How to harness power of digital technologies to enhance talent acquisition

The intangible fuel that powers each company's business is talent. Without talent, no business can even hope to exist, let alone dominate the current competitive market, and therefore, acquiring the right talent is imperative for every organisation. 

Talent is no longer a one-dimensional hiring decision – from the time of assessment, through recruitment, to managing and retaining talent, there are many areas that need to be considered in every hiring strategy. Employers go to considerable lengths to hire the best candidates, who can adapt to evolving dynamics and demonstrate their capabilities to drive business transformation.

During the pandemic years, the tech talent across geographies not only transformed their homes into workplaces but also underwent a paradigm shift that impacted their ways of finding jobs, appearing for interviews, following up for feedback, and everything in-between and beyond. 

At the same time, the crisis-induced digital transformation has widened the gap between tech and talent in almost every conceivable sector. At this stage of the talent acquisition journey, technology has been playing a significant role in revolutionising the recruitment approach, build talent pipelines, and now, there has been an increased emphasis on investing in the right tools to find, hire, and nurture talent. 

As per Gartner’s recent survey, 66% of CFOs have cited increasing their funding on digital technology, 42% of them plan to increase investments to backfill vacant roles, and 35% said to increase spending on hiring new roles. 

Forward-looking employers recognised that they must respond to existing challenges with rather dynamic and tech-driven recruitment strategies and processes. 

To minimise the cost and time investments in recruiting top talent and mitigate the risk of losing them to competitors with better employee value proposition (EVP), hiring solutions powered by advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain are the way forward. 

These solutions can ramp up resource hiring and allow recruiters to focus on tasks that require human attributes like empathy, aware and engaging conversations, career advisory to potential candidates, and creative thinking.

The available tech stack in the recruitment industry can propel the efficiency of recruitment teams by managing candidate experience, automating the distribution of job postings, and providing data to enhance recruitment marketing strategies.

AI-Powered Sourcing Platforms 

While job aggregators have been serving as job search engines for widespread entry and mid-level candidates for almost a decade now, frequent enhancements and updating of functionalities fortify their relevance in the talent market. 

These sites and services rely on AI and proprietary algorithms to connect applicants with jobs that suit their skills and needs. They are only becoming more popular as big data is enabling more relevant job matches for applicants. 

Additionally, these platforms support the removal conscious and unconscious bias as it filters through large volumes of data points and matches the best fit.

Application Tracking System

The most common software used for talent acquisition is known as an applicant tracking system (ATS). These solutions perform precisely as advertised; they track new applicants as they enter the system and enable businesses to manage them efficiently during the hiring process. 

Motivated by the global movement towards inclusion and equal opportunity, these systems are used to avoid unconscious bias too. A data-driven approach, using algorithms to filter applications, can help make the screening process as objective as possible.

LinkedIn for Recruitment

LinkedIn is an exceptional social media platform for communicating and looking for the right job seekers - active or passive. With over 760 million users on the platform, recruiters can find just about anyone for any position on LinkedIn to connect and eventually recruit. 

Additionally, it is a great place to brand an organisation as an employer of choice.

Recruitment CRMs

Though similar to an ATS in many ways, recruitment CRM (or candidate relationship management system) presents an ecosystem that houses important information about candidates who were competent but couldn’t be hired for various reasons. 

When a position needs to be filled quickly, recruiters can turn to the records maintained by the recruitment CRM to proactively seek an individual who might be able to fit the role. A recruitment CRM platform is a talent database that can help:

• Create and maintain a pipeline of great talent
• Send out regular communications to this group to keep the relationship alive
• Act as a strategic partner alongside other functions within an organisation

Employee Referral System

While most organisations stop at rewarding the employees who refer eligible applicants, few have gone ahead to automate the process and make referring easier for the existing employees by introducing platforms that scan employee networks for the right talent for the positions. With employee referral systems, recruiters too can search employee networks for them and then request current employees to make a warm introduction. 

And with that, recruiters get connected to a larger talent pool of passive candidates who are connected to the company through current employees.

A special mention to the alumni networking platforms that enable talent acquisition function to stay in touch with ex-employees, engage them through communications and events, and pitch job opportunities. Alumni serve as a powerful brand ambassador of company’s culture. Numerous organisations also use these networking platforms for knowledge transfer, leadership training, and mentorship programs by ex-employees.

Today, talent acquisition is increasingly important to an organisation, especially with the constant transition from traditional recruiting methods to digital recruiting technology. 

Recruitment is becoming more technology-driven, complex, and comes with an immense range of responsibilities. Therefore, it is imperative that recruitment should be given enough resources to handle it effectively to help build the digital workforce of tomorrow.