Three tech trends every HR professional must watch

HIRING talent can be a highly tedious process for many employers; the tiresome candidate searches, the endless scheduling of interviews, and the repetitive screening techniques.

Though necessary, these processes are a time-consuming task for HR professionals, often taking away from the more gratifying, meaningful parts of the job tasks such as building candidate relationships and smart decision-making.

Recently, professional social-networking site, LinkedIn, released a report Global Recruiting Trends 2018, in which they highlighted four new trends that will enable your HR teams to streamline the recruitment process. Since these trends will directly impact your ability to hire and retain talent, your business simply can’t afford to ignore them.

The introduction of new interviewing tools

According to LinkedIn, new tools are emerging that seek to shift the standard, traditional method of interviewing. Half of UK respondents said that changes to interview techniques are ‘very’ to ‘extremely’ important to the future of hiring.

Some of the biggest challenges for talent leaders included assessing a candidate’s soft skills (63 percent), understanding their weaknesses (57 percent), and avoiding interview bias (42 percent).

In 2018, new tools will help to address these challenges, including virtual reality assessments, meetings in casual settings, and job auditions.

Video interviewing

This tool is looking to make it easier to pick the right talent. One company that is leveraging the benefits of this tool is KPMG Australia. The company has started using video interviews to evaluate a candidate’s skills at scale, even before meeting them.

The candidate can record the interview at any location, and involves them spending 15-20 minutes answering questions. From this, the company’s recruitment team analyzes the videos and selects candidates for in-person interviews.

The benefits of video interviews include:

Increased hiring efficiency: Video has cut the number of in-person interviews from thousands to hundreds, meaning that recruiters have more time to do more meaningful tasks.

Positive candidate experience: Tech-savvy applicants  feel more comfortable using video with it being less confrontational. Furthermore, it eliminates the hassle of travel.

Virtual reality

Lloyds Banking Group uses virtual reality (VR) in the final round of interviews for their Emerging Leadership Programme. Using a VR platform, candidates are assesses on their ability to solve a variety of tasks.

The benefits of using VR in interviews include:

Better ability to assess skills: The recruiter can get a first-hand look at how a candidate performs at a task, rather than the traditional interview technique of getting a candidate to describe how they would.

Increased candidate engagement: Of the candidates who took part, 96 percent rate the VR experience as comfortable and impressive, with 100 percent saying it adds value to the hiring process.

The use of data is key

Most HR professionals are using data in their jobs now but this is a trend that is set to really accelerate in 2018, with almost two-fifths regarding it as one of the most important factors in the hiring process.

Just as a company has a social media strategy, they must also have a talent intelligence strategy. The most common uses of data are to understand attrition, skills gap as well as building better offers.

“We are going to see the biggest change in the HR profession overall, as analytics start to reinvent the way we work,” says Dawn Klinghoffer, General Manager of HR Business Insights at Microsoft.

“We are now starting to look for HR professionals that have the capability to understand, interpret, and leverage data — and this is a trend that I believe will continue for a while.”

While data is your ticket to hiring the best talent, according to LinkedIn, it doesn’t come without its challenges. Such obstacles include poor quality of data, figuring out where to find the data, high cost, and a weak understanding of how to use the data.

AI will become your secret workhorse

Many professionals associate AI with a job-stealing tool to be cautious with. Yet, for recruiters who often receive mountains of CVs a day, AI is set to become a useful tool that will optimize their productivity.

According to the LinkedIn report, over a quarter of UK respondents said AI is the most important trend for 2018. It helps them source, screen, and nurture candidates, saving a significant amount of time whilst also helping to remove any human bias.

Applications of AI in recruitment includes the use of Chatbots to respond to many basic questions so you don’t have to.

UK-based Vodafone has also been using AI-powered robots to screen the video interviews of candidates. Based on things such as role requirements, other candidates, and top performers at Vodafone, the AI robots assess candidate suitability across 15,000 different dimensions, from body language and facial cues, to voice intonation and speech cadence.

 

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