After a number of very challenging years for recruiters, things are finally looking up.
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Bringing on top talent isn’t the only weight recruiters bear. They’re expected to bring on top talent that will stay for years to come. This is a challenge no matter what, but add on the negativity surrounding the job market over the past couple of years and you’ll find recruiters have had one of the most important and difficult jobs in the business world.
But things are finally looking up.
A recent Gallup survey, Majority in US Now Optimistic About Job Market, found optimism in the job market is the highest in the past year since 2001. With this optimism came 1.98 million new jobs in the first 11 months of 2016, according to Glassdoor’s Job Trend’s 2017 report.
With no shortage in job openings, recruiters are being put to the test in corporations everywhere, but with evolving technology, their careers have never been more exciting.
Here are two of the reasons recruiters are having the time of their lives (the third will follow tomorrow):
- Automation Tools Are Cutting Administration.
If you ask recruiters how much time they spent sorting through résumés and e-mailing respondents just a few years ago, they’d probably tell you it’s beyond counting. The main difficulty remains with the fact that recruiters receive hundreds of résumés for job-postings, and an overwhelming 75% are unqualified candidates, according to a 2016 Ideal report, AI Recruitment: The Future of Automated Recruiter.
Thanks to AI’s entrance on the scene, the days of sorting through countless e-mails and online applications are over. Résumé screening automation allows recruiters to cut down on the amount of time they’re spending digging through unqualified candidates’ résumés. These tools scan candidate résumés to weed out those applicants who are obviously unqualified, leaving recruiters with more time to spend researching those who are promising for the job.
Hiring through automation allows for more collaborative and better-informed hiring decisions, as well. Some automation tools, like Workable, allow you to post a job to sourcing talent, provide tools to manage multiple hiring pipelines, allow your team transparent communication, organize candidate profiles, structure interviews, and offer a full reporting suite.
Rather than wasting time calling, e-mailing, and then sitting in interviews with not-quite-qualified candidates, recruiters are able to spend precious in-person interview time with the most highly qualified candidates.
- Focus on People Analytics.
People analytics is the use of data, interpretation, and the results of measuring data patterns to make top talent decisions. These analytical systems have evolved to integrating both external and internal data, making recruiters’ jobs of finding candidates who will stay with an organization more of a calculated process.
Google’s People Operations team (formerly known as Human Resources) are the leaders in using people analytics to grow a strong workplace. Their team analyzes internal data to understand the qualities of their own successful employees to better grasp what skills and traits candidates need to excel within the organization.
An example is Google’s Project Oxygen. During this major project, Google’s analytics team discovered managers needed eight specific traits in order to lead engaged and productive employees.
Now, recruiters know that in order to hire an effective manager, they must look for an individual who is a good coach, empowering, not micromanaging, caring for team members, productive and results oriented, a good communicator, helpful with career development, willing to create a vision, and able to use technical skills to advise.
The benefits of people analytics in recruiting are widespread, but most of all, recruiters are able to be proactive. Moving away from instinct-based decision making gives them concrete decision-making power.
Karyn Mullins, Executive Vice President and General Manager at MedReps.com, a job board that gives members access to the most sought-after medical sales jobs and pharmaceutical sales jobs on the Web.
Tomorrow we’ll hear more from Mullins about how social media expands transparency.
Analytics today brings about the same results of having 30 years recruiting/interviewing experience. Since there aren’t that many recruitasaurs around these days (they’ve stayed in business because they developed their intuitive skills to an amazingly high level…think master chess players playing computers) analytics can make up for years, if not decades, of hands-on experience in identifying winning candidates.
The future in recruiting lies in predictive analytics and the accuracy of the interpretations of the findings…or, 30 years experience. The technology solutions can identify “most likely to succeed” candidates, but what it can’t do is attract them as successfully (the “best” candidates aren’t always actively looking or take the time to listen about the “perfect opportunity).
My longest standing clients (some were candidates 10 – 20 years ago and are now hiring execs) tell me my recruiting process can best be described as more “seducing” than recruiting and the only way a recruiter can succeed at “seducing” the best candidates is to thoroughly know the personality of their hiring exec and the culture of the company.
The future belongs to predictive analytics and the superstars of tomorrow will exploit the technology and learn from the remaining recruitasaurases before they’re extinct 😉