Resumes have not changed much from when the great Da Vinci himself wrote the first one in the 15th century. Like Da Vinci’s letter to Ludovico Sforza, most resumes are a listicle of one’s accomplishments. Yes, today, one can create a colourful and concise resume with Canva or any of the other tools available. One can even create a fabulous resume with the magic AI tools that abound on the internet. But dressed up or otherwise, a traditional resume still remains a concise document that outlines an individual’s educational background, work experience, skills and accomplishments. The fundamental purpose of a resume remains constant: to efficiently communicate an individual’s professional background.

But is the resume enough?

The question that often pops up is: is the resume enough to evaluate a candidate in today’s changing work environment? And most times, the answer is: no!

The modern workplace has undergone a profound transformation in recent years, marked by significant shifts in dynamics driven by three key factors: the widespread adoption of remote work, rapid technological advancements and the increasing popularity of gig work.

Automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics have become integral parts of many industries, necessitating a new set of skills. The new-age employee, therefore, must have more skills in their repertoire in addition to the knowledge garnered from their college education. They must be digitally literate, adaptable to evolving technologies and capable of navigating a data-driven landscape. Problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity are increasingly valued alongside technical proficiency. The demand for soft skills, such as effective communication and collaboration, has also escalated as remote work relies heavily on virtual interactions with a globalised and diverse workforce. The ubiquitous resume is unable to draw a picture that allows the hiring team to evaluate many of these new-age skills.

Where resumes fall short

• Limited insight into skills and attributes
  At the end of the day, resumes focus on your experience rather than your skills. Since they are organised by job titles, they give you an idea of the candidate’s career progress but little to no insight into their competencies.
• Incompatibility with evolving job requirements
  As the resume is essentially a snapshot of qualifications and work history, it fails to spotlight nuances such as interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence and adaptability. Yes, candidates most often list these skills along with critical thinking, problem-solving abilities or leadership qualities in their resume. However, it’s most often a listicle with no way for the hiring team to evaluate these qualities.
• Fraud or lying in resumes
  It is probable that a candidate exaggerates job responsibilities and achievements to appear more qualified than he or she actually is. For example, a candidate might take full credit for a project’s completion, stating that he or she was ‘responsible for the project.’ In actuality, they might have been just a cog in the wheel. This supposedly harmless practice can undermine the hiring process, impacting workplace productivity and damaging organisational trust.

A skills compass

New-age hiring teams focus more on methods and practices that can measure skills and suitability rather than just educational qualifications and experience. Let’s take a look at some of the more popular practices.

• Portfolios and projects
  IDEO, the design and innovation consulting firm, has always valued portfolios over resumes. One of the reasons for this is that portfolios and projects offer definitive examples of a candidate’s work, with snapshots of what he or she has done. They also offer an opportunity for the hiring team to ask specific questions that probe the candidate’s knowledge and attitude.
• Assessments and skill tests
  Tech giant Google is a great proponent of using coding assessments in its hiring process. Many startups and even traditional tech companies have started asking candidates to undergo skill assessments before hiring.

These methods are particularly crucial in creative fields, tech industries and project-oriented roles, allowing candidates to demonstrate problem-solving, innovation and project management abilities.

Today’s employers are looking for tangible evidence of an individual’s capabilities and suitability. As culture fit is an important aspect for most companies, candidates’ psychographics are also added to the mix of evaluation tools. It is vital that you embrace a holistic and future-focussed hiring approach to build a resilient and collaborative workplace.

“We are entering an age where speed, flexibility, innovation and execution matter much more than decades-old qualifications or antiquated experiences dressing up a lengthy resume.” ~The future ready organization: How dynamic capability management is reshaping the modern workplace by Gyan Nagpal, award-winning talent strategist and leadership coach 

Indeed, traditional recruitment processes, centred around the resume, no longer work. It was riddled with issues at every stage, such as:

• Misrepresented information in resumes
• Faulty or biassed screening
• Lags at every stage
• Human errors

The adage don’t judge a book by its cover can work both ways in recruitment. Undeserving candidates may clear screening and deserving ones may get eliminated based on misleading resumes.

A few insights from a recent HirePro study, No resumes please:

Paving the way for talent-centric recruitment, throw more light on this trend.

• 56% of candidates claim skills they barely know.
• Recruiters don’t trust resumes as they believe 85% of candidates lie.

The industry has caught on to the resume malpractices. There is a realisation that only a changed approach can evaluate candidates holistically. This thought process resulted in the industry adopting a skills-first strategy. 75% of recruiters agree that skills-first hiring will be the focus for the next 18 months, says the HirePro study.

A trend, referred to in Future of Recruiting 2023: LinkedIn Talent Solutions report, affirms this point. It says recruiters are 25% more likely to search by skills than three years ago.

Another associated trend is that behavioural and functional skills are finding equal prominence as technical skills. What’s the best way to implement skills-based hiring? Industry trends indicate that the solution lies in tailored assessments powered by AI. Aneesh Raman, the vice president and head of The Opportunity Project at LinkedIn, refers to AI as the “North Star for the skills-first movement” in an SHRM article.

What are tailored assessments?

Organisations can fully customise their assessments for a role by leveraging technology to find the best fit. These assessments have questions based on real-life scenarios aligned with the role. Also, advanced AI technologies help enhance these tests significantly. You can explore options such as personality assessments, gamification, adaptive tests, VR assessments, etc. They help evaluate candidates holistically for various personality aspects, such as:

• Problem-solving skills
• Learning quotient
• Emotional intelligence

Nowadays, these traits are being considered among the most sought-after skills as they indicate the performance quotient of individuals. 

While resumes only hint at what the candidates can do, tailored assessments show you, with proof, what they can do. Let’s see what the top benefits are.

