AI in Hiring, Artificial Intelligence, ATS, Candidate Experience, Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Company Updates, Data Analytics & Reporting, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DE&I), Hiring Assessments, Hiring Manager Engagement, Job Descriptions, Leadership, Managing Costs, Resumes, Talent Acquisition Problems
Talent acquisition teams have many priorities, and it’s hard to balance them all. What’s interesting is that many of the same priorities show up on the top initiatives list year-after-year.
If you are looking to make significant progress in any or all of these areas, then you need a solution that can PROVE they address all of these initiatives with practical examples.
With SmartRank:
Productivity – you could give your recruiters back 30% – 70% of their time back in their day
DE&I – you could have zero unconscious bias in your screening process
Hiring Manager Engagement – simply give them applicants that are EXACTLY what they want
Compliance & Legal – no bias data + 100% inclusive and objective screening = no calls from the EEOC and/or OFCCP
Data Analytics – remove assumption and opinion driven anecdotal conversations with data driven conversations
Applicant Experience – something actually new, different, better, and ultimately benefits the applicant
We can show how we specifically address each of these initiatives in less than 5 minutes each. If you are curious, schedule time with us to learn more (https://lnkd.in/gpyUcDF2)!
AI in Hiring, Artificial Intelligence, Candidate Experience, Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Hiring Assessments, Leadership, Resumes, Talent Acquisition Problems
“92% of companies view skills-based hiring as more effective than using a