One of the of the most significant disruption over the last one year is how people and businesses have embraced remote working and virtual technology. Given the benefits experienced by everyone, remote and hybrid working models are here to stay and technology will be a crucial part of this. 

On the human resource management front, be it the recruitment interviews, open houses, or employee onboarding process – all functions are being performed virtually. However, it is not anymore just about using various forms of conference calls and chats to communicate during the employee recruitment and onboarding journey. Data-driven HR practices are now helping people managers and CHROs to push the boundaries and explore possibilities for a complete overhaul of how human resource professionals conduct their business. 

Use of these new-age technologies are simplifying and providing real time insights for recruitment. While there is a plethora of HR tools that aid employee evaluation and analysing their past work history, tools like facial and emotional recognition are getting prominence in determining the employee behaviour and their involuntary micro expressions to assess the candidates. These AI tools have been designed to assess their emotional intelligence and can serve as viable tools for employee listening. It also amplifies the employees’ digital footprint and provides additional information about an applicant with data analytics. An AI platform will analyse whatever data is available online to deduce the candidate’s profile and provides a deeper insight for people managers and CHROs to make a better hiring decision. 

These practices are now going to be at the frontier of HR recruitment, and perhaps will be a key part of employee’s personality screenings. A lot of HR leaders are already using this tool to effectively understand characteristics like flexibility, ability to handle pressure and social qualities. It is almost impossible to pretend to act differently or put up a personality that you are not, because these tools capture the minutest of the actions and expressions and give real and factual results to the potential employers. Beyond just video conferences to interview employees, these tools allow an unbiased insight to employee’s demeanour as human perspectives are often biased or driven by personal likes or dislikes.

As employers’ level up their game in new technologies for employee recruitment and assessment, it’s time that candidates also learn how these tools function. The traditional HR functions have taken over technology, and so much so that the entire people management space is now dominated with it. We aren’t far away from how a combination of AI, facial recognition and data analytics will aid the entire employee recruitment, onboarding and review process. As business functions become normalised remotely, so does recruitment and analysis. The near future will witness more innovation and technological integration across every possible HR aspect for organisations to drive change and growth.