Benefits of tailored assessments

Objectivity

Humans are prone to errors and biases. Technology brings in objectivity, removing all forms of conscious and unconscious bias. The HirePro study finds that 44% of recruiters found biases in traditional, resume-based hiring. Tailored assessments reduced biases by 78%.

Data-driven decision-making

One of the prime factors bringing objectivity to tailored assessments is AI-backed insights. Recruiters gain vital inputs on candidates’ reasoning skills, decision-making approach, etc., to better evaluate their fitment.

Holistic and inclusive approach

Options like adaptive tests provide an inclusive way to evaluate candidates holistically. These tests change the difficulty level of questions progressively, depending on the responses from candidates. The algorithms calculate percentiles based on the varying weightage of questions. Thus, all candidates can showcase their competencies equally for a fair result. Gamification and VR-based tests provide recruiters with multiple insights to ensure a more accurate evaluation. 

Time and cost savings

Tailored assessments save time spent on resume screening and lengthy interviews. These tests can be administered remotely to multiple candidates across geographies simultaneously. The HirePro study found that with tailored assessments, recruiter efforts dropped significantly from an average of 23 hours to four or five hours. 

Tailored assessments reduce recruitment costs associated with interview logistics, background checks, etc. Since these tests improve hiring decisions based on many parameters, they also reduce the cost of wrong hires and help increase productivity and retention.

Enhanced candidate experience

Tailored online assessments eliminate the need for candidates to travel for recruitment. Automated scheduling, instant communication and shorter tests accelerate the process, vastly improving the candidate experience. Gamification and VR-based assessments add to the candidates’ experiences as they are more immersive.

Future performance predictors

AI-backed predictive analytics help understand the future performances of candidates to make better hiring decisions. Candidates chosen after thorough skill evaluations outperform other candidates on the job across various sectors, according to the HirePro study.

It appears that resume-based hiring is going out the window! With multiple factors working for tailored assessments, they have become an essential hiring tool. What remains to be seen is their further evolution with technology that will maximise benefits. 

References: 

• https://hirepro.in
• https://medium.com
• https://www.workplace.com
• https://www.shrm.org
• https://business.linkedin.com

Recruitment – A short, but hoary history

When you think about recruitment, what are the images that come to your mind? Do you, for instance, picture people traveling across trading routes or entire communities moving to new countries, even continents, reshaping history as they voyage across the seas?

This is the tale of recruitment: a crucial human resource allocation practice with an ancient history. Recruitment involves sourcing, sorting, selecting, and on-boarding employees to an organisation, often on a large scale. Modern day enterprises see talent acquisition as a way of accelerating the growth of sectors, economies, and even countries.

How it was: Indian indentured labourers recruited by British plantation owners voyage to work in Trinidad.

Pic courtesy: Caribbean Atlas

You may wonder where history features here. Think about it: at one end of the spectrum, in the Middle Ages, people from Western Europe were recruited into imperial armies that marched across countries, winning territory and bounties that helped them build economies back in their home countries. At the other end of the spectrum, as agriculture, trade and commerce flourished between countries and new lands were discovered, colonists moved labourers from countries in Asia and Africa to work in tropical plantations in the Caribbean and South America, and to build the massive railroads and towering cities of the new world. Entire populations of merchants and traders moved behind these workers, following opportunity and a hope for a better life.

From colonial history to COVID-19, technology has changed the very face of recruitment. At the dawn of the 20th century, as many countries around the world underwent massive industrialization, the concept of working in factories and offices was introduced to societies.

Building the Mechanisation Era: Workers at the Bement Miles Pond Company in the US, circa 1920. Many were recruited from the countryside or among recent immigrants and were employed in large cities along the US East Coast.

Pic courtesy: New York Times

Suddenly, people used to being students, gentlemen (and women) of leisure or serfs in farms became office-goers and factory workers. Almost just as suddenly, recruiters started scouting countrysides and underdeveloped countries and moved people to cityscapes: cities just didn’t have enough talent to satisfy demand, and countryside just didn’t have enough work. Recruiters profitably bridged this demand-supply gap across geographies with strategic hiring for their organisations.

As the masses began work in smoky factories, we zoom our historical lens past the World Wars where young men in the West (and the colonies) went to fight for freedom in far-off shores. We march past growing armies of smartly clad ‘white-collar workers’ and uniformed ‘blue collar workers’ manning the great enterprises in newly independent countries of the 20th century. We fly by past recruitment drives by ‘body shoppers’ to staff Y2K projects and beyond, to the dawn of a new century.

Modern day scenario: How recruiters were doing it pre-COVID

By the early noughties, recruitment had become a critical and mainstay function of modern-day HR organisations.

On the supply side, candidates looking for jobs pored over the classifieds in daily newspapers or approached specialist employment agencies and consultants to submit their résumés.

Some historians point to the arrival of the telefax (or fax machine) as an advancement that sped up the typically slow process that could take multiple months. With computer-based faxes, recruiters could receive and forward résumés in minutes, build their databases and call candidates for interviews. Still, the time from initial contact to making an offer and onboarding was long, till the internet explosion happened.

The genesis of virtual recruitment, online recruitment, or e-recruitment, whatever the moniker, can probably be traced back to that day in 1994 when monster.com launched its portal. Monster’s success launched a slew of similar firms, most of them with a B2C focus, where candidates could upload their résumés, build online profiles, and apply to jobs listed on the portal.

The social media era saw the rise of LinkedIn (launched in 2003) to build professional networks of job seekers and recruiters – all eager to interact for mutual benefit on the platform.

On the B2B side, recruitment firms took advantage of technology to support enterprises – whether in their quest to hire hundreds, even thousands of employees in single drives, or more specialised hunts for skilled workers in smaller numbers. As the new century progressed, candidate databases, video hiring of remote candidates, recruitment workflow systems and fraud detection software were integrated into the process, with an aim to optimise time spent on the effort and secure better candidates.

