Breakthroughs in technology rarely take place all at once. As individual innovations progressively show their worth and spawn new uses, they finally become part of a larger platform capable of reshaping business paradigms. As a result, small steps can quickly lead to significant changes, pushing businesses to keep up. In response to disruption, certain industries have incorporated cutting-edge technologies. Today, their impact on the corporate landscape and consumers is seen across sectors in magnitudes. The same holds true for the recruitment sector, which has always leveraged emerging technologies to enhance and innovate the learning process, but the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated this digital transformation. Recruitment, like any other industry, is transforming as a result of technological advancements in an increasingly digital environment. 

Challenges in recruitment today

The pandemic and its ramifications wreaked havoc on several talent acquisition teams and piled new expectations on others. It proved to be a historic moment for the industry as virtually recruiting and onboarding a remote workforce became the new norm. However, with millions of displaced job seekers and new graduates, the recruitment industry faced a great deal of pressure to rapidly address the gaps and challenges in the industry since its heavy digital shift. 

According to a recent survey conducted by MeritTrac and a behavioural economics and science team, 87 percent of employers contacted said that during COVID-19, they moved their hiring efforts online. However, the traditional systems were not designed to take on the tsunami of recruitment drives provoked by the economic climate change. Keeping track of and categorizing large-scale recruitment metrics generated by a huge number of applications became a critical challenge. Many businesses struggled to design an efficient and well-structured recruitment process that would account for and resolve all these challenges at one go. As a result, stakeholders faced difficulties making effective, data-driven, efficient hiring or staff development decisions. Not to mention, existing platforms had limitations such as a lack of centralised visibility to manage assessment processes, a lack of coordination between departments, and so on. These factors and restrictions are critical for recruiting and evaluating employees.

A holistic solution

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the labour market and the economy into disarray. Traditional hiring methods that prioritise backgrounds, degrees, and referrals are insufficient to address the current predicament.  As aspirants constantly find new ways to demonstrate and advance their own skills, innovations in assessment technologies help develop more solutions to optimally assess a candidate. Moreover, end-to-end assessments have shown that they can aid in the transition to a more equal and inclusive workplace and are key to implementing a data-driven approach to talent sourcing - one in which people's abilities, skills, and talent determine their opportunities, and one in which improved data benefits businesses. Technology-driven assessments help organisations establish diverse teams, achieve outstanding performance, and boost productivity. Integrating data-driven talent sourcing into any organisation is critical. Shifting to a data-driven approach not only addresses and resolves the problems that organisations are facing today, but it also stands to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the recruitment process altogether. Analysing candidate and employee data can help identify hiring bottlenecks, as well as systematically structure and refine recruitment efforts. This will not only help organisations attract the right talent in the market but also give them a competitive advantage, all while saving time and money. They allow the recruiter to accurately determine whether a candidate will be a perfect match for the company's culture, as well as measure their degree of knowledge in various skills and competencies demanded by the job.

Way forward

Hiring plays a critical role in any business, with the ability to either build or break an organisation. In the outsourcing realm, AI-enabled chatbots are used to deliver the first layer of customer care. They're fantastic at answering simple queries and providing information, reducing the dependency on people having to communicate with customers directly. The same logic applies in the recruiting world: technology-driven assessments help recruiters by reducing some of the time-consuming manual tasks. Candidates can now be sought and filtered using advanced and automated tools that can administer assessments, organise interviews, and provide candidates with regular updates throughout the process. In the long run, technology-driven assessments will help retain existing employees by substantially decreasing their workload. They will make the hiring experience more rewarding owing to its efficiency, in addition to supporting and preparing the next hiring cycle. Another outstanding feature of the end-to-end assessment is its capacity to anticipate challenges and provide appropriate solutions to teams. This increases the appeal of businesses to both clients and employees. Recruiters can ensure more quality candidates and increased productivity for prospective customers by tracking employee performance and potential. It is a brilliant approach to leverage technology to save time on both ends of the process. There is no doubt it is headed to revolutionise the way we perceive, practice, and approach recruitment in the future.