Hiring in the Digital Age: What next for Recruitment?

Your company is only ever as good as the people who work for it, and in an ever-growing digital landscape, it can be difficult to know the ins-and-outs of recruiting the best possible people.

Some of the key elements, which this article will look at, are:

• Seeking candidates
• Social media
• Data analytics
• The application process

By looking at these areas, you will be able to gain a clearer understanding of the digitalization of recruitment, and equip yourself better to deal with new developments.

Seeking candidates

In order to maintain the highest, most skilled level of employees, you need to look for those who may not be looking for you, they are called ‘passive candidates’.

The good news is that 85% of the workforce want to hear from you; since only 15% of people say they are ‘super passive’ (completely content in their current job). This gives you a huge amount of potential candidates for your job. It is important to remember that unlike someone actively seeking to work with you, it is your job to warm up a passive candidate as you would a potential customer. You need to make sure that your business is a great offer, make sure your job postings are tempting to potential employees, and contact the candidate in a personal way; network, don’t cold-call, and email them individually and directly.

Social media

Given that 73% of 18- to 34-year-olds found their last job through a social network, we can see the growing dependency good recruitment has on social media fluency. A key factor about social media is to understand who you are looking for, on which platform, and why.

Overall, in order for your business to seem like a viable, interesting option, you have to make sure your team knows the ins-and-outs of each site. Remember, your brand is an incredibly important part of the recruitment process, and since so many people interact with companies via social media, it is your job to maintain a great reputation.  

Good places to start include Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, and it is important to note each social media platforms has its own tone. LinkedIn will require a very professional stance, while people on Twitter and Facebook may not appreciate this. Remember, for more specific jobs (such as IT), there are other, more specialized sites such as GitHub, where you may be able to find potential employees.

This is quite a large undertaking, and cannot be confined to Mondays-Fridays, since people expect immediacy on social media. However, employers who used social media to hire found a 49% improvement in candidate quality, so the benefits are plain to see.

Data analytics

Advances in data analytics are causing the recruitment process to change.  This is something that is constantly shifting and on the rise. As the number of people hired via social media increases, business are realizing they do not have the time to sift through everyone’s profiles, and are coming up with analytics solutions accordingly.

Bob Myhal, director of digital marketing at CBC Advertising, states that soon ‘cloud-based hiring tools will allow recruiters and hiring managers to easily and affordably find, evaluate and organize top job candidates, while innovative assessment and filtering techniques will help provide a 360-degree holistic view of top applicants.’ He suggests that companies will use biometric data to assess which candidates are a good fit for a position or not.

The application process

The application process is also crucial to recruiting the best candidates, and sealing the deal. Increasingly, we are seeing that candidates know their own worth, and are not willing to participate in an application process that makes things difficult for them. As such it’s essential that your application process is simple, and feels tailor made to the person applying – nobody wants to feel like they’re already being undervalued.  

Amber Hyatt, SPHR and director of product marketing at HR software company SilkRoad, suggests employers should include ‘candidate job portals, employee on-boarding and off-boarding portals, and specialty tools that foster sourcing jobs via job boards and employee referral networks’. It is your job to make sure that the process is informative and easy for any potential employees. If your company doesn’t have the resources for all those things, try to make part of your website dedicated to the process.

While the process of recruitment and hiring is ever changing, shaped by changes in our cultures and technologies, these are some of the key areas your business needs to consider to ensure you employ the highest level of workforce.

Remember to stay receptive to new ideas and concepts in recruitment; a business that explores all avenues is more likely to attract clever, hard-working and intuitive people.