!

“There is a bit of nervousness about, ‘well what’s my job if it’s not reading resumes?’, and I just think there’s so much more important work you can do.”

Jaimee Charlton, National Store and Marketing Manager
Spendless Shoes

Now is time to graduate from traditional recruitment to technology that aids recruitment decisions and helps put those hours you want back in your week. Not sure how to make the leap?

These times call for easily accessible, flexible and highly intuitive recruitment software that simplifies the hard work so that you can add your own expertise to the hiring decisions. Time to act and embrace it!

How are you preparing for the influx of candidate applications?