Recruitment during COVID-19M

We now arrive at 2020 in our story: countries around the world came to a screeching halt due to lockdowns, economies came crashing down like dominoes, bringing global enterprises to a halt in ways they’d never experienced before. While ‘game changer’, ‘disruptor’ and myriad other terms may be clichéd, they still perhaps aren’t descriptive enough to convey the enormity of the change.

But, behind closed doors and shuttered windows, locked-down people still managed to live, work, and play. As days turned into weeks, apprehending months of stasis, enterprises started sending employees work to their homes and restarted recruiting: suddenly-suppressed economic forces resurfaced with a vengeance and qualified people were essential to support the renewed activity. A report by the leading recruitment firm CareerNet Consulting that studied the impact of COVID-19 on hiring in India found that organizations are turning to technology to implement virtual hiring and onboarding during this crisis.

The recruitment sector now had to transform and adapt to the new normal. Video-enabled recruiting accelerated beyond anyone’s guesstimation: remote, safe, supported by fraud detection technologies and critically, fast.

Recruiters have now climbed on the virtual hiring wagon post the initial COVID-19 shock, as enterprise leaders realised that the virus is here to stay for some time, and enterprises must carry on with business as usual. For instance, CareerNet found in their survey that over half of all employers in India expected to resume hiring from January 2021. As the report concludes, the expected revival of hiring is going to be through innovation-driven solutions that foster meaningful candidate engagement and efficient recruitment.

Video to the rescue?

Perhaps, video-driven recruitment can be called the true game changer in this new recruitment paradigm. Recruitment technology companies that offer complete remote recruitment solutions use video interviews, enhanced with voice and facial recognition technologies – sometimes with whopping success rates of 99% – to assess candidates via video.

Accelerated hiring, enabled by tech: A live video interview to assess remote candidates effectively.

Pic: From HirePro website

Video recruitments can make life easier for recruiters in several obvious ways.
1. Simplify the scheduling process: Have you scheduled in-person interviews for 10 candidates with 4 internal stakeholders? Scheduling can be a nightmare, leaving admins (and their managers) frustrated and hapless. Just completing the interview process can take all the bandwidth of recruiters, leaving them with little energy to manage the candidate experience. Now, think of doing it for a 100, a 1000 or more candidates, many of whom could be in remote locations.
Video interviews, supported by scheduling software, can make the process seamless. With a few clicks, recruiters can ably connect remote candidates with scores of internal stakeholders — hiring managers, technical leads, HR interviewers, and others — without any of the parties leaving their desks.

2. Recruit efficiently at scale: The ‘scale’ part of this equation begs repetition. If you are a recruiter who has conducted career fairs with walk-in candidates, you’re surely aware of the logistics, screening, and fraud detection issues that are involved. Efficient recruitment platforms can move the entire process online, even speeding up the process with pre-checks conducted for documents and prior filtering of candidates. Recruitment targets of even tens of thousands can be met without breaking a sweat: surely, a distinct advantage for smart recruiters.

This also makes performance tracking a no-brainer for HR leaders – when all the workflow data is available with real-time reports, HR managers can better manage their star recruiters and support those lagging behind them.

3. Remove process inconsistencies – Interviews may vary questions across candidates – thus making evaluation harder. Candidates may freeze in strange, new settings – losing out on great opportunities (and organisations losing out great hires). The job may require mastery over technology – something not easy to test in a typical in-person setting. Time may be wasted in small talk, breakfast, lunch, or other social necessities in a campus setting. All these inconsistencies can get wiped out in a single stroke when the interviewer and candidate login from remote, comfortable locations for a 20-minute call (versus a multi-hour commitment in the older formats).

There are a host of non-obvious benefits of video interviews as well: for instance, if you argued that much of this could be done over a phone call, think of the ability to observe body language and non-verbal cues – huge insights for an interviewer that are not available in a typical phone interview.

In a nutshell, video interviews score over old-school recruitment techniques in any dimension. They improve the overall process for all parties, leaving recruiters, interviewers and candidates happier, with better communication, closure and a far superior experience.

Associated tech that makes video recruitment real & effective

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive technologies in recruitment is a significant enabler for recruiters. AI-powered software has algorithms that sharply reduce the time taken to hire candidates. Candidate screening, setting up interview schedules, maintaining ongoing communications during the process and automated onboarding are all done seamlessly and efficiently. The bonus? A huge improvement in the candidate experience, burnishing the organisation’s brand and reputation with potential employees and the public at large – something companies are very sensitive to in the internet era.

AI-powered HR software also helps recruiters do better data analyses while recruiting, making for improved cognitive decision-making to source better candidates.

Reading the tea leaves: Forecast for post-pandemic recruitment scenario

Let’s take a leap forward to how all this is shaping up: thinking of 2, 3, even 5 years from now—in 2025—when the world is well past the pandemic disruptions. We predict that organisations large and small will be well-settled into working with large numbers of remote workers in almost all settings, making remote recruitment technology the norm.

Hiring needs will evolve rapidly as technology continues its march of disrupting sectors, giving rise to new business models. Not just this, technology will support business strategy more ably, giving leaders the ability to forecast market trends for longer time horizons – making plans beyond quarters to years and multiples of years. This will make strategic hiring all the more important.

The focus of recruiters will firmly be on matching the best candidate profiles for these highly strategic job opportunities. Video interviewing, aided by a slew of technologies such as virtual lobbies, real-time document verification and profile analysis, will make instant candidate matching, on-the-spot offers and speedy onboarding the norm for enterprises. Recruiters will also rely regularly on better, actionable metrics to ensure their activities directly benefit the bottom line of the organisation.

Aided by advances such as video hiring, a truly global economy is shaping up right before our eyes. Welcome aboard the future of recruitment; it’s looking sunny ahead!

