Will you ever find a trampoline to jump over your recruitment barriers?

Organizations face a ton of recruitment barriers that can be jumped over with recruitment intelligence solutions, ensuring that you find the right talent in the shortest possible time frame.

Recruitment is fascinating and intriguing. One of the earliest pieces of evidence of the existence of recruitment can be found dating back to the great Roman Empire. It consists of wooden tablets that had an engraving of resumes of individuals, mentioning their skill set, work experience, and other professional details. Since then, recruitment has evolved tremendously. So much so, that it has carved a niche for itself in the form of the “recruitment and hiring industry.” We now have in-house recruiters as well as third-party recruiters that help organizations to find the right candidates. But, even with changing times, specific recruitment barriers have stayed the same, causing tangible and intangible losses to organizations.

What are the recruitment barriers?

As a candidate, a hiring manager, or a recruiter, you are very well-versed with the perils of the recruitment process. To begin with, candidates are usually unhappy with the long recruitment turnaround times in the hiring process, usually exacerbated by delays in communication. With so many applicants in the market today, the average hire time to fill a vacancy has risen to 42 days. This is a worrisome figure for candidates and organizations alike. Similarly, there are other recruitment barriers that recruiters face such as failure to find the right candidate, resulting in a skills gap at the organization, a communication gap between recruiters and hiring managers, spending a lot of time to recruit a candidate, and failing to provide candidates with a pleasing recruiting experience. Organizations are also faced with the additional task of ensuring that data privacy and compliance laws are met, and the data is maintained and deleted according to the law. All these challenges have not yet been fully resolved even though we have reached an advanced age where we have a technological solution for most of our problems. All these mentioned factors are detrimental to your organization. You may end up repeating the recruitment process along with the same mistakes again and again, which will lead you nowhere. But isn’t there a solution that can get you out of this recruitment trap? Well, behold, there is — Recruitment intelligence.

What is recruitment intelligence?

Recruitment intelligence is the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence in the recruitment process to not only automate repetitive tasks but also assist hiring managers with decision-making at every stage of recruitment, right from candidate sourcing to onboarding.

How can recruitment intelligence help overcome recruitment barriers?

Recruitment intelligence tools use artificial intelligence technology that can help overcome the recruitment barriers mentioned above and streamline the recruitment process. Here’s an in-depth look at how recruitment intelligence can help the age-old challenges prevailing in the recruitment process.

Reduce recruitment time

One of the most significant challenges for recruiters and candidates is the time spent in the recruitment processes. This can be attributed to the following two primary reasons.

• Improper candidate screening: As discussed earlier, the HR team has to go through hundreds or even thousands of resumes for screening candidates. This process is very lengthy and time-consuming. Recruiters often resort to a thorough screening of the first few applicants and tend to continue the recruitment process among the selected first few candidates. This results in your organization missing out on the right candidate at the earliest opportunity.

With recruitment intelligence, the process of screening candidates can be carried out automatically by the AI solution. The AI solution can analyze a large number of resumes quickly and find valuable, relevant information about the candidate, such as the candidate's qualifications and skillsets. It can then present this report to a human resource manager for further inspection. Thus, the time required for resume screening is brought down significantly with the help of recruitment intelligence tools and ensures that every relevant candidate passes the screening process.

• Communication delays: Recruiters have to go through a swarm of applicants for filling a single vacancy. This means that they have to spend a lot of time screening candidates at every stage to finalize one final candidate. Processes such as resume screening, task assignment and reviewing, interview scheduling, and conducting interviews can take a ton of time. This means that the hiring manager has little to no time left for other activities, such as responding to candidates quickly. It so happens that emails from a potential candidate go unanswered, or there is a significant delay in response. This can often lead to you missing out on the right candidate just because of communication delays.

Recruitment intelligence tools can seamlessly close the communication gap by automatically responding to candidates. The RI tool can understand a candidate’s email message with Natural Language Processing capabilities, and can thus respond appropriately without the need for human interference. Therefore, the candidate will always feel involved in the recruitment process and not be left hanging on as it currently happens in most cases.

Assist in finding the right candidate

Once a few potential candidates are selected, hiring managers are faced with the daunting task of candidate selection through assessment and interviews. This again is a herculean task in itself, consuming a lot of time and resources. Human resource management thus can’t dedicate the required amount of time involved in these processes, first due to the complexity of the tasks and considering the other tasks they have at hand. Secondly, the interview process itself is complex, requiring interviewers to assess a candidate in just half an hour or one hour to determine whether the candidate will be the right fit for the organization. Assessing soft skills and hard skills in such a short period can become difficult. There is also the question of human bias. Hiring biases are not new in the recruitment process, and they can lead to serious legal, financial, and reputational damages.

Recruitment intelligence can assist human resource managers in the candidate assessment and interviewing process. The tools can be programmed to conduct online competency tests that can give hiring managers a clear understanding of the hard skills possessed by the candidates. Similarly, with behavior and facial recognition technology, the tool can also be used to assess the candidates’ soft skills. Depending on the posture and expressions of the candidates, such as the position of the shoulders and involuntary facial expression changes when presented with a question, it can help determine whether the candidate is confident, scared, or faking his interview. Similarly, the tool can also analyze the candidates' speech patterns throughout the interview to determine the changes in the candidate's behavior during the interview. Based on the analysis, it can generate a report that can assist hiring managers in making informed decisions.

Provide analytics and reports

Recruitment intelligence tools gather data at every stage of the recruitment process. The gathered data is then collated and analyzed. The data is arranged in graphs, pie charts, and tables to provide organizations a simplified overview of their recruitment process. With the help of data analysis and report generation capabilities of the AI solution, the organization can Analyze the cost-per-hire in various departments and positions

• Gauge hiring trends in the organization
• Calculate the ROI on each candidate
• Analyze the pitfalls in their recruitment process

Organizations can make informed decisions to streamline their recruitment process with the availability of such insights. The recruitment process will keep getting refined with each new recruitment activity due to the insights provided by the recruitment intelligence tool.

Ensure regulatory compliance

Organizations need to comply with state and federal laws regarding recruitment data collected in the hiring process. Non-compliance with these laws can lead to legal procedures. For example, organizations need to retain candidates’ data for a minimum of six months, in case a candidate files a discrimination claim. Similarly, if the organization is keen to retain the candidate data even after six months, for future recruitment opportunities, they first need to seek consent from the respective candidate. Organizations can often end up inadvertently neglecting the compliance requirements, and this can result in severe consequences.

With a recruitment intelligence tool, organizations can easily manage their regulatory compliance practices. The tool can securely store candidates’ data in a digital format, ensuring data privacy for the stipulated time. Once the data retention period draws close, the tool can notify the organization of the same and have them take the required steps (deleting the data or keeping it further with the candidate’s consent). Thus, you won’t have to spend time on resources on checking your regulatory compliances as the recruitment intelligence tool will do it for you.

The recruitment process is barraged with obstacles that hinder the hiring process across organizations and industries. Will you ever find a trampoline to jump over your recruitment barriers? Well, you already have, in the form of recruitment intelligence.