It’s a strange time to be an active or passive jobseeker. With headlines focused more on dilemmas such as furloughing, and in some unfortunate cases redundancies, it’s easy to feel like enabling recruiting when times get better will be a minefield.
A harsh reality behind the coronavirus pandemic is that talent pipelines are going to be bigger and more competitive for it. Jobseekers looking for new opportunities will need to become more conservative with their choices and preferences in employer attributes. In turn, employers will need to be prepared for more applications and tougher screening to find the best fit candidates.
Never before will the notion of Recruiting Enablement be so vital. Technology will need to become a true enabling recruiting force multiplier. Employers across the industries must be ready to deal with a greater influx of applications heading their way, intelligently engaging with the best candidates is an essential.
As the saying goes it takes two to tango and while those looking to change careers will also need to prove their suitability for the role in question, it is also up to the applicants’ chosen employer to use the right technology to build a meaningful relationship with the candidate from application to onboarding.
Harold Macmillan, the softly-spoken former Prime-Minister at the turn of the 1960’s once said “you have never had it so good”, and in many ways this will transcend to UK businesses inundated with a wealth of talent. However, without the right technology to engage with this plethora of talent they will become the ones to miss out.
At its core Recruiting Enablement encompasses the processes, content and technology that empowers talent acquisition teams to recruit both efficiently and effectively at high volumes and velocity.
Utilising such technology empowers employers to make high quality and diverse hires efficiently by engaging diverse talent pools, enabling tailored employer value propositions (EVP). By applying this logic businesses can help to brace themselves for the future talent demand – benefits such as improving decision making, mitigating bias, reducing the administrative burden on recruiters and hiring managers, and speeding the alignment of recruiting with desired business outcomes regardless of strategy, complexity or volume.
In 2019, Gartner found that 92% of candidates admitted to considering at least one other offer besides their primary offer. The risk of this issue arising again once organisations lift any recruiting is striking. It is going to be vital for employers to utilise the right recruitment technology needed to hire a diverse workforce which some argue have been looking elsewhere for employment in the past decade.
Take the Metropolitan Police as a case-study who re-thought their application procedure upon noticing a dramatic drop-off for female candidates at the physical assessment stage meaning that the Met were saturated with a male workforce. By utilising video content that showed a more inclusive workforce encouraging women to apply, they saw an increase in the number of women participating and passing the assessment by 40%. It’s important that you take strides to taIlor the recruitment process to the individual as well and intelligently engage with the candidate through their application.
This is incredibly important with Oleeo data showing that just 19% of employees agree that “what my employer portrays about itself matches what it’s like to work there.” meaning that the majority of organisations that will expect a higher amount of applications post pandemic are still not able to articulate employer value proposition and could face losing out on prime talent.
Overcoming stigmas like being known for heavy and lengthy applications which are off-putting is vital. Candidates must not feel that they have to go through various different stages before being closer to an offer. Time to hire is going to be essential in winning the quality candidates you want, else many professionals could already find themselves in employment by the time a final hiring decision is made. Indeed research fom Robert Hall says 57% of job-seekers lose interest if the hiring process takes too long, coupled with the notion that employers do not build relationships with their candidates they are almost guaranteed to lose out on the best talent.
Thus by leveraging Recruiting Enablement recruiters are able to support decisive hiring manager patterns by automatically ranking high volumes of candidates against the most meaningful decision criteria, enabling recruiters to fast-track a ranked shortlist of qualified candidates for hiring managers to focus on.
Ultimately it will also be down to organisations going far and beyond to protect their brand image with a whopping 72% of candidates happy to share a negative recruiting experience and it is crucial for hiring-managers to build relationships early-on. In this case a lack of engagement could be costly both in the short and long-run.
While candidates will be taking extra-time in choosing their next role it will be up to the organisation to prove themselves as a long-term career provider rather than mimicking something of a revolving door, thus it is not only crucial to keep an applicant engaged during the candidate-journey but also to remain as human as possible in getting to know talent from the outset. After all, isn’t that what we all want. Someone who wants us just as much as we want them?