If you want to learn how we, at HirePro, help employers with modern-day recruitment, please call us at 080 6656 6000 or write to us at sales@hirepro.in.

A Walk Through the Recruitment Lane – infographic

The Backstory

Artificial Intelligence or “AI” was formally founded in 1955 and has come a long way ever since. AI programs were deployed in diverse fields. But, it was only in 2017 that “AI in Hiring” became the talk of the industry fueling innumerable conferences, blogs, articles, and podcasts that have discussed the immense potential of this technology in recruitment. As of this date, AI remains the biggest trend in the recruiting industry. All signs point to AI continuing its reign over the next few years.

The Impression

In technical terms, AI is defined as a computer system that can mimic humans’ cognitive functions, such as learning and problem-solving. Is this credible in the world of talent acquisition? At first glance, ‘AI-driven’ talent acquisition systems seem to be huckster promises: database-driven n-tier web platforms masquerading under the AI label.

That is the hard truth: much of the recruitment world has not yet employed genuine AI to build end-to-end talent acquisition systems. Instead, there has been vast usage of relevant algorithms that match the right candidates to the right job, chatbots that elevate candidate interactions, and automated sourcing. In terms of actual AI technology, some aspects of machine learning and forecasting are used to auto-screen candidates from their resumes. Parts of smart automation are used to perform sentiment analysis on job descriptions so as to detect potentially biased language. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is the most commonly used AI program.

In the form of a programmatic advertising technique, AI is used for posting highly targeted job ads. Interviews proctored by AI-driven tech can also be conducted. Basically, any domain in recruiting where definite inputs and outputs exist such as screening, sourcing, and assessments, is being automated utilising AI algorithms.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

— Mathematician Alan Perlis

The Good

This much is evident: the industry’s movement towards AI is real. From a recruitment perspective, AI makes the whole hiring process easier and quicker. This further leads to higher efficiency, with the best results.

There are numerous benefits of using AI technology for recruitment. The first is the automation of high-volume tasks, which is a major time-saver for recruiters. This, in turn, increases business productivity. In addition to the quantitative benefits, there is an improvement in the quality of hiring through standardized job matching. Improved integration of analytics helps pick the right position for a candidate.

Further, AI enables precise analysis of a candidate’s skills – biometric and psychometric tests can even analyse the smallest traits such as voice features, facial micro-expressions, and body language. The entire recruitment process is maintained with high accuracy and is completely fraud-proof.

With regard to candidates, there is a highly improved user experience. Also, competition motivates candidates to upgrade their skills. A sophisticated rèsumè and prestigious referrals will no longer work.

The Bad

Artificial intelligence could appear to be a threat in the eyes of recruiters since AI takes up part of or sometimes even the entire job of the recruiter. But the change, we predict, will be temporary. Humans will adapt, as they did when the typewriter upended skilled human writers, or the computer upended professional typists. Recruiters will move into lateral positions where the human touch is essential. Thus, AI in hiring will elevate the value of human intervention.

In the current scenario, lack of human touch is a drawback of AI. While it is seemingly straightforward to match a candidate’s skills to a job requirement, there are so many dimensions of aptitude, attitude, fit into a team, and personal capabilities that can only be gauged by a human. This provides scope for more research on gracefully combining human and artificial intelligence as AI is still in its infancy in the recruitment landscape.

Finally, when it comes to bias, AI is as suspect as humans. Even though most AI systems show no hint of bias, there have been observations of bias creeping into systems. After all, AI is built by humans and trained on human data. In the long run, such biases can result in systematic discrimination, whether it is to do with gender, age, or experience. Ultimately, the solution lies with us. Recruitment specialists should consider this as a careful concern and monitor what is being fed into the system

The Latest

The recruitment technology realm is rapidly changing, wherein AI is soon becoming a must-have. Here are a few AI trends in hiring:

• Recruitment Marketing Software
  These tools are aimed at creating engaging content for job ads and building an impressive employer brand.
• Talent Rediscovery Software
  These algorithms screen prior candidates and verify whether they are suitable for the currently open roles.
• Job Aggregators
  These programs employ spiders and bots that crawl different career sites, social media platforms, and job boards to advertise job postings.
• Predictive Models
  These models provide deep data-driven insights throughout the recruitment process, enabling stakeholders to forecast success probabilities for both the company and the candidate.

The Message

AI technology can transform many aspects of recruiting, but it cannot replace human interaction. AI will remain an assistant to recruiters for the foreseeable future, providing quantum leaps in productivity, efficiency and outcomes that will have far-reaching positive effects on hiring. AI tech-enabled hiring will help recruiters, and ultimately, business owners execute better towards strategic hires.

The ultimate goal to achieve success will be a collaborative effort between human and artificial intelligence. The recruitment world is moving towards phygital recruitment – an amalgamation of human pre-qualification and machine learning algorithms. This hybrid approach has emerged as highly successful.

It is also important to note that recruitment specialists should constantly upskill themselves in domains that AI cannot dominate over: providing the much-needed human dimension in understanding the abilities and needs of candidates, and matching them to the right job requisitions.

HirePro‘s AI-driven agile platform is specifically built to address the unique challenges of recruitment, be it campus or lateral hiring. Workflows across corporate functions and service providers are integrated and automated to offer a single platform.

If you want to know more about our platform, reach out to us on 080 6656 6000 or write to us at sales@hirepro.in.

References:
– talentlyft.com
– forbes.com
– hrtechnologist.com
– wikipedia.org
– resources.workable.com
– ideal.com
– medium.com
– vtechsolution.com
– recruitmenttech.com
– simplicant.com

Thanks to the increasing popularity of remote hiring, virtual recruitment has been gradually gaining momentum in the past couple of years. However, the pandemic-induced new norms have catapulted virtual recruitment to the centre stage. Though this is relatively new to the industry, HirePro’s virtual recruitment team has got the process down to a T and has some interesting tips to share.

Get your ducks in a row: A structured process matters

A structured process might seem like a cliché, but you need to adapt and build your processes to suit virtual recruitment. The best way to do so is to select an appropriate Applicant Tracking System(ATS) and adjust the stages of your recruitment funnel to the remote reality you’ve found yourself in. You could also use chatbots or virtual recruitment assistants to enhance your efficiency while recruiting in large volumes. All of these adjustments will help you manage the entire recruitment process effectively, offering a smooth and positive experience to candidates and hiring managers alike.

Old wine in a new bottle

You might have a well-established system of assessments and tests that have worked very well for you in the past. However, you might need to modify these so that they are fully virtual but still effective. Ensure your recruitment tech stack has the required capabilities. Invest in custom built assessment solutions that focus on technical skills as well as soft skills to find the right talent.

Align with the team and find the right match

While the process of candidate matching is not new to any of us, the entire process of defining the right criteria to hire has been complicated by the fact that the hiring team is distributed. Ensure that everyone is on the same page all through the hiring process. Right at the onset, define the main stakeholders for every step of the process, from resume selection to the final interview. Keep your team up-to-date throughout the process. For example, in your ATS, make use of notifications, mentions, and integrations with common communication tools to collaborate efficiently. This way, the entire team will have its eyes on the ball and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Is this the real McCoy?

For obvious reasons, the incidence of fake candidates is higher in the virtual recruitment scenario. You, however, can insure yourself from being adversely affected by a candidate’s fraudulent behavior with the help of proctored assessment solutions. For example, HirePro’s proctored assessment solution has a 99% success rate in voice and face recognition when candidates are assessed via live or automated video proctoring.
Ensure you have a robust system in place to check references and validate the veracity of the candidate’s resume.

Roll out the red carpet

Virtual recruitment can fall in the realm of being impersonal and uninvolved. This could make the candidates feel unsure and discourage them from progressing with the offer.
Continuously engage with the candidate at every stage of the hiring process to keep the human touch alive. Adjust your recruitment platform to reach out to the candidates right from the word go with useful information on the tools they would be using and how they could prepare. You might also want to introduce the candidates to their interview panel a day in advance, via email.

Ahoy! All on board?

A confusing onboarding process can affect the time required and effectiveness of your employee’s integration into your ecosystem. You can ensure a seamless onboarding process by investing in a SaaS-based platform that automates the post-offer engagement and onboarding activities. This enables you to make the onboarding an engaging process that is in line with your organisation’s ethos and branding.

Adopting a virtual recruitment process is not the insurmountable hill you might have envisioned. Like everything else in life, it’s just a case of making the best of use of the technology available and adapting it to your specific requirements and circumstances.
Happy Recruitment!

If you have any queries or need a demo on HirePro virtual hiring, please write to us at sales@hirepro.in.

Sources:
– recright.com
– evalground.com
– cv-magazine.com
– smartdreamers.com
– northeastern.edu
– financesonline.com
– talentlyft.com
– harver.com

If you are in recruitment, you must be feeling like you’re in one of those high velocity “insanity” rides in an amusement park. Yes, there was that lull when the industry went quiet during the lockdown. But now that recruitment has started in earnest again, you must be scrambling to meet the ever-present demand for top quality talent, while navigating this completely new pandemic-driven landscape. The need of the hour is to overcome all geographical and logistics-based barriers and find the right talent. Once you’ve found the talent, you then need to onboard your new joinees virtually from different geographic locations. How else could you meet these new demands on the talent acquisition industry other than through online recruitment?

Like everything else, it’s not just enough to get on board with the idea of remote recruitment. You need to ensure that you have the right tools in place as well as organizational buy-in. If you think that this is just a momentary trend brought on by COVID-19, we are here to tell you that virtual hiring is here to stay. In fact,as per the Litter annual employment survey, some of the key components of remote hiring have been emerging since 2019 itself. The pandemic pushed this trend into the spotlight in 2020.

A recent survey done by FutureLearn also gives us some food for thought.

• More than 50% of recruiters said they used remote hiring techniques during the lockdown
• 14% of recruiters believe they saw a reduction in the levels of unconscious bias through the hiring process
• 66% of recruiters are expecting to move to a more hybrid model of hiring in the future
• 25% feel they are not prepared or trained to shift to the new way of working

Advantage, virtual recruitment!

Despite this year’s pandemic-induced hiring freeze, when it comes to high-quality talent, it is still a candidate market out there. You need to project the right image to attract the right talent. In the current climate of social distancing, remote hiring or virtual hiring is actually a necessity. Adopting remote or virtual hiring indicates that you are not only factoring the limitations of time and space through technology, but also addressing the candidate’s personal well-being.

Here are a host of other reasons why virtual recruitment will endure in the future too.

• Time-saving: Automation hastens the entire recruitment process.
• Candidate screening: An AI-powered remote recruitment software would allow you to parse a large amount of resumes/jobs in a scalable manner.
• Improved quality of hire: Online assessment tools help remove some of the biases that might affect the hiring process. For example, HirePro’s fraud proof assessments, end-to-end automation and flawless video interviews improves the quality of hire significantly. This creates a fairer hiring experience that produces better long-term results.
• Bulk hiring across locations: You can attract a larger pool of applicants and effectively reach and evaluate all of them anytime, remotely. This would allow you to bring in uniquely-skilled resources from anywhere in the world.

While the age-old norm in recruitment demanded face-to-face interactions, video interviews is the new path to explore and adopt.

Get it right and ace online recruitment!

Technology is the cornerstone of any remote recruitment platform. You will need the right tools to source, screen, interview, select, and onboard employees virtually from different geographic locations.

Here are some of the tools you should keep an eye out for:

• Applicant Tracking Systems
• Recruitment CRMs
• Skill Testing Tools
• Psychometric Testing Tools
• Video Interview Platform
• Candidate Satisfaction Surveys
• Background Check Tools
• Reference Check Tools

If you want to harness the power of the digital space and reach out to a lot of qualified candidates at once with a minimal budget, you could also consider holding a virtual job fair. The format of a virtual career fair can be as diverse as the candidates you wish to reach. Many recruiting technology companies offer hosting platforms for webinars and chats that you could use to host specific events.

While evaluating all these tools and methods, do keep in mind that technology is just the skeleton with which you can give shape and life to your online recruitment process. You’ll need to reengineer your strategies and equip yourself with the right skills to tackle this paradigm shift in recruitment. Because, virtual recruitment is definitely here to stay!

If you have any queries or need a demo on HirePro virtual hiring, please call us at 080 6656 6000 or write to us at sales@hirepro.in.

References:
– itproportal.com
– itproportal.com
– calcalistech.com
– business.linkedin.com
– glassdoor.com
– accolo.com
– economictimes.indiatimes.com
– hr-on.com
– nimble.com
– timesnext.com
– futurelearn.com
– smartdreamers.com
– builtin.com
– northeastern.edu
– financesonline.com
– comparecamp.com
– talentlyft.com
– harver.com

2020 has been a year of uncertainty and change. So, it’s not surprising that it has given rise to a myth or two. Many recruiters have encountered their share of myths in the virtual hiring landscape. We are here to debunk some of them for you.

Myth 1: Go Virtual and Spend More for Less!

Virtual hiring is not efficient and will utilise more time and resources than traditional recruitment.

Truth of the matter: Virtual recruitment can be highly efficient as long as you make use of the right technology stack and adapt it to your specific requirements. In fact, a recent CareerNet survey indicates that 3 out of 4 employers believe that they can effectively hire employees remotely. At HirePro, we’ve been able to eliminate the friction in the recruitment supply chain with our technical innovations and solutions. This means that we’ve been able to transform the typical 60-day hiring cycle to a just-in-time phenomenon for our clients.

Myth 2: Virtual Equals Poor Candidate Experience

Candidate experience will be affected as communication is not seamless.

Truth of the matter: A well-managed recruitment process that makes use of the multiple levels of communication offered by a recruitment platform can deliver a positive experience to the candidate. You can retain the human touch by modifying your communication and incorporating audio and video calls into your communication strategy. Your willingness to recruit virtually demonstrates your empathetic and employee-friendly approach.

Myth 3: Virtual- An Open Invitation to Frauds

It’s very difficult to prevent fraud during virtual assessments.

Truth of the matter: Proctored assessments have really made this a myth. HirePro’s online proctoring tool enables automated detection and control of cheating. We have achieved a 99% success rate in voice and face recognition when candidates are assessed with live or automated video proctoring.

Myth 4: Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole

Finding the right cultural fit is more difficult when you hire virtually.

Truth of the matter: Whilst meeting a candidate in person is a very good way to assess their fit into your team, the reality is that your working environment has changed. Most of your employees might be working remotely and your assessment should now need to factor in soft skills that are essential to the new work environment. Here are some of the soft skills that we think are essential for effective remote working.

• Collaboration
• Focus
• Adaptability
• Time management
• Written communication

We help you design custom solutions that test candidates on the skills you require.

Myth 5: Onboarding Virtually? You are inviting chaos!

It’s difficult to onboard new hires remotely.

Truth of the matter: A well-managed remote onboarding process can be just as effective as a traditional onboarding process. A recent CareerNet survey reports that 9 out of 10 organisations are onboarding employees remotely. They do this by shipping assets and using technology-enabled collaboration and tools.
You can structure a remote onboarding process that is engaging and in line with your brand with our AI-driven platform. The platform automates the entire onboarding process from the post-offer engagement stage.

The ground reality is that virtual hiring driven by technology-led solutions is being adopted rapidly. The CareerNet survey also reported that 68% of employers will recommend remote hiring to their peers and colleagues.

Don’t be late to the party! Call us at 080 6656 6000 or write to us at sales@hirepro.in for a demo.

After businesses recovered from the initial shock of almost-cessation of business in 2020, remote working found its way across industries and segments, right from educational institutes to the big corporates.

Remote Hiring soon piggy-backed on remote working as companies realised they had to hire mission-critical talent. While virtual hiring was not a new concept, it took centre stage in 2020. Increased reliance on digital recruiting being the new norm, here’s how to hire smart and make virtual recruitment a breeze.

Why should you hire remotely?

In 2020, workforce planning and recruitment were impacted by new modes of working, shifting and merging of job roles, and the recruitment marketplace.

The coronavirus pandemic jumpstarted virtual hiring, as companies needed to provide a seamless and positive experience for the candidate. A Gartner HR Poll revealed that 86% of companies were using new technology to conduct virtual recruitment. According to Gartner, virtual interviewing may become the new standard for recruiting leaders and candidates, long after social distancing guidelines are lifted.

Talent acquisition – made easy virtually

The workforce is at the heart of the organisation, and while everything else may remain virtual, it’s important to remain connected with employees – both old and new.

Virtual recruitment is not just about conducting a video interview and sending an offer letter via email. Companies that offer a virtual hiring experience that is as close to the “real” hiring experience will be the ones that succeed in acquiring the best talent. Some strategies have shown immense success.

Be sensitive: The pandemic has put people under tremendous stress – financial, emotional or even health-related. All of these can impact the interview. So, do make an effort to put the candidate at ease. Be cheerful. It helps.

Spend adequate time: Rather than walking quickly through interviews, spend some time to understand each candidate. Conduct multiple interviews with different people to get a holistic impression. That will help you zero in on the most suitable candidate.

Document your hiring process: Make sure that everyone on the hiring team is up to speed and on the same page, and that questions are not repeated. A seamless and process-driven approach, despite multiple interviewers, will give the candidate a positive impression about the company.

Respect time and boundaries: Make sure that the interview process is to the point, targeted, starts on schedule, and adheres to the planned duration.

Have a remote onboarding process: A 90-day onboarding plan, and an onboarding buddy will help ease the transition. Share onboarding documentation with all managers.

Share company culture: Make the potential candidate aware of the company’s culture, work ethics, and even fun aspects. .

Close the hire: A quick closure will help in getting the candidate you want, and will minimise the risk of their looking elsewhere.

So, what does remote recruitment involve?

The increased use of virtual hiring platforms, due to companies being limited by mobility and social distancing norms, has resulted in the mushrooming of several typical processes.

Source potential candidates: This is often done via hackathons and virtual career job fairs.

Screen candidates using bots: Time-consuming tasks such as initial fitment, interview availability timings and other information are done by bots, optimising a recruiter’s time.
Online assessments: Hiring platforms provide different types of tests – psychometric, aptitude, tech and domain-related. The tests can be remote-proctored and fraud-proof. Many of the cutting-edge platforms are powered by AI, offering live and automated detection of suspicion and warnings while being highly reliable and requiring low bandwidth.

Video interviews: Virtual hiring platforms use AI to verify identity, thereby allowing video interviewing with no impersonation risks. The interviews can be interactive, via screen sharing and digitised whiteboards, and can be conducted even in low bandwidth scenarios.

Making an offer: The availability of data analytics enables data-driven hiring decisions, eliminating the possibility of unintended bias.

Digital Onboarding: Virtual recruitment platforms offer a smooth onboarding experience to new employees. A branded onboarding experience with documentation, and sharing company policies and procedures, eases the transition into a new work environment.

Hiring remotely – benefits and challenges

A virtual recruitment platform can help ease the process for both the hirer and the hiree.
Virtual hiring offers many obvious benefits to employers. Amongst these are:

Location-agnostic hiring: Companies can hire people from different regions and even countries, especially for tasks where employees need not be in the same time zone.

Diversity and inclusion: Organisations now have a wider and diverse candidate base, which translates into an opportunity to be more inclusive. Virtual career fairs have proven to be an effective means of recruiting from diverse groups such as women returning to a second career, veterans, and people with special needs. These virtual engagements can be advertised on your company’s career page and social media accounts to attract the right talent.

Employee retention and improved productivity: A virtual workforce means that employees have flexible hours. People can work from anywhere and this improves employee morale.

Cost and time savings: Recruiters and candidates no longer need to travel for interviews, resulting in significant savings for organisations.

While it’s great to have a diverse and remote workforce, virtual recruitment comes with challenges too. Some of these are:

Physical Infrastructure: The virtual recruitment process requires access to high-speed internet connectivity so that interviews can take place smoothly. Also, the recruitment team should ensure that people on the interview panel as well as the candidate have access to devices that have requisite audio and video capabilities. This will enable the recruitment process to proceed on schedule.

Communication: It is important for people in a hiring team to be on the same page. Clear communication within the team is essential for this. For interviews, video-based ones are preferable to ensure that non-verbal cues are not missed out. Two-way interactions are crucial for an accurate assessment, so the candidate should be actively engaged.

Transparency: To eliminate any confusion, each stage of the hiring process should be as transparent as possible. During the interviews, the candidate will draw conclusions about company culture and expectations.

Onboarding: Onboarding a new employee has its own challenges even in a real environment, and it becomes a tad more complex when done virtually. Tight documentation and processes are imperative to ensure that new joinees do not feel lost in the system.

2021 and beyond – Is remote recruitment here to stay?

It is most likely that virtual recruitment is here to stay. Investing in the right technology for a seamless remote hiring experience may become a necessity. Recruitment practices in 2021 and beyond will include automated processes for screening of candidates using AI-powered chatbots. Predictive analytics will help companies fine-tune recruitment operations.

With the right virtual hiring platform, companies can make great strides in building a dependable, trustworthy and talented remote workforce.

References:
– assets.kpmg
– gartner.com
– thehindubusinessline.com
– rakuna.co

2020: The rise of remote recruitment

It’s a very 2020 thing: hiring has gone remote. Not that it was all in-person in 2019. Riding on the tailwinds of technology and automation, the practice was on the upswing. Just like many other things in the world, companies came up against COVID-19. Workforces went remote, and as a corollary, hiring went remote as well.

What exactly is remote recruitment?

It refers to the HR practice of casting a wider net to find suitable candidates for open positions – looking beyond company locations. The hiring process happens completely virtually. Post virtual onboarding, an employee may possibly work remotely, either partially, temporarily or permanently.

AI in remote hiring: evolutionary tech

HR technologists have been deploying an array of tools and systems to make the recruitment process more efficient, whether it is recruitment marketing automation, video interviews, virtual reality engines, or facial recognition software, to enhance candidate experience.

AI in recruitment tech, although relatively new, has become almost ubiquitous. Consider the use of chatbots to provide instant answers to candidate queries. Or, resume screening algorithms that filter candidates at a much faster rate than any human can. Pre-assessment tools that gauge candidate personality and aptitudes have become quite prevalent.

These are the myriad ways in which AI works in hiring: as an underlying support tech that turbocharges the recruitment process and provides an array of efficient tools for recruiters to do their jobs faster and more efficiently.

5 ways AI is transforming remote hiring

Let us examine 5 specific and powerful ways AI can benefit remote hiring practices:

1. Better Sourcing: When the recruitment footprint goes bigger, as it does with remote hiring, the number of input resumes goes up tremendously as well. It is the norm today to source resumes from multiple sources such as company websites, social media channels, online job portals as well as recruitment companies. This leaves recruiters with the tedious task of normalising multiple formats, types of resumes, and amounts of input content to make crucial decisions. AI can greatly help streamline this workflow, and present filtered end products for assessment.
2. Finding Best Fit, Faster: Pre-assessment tools such as those offered by HirePro are invaluable for HR technologists to help assess if candidates are the right fit for the position. Finding the fit becomes all the more important in remote contexts, where employees are potentially working from home and don’t have the benefit of working closely with teams. The personality of these employees must be able to ride the new paradigm of remote work capably – AI can help gauge this.
3. Better candidate experience: Candidates today form an impression of the company culture from various digital touchpoints. Recruiters have this additional channel to worry about managing and controlling. Chatbots powered with Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be powerful allies in this effort. They engage candidates across different digital platforms, providing the right answers that keep the brand messaging intact while clarifying a host of questions candidates may have. They save the precious time of human resources in the process.
4. Filtering out the fakes: Facial recognition and fraud detection technology has evolved by leaps and bounds. AI-powered tech during video interviews can gauge candidates’ voice tone and tenor, body language and gestures to assess candidate fit. Attempts at fraud during the process are detected admirably by platforms such as Hirepro. The entire process becomes ‘frictionless’ for recruiters as they don’t have to worry about the latest tech that fraudulent candidates are throwing at them to bypass the system. Instead, recruiters can focus on getting positions filled.
5. Remove the bias: Human bias against candidates – whether due to gender, race, age or even qualifications – can be subtle. But it’s effects are rampant and can prevent companies from getting the best possible resources for particular openings. AI, when trained right, can prevent this – as machine learning models are trained on the right data where human bias has been weeded out, they can be deployed to provide bias-free assessments of candidates throughout the recruitment process.

The addition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in current hiring platforms and tools, and newer ones still coming up, is a powerful dimension in recruitment technology.

COVID-19 has altered the way enterprises work. In a way, this change is shaping the future of how businesses manage their clients and workforce. Not to mention, the future of recruitment too. Even in tough times like this, organizations cannot stop their hiring process. How does talent acquisition pan out in such a crisis situation? How, in such circumstances, does an organization find the right talent to fill their hiring needs?

How does one gauge if an applicant is the right fit for a job profile without meeting him/her in person? How then can recruiters leverage remote hiring to give them good results? Remote hiring is not without its challenges. Nor is it completely new to the market. It has been around for quite some time now, though not as predominantly as traditional ways of hiring.

Challenges of remote recruitment

• Finding the right talent pool remotely
  This is by far the most challenging aspect of remote recruitment. With teams distributed remotely, finding the right talent pool that is spread across the country can get daunting. How can hiring managers gauge aspirants well enough to come to a conclusive decision?
• Unexplored methods for shortlisting candidates
  Companies nowadays are seen constantly innovating with their hiring processes. It becomes imperative to think of unexplored methods of shortlisting candidates to stay in the race and not lose out on the best talent available in the market.
• Checking CVs through virtual mediums
  As much as one wouldn’t want this situation, fake CVs are a thing in the market. Checking CVs can get daunting, especially through virtual mediums where faking a CV can get very easy.

Benefits of Remote recruitment

Remote hiring, though fraught with challenges, has multiple benefits.

• Access to a larger talent pool
  Think about it. Remote hiring could actually open up places from where better talent could be found. Geographical boundaries become thin in the search for the right candidates. Better talent means better productivity. Better productivity, in turn, leads to better profits. Win-win situation here, is it not?
• More hours for work
  With extra hours of commute completely cut off, employees often do not mind going the extra mile when needed. Good for the organization, and in turn good for its employees working in remote roles.
• Cost saving factors
  Expenses on office space, food, electricity, workforce – cut. Remote hiring does seem quite cost saving to the organization in the longer run.

Strategies for Remote Hiring

Careful planning and smart strategizing can ensure that remote hiring brings in desired results. Here, we share some pointers to keep in mind when strategizing remote hiring.

• Be visible online
  Job openings need to be marketed efficiently. That is a given, isn’t it? How will good talent find job opportunities otherwise? Let the market know about the job openings you have. Shout it out to attract the best talent in the market.
• Showcase your work culture on social media
  Communicating work culture to remote prospects is extremely important, especially in a situation where they may not get the chance to visit the office premises or experience the company’s work culture in person before accepting a job. This will pave the way for better onboarding experiences and easier transitions.
• Use the right digital tools
  Sorting and assessing applications remotely can get quite challenging without the right systems. This is where you will need to put in maximum efforts. Assess ways to process applications efficiently. A good application tracking system (ATS) will help immensely.
• Invest in a good video interviewing platform
  Assess and choose a good video interviewing platform. In the absence of a face-to-face interview, conducting video interviews will be your best bet in selecting the right candidates for your job openings. Therefore, it makes sense to invest in video interview software that is not prone to glitches. Where network connections are not completely reliable, it would help to have alternatives to connecting to your interview. It wouldn’t hurt to do a trial with a colleague before inviting candidates to the platform. Also, do choose a silent place where chances of disturbance are minimal.
• Set up suitable work assignments
  Consider giving a small work assignment. This will give you an opportunity to test prospects’ technical skills or team skills effectively. You will be in a better position to make an informed decision about the candidate.
• Validate references online
  Investing time and resources to validate references virtually will be well worth your time.
• Close the loop
  Recruiting doesn’t end with rolling out offers. Close the hiring loop properly, one way or the other. Setting up a smooth and efficient remote onboarding process can go a long way in gaining employee trust. And, if someone does not make the cut, do let them know, politely but firmly.

Conclusion

Remote recruitment has its pros and cons. But as the world is evolving into a realm of remote working, remote hiring is also taking the center stage. Increased reliance on technology, for hiring and working, is here to stay. Soon, it may feel like we’ve been hiring remotely all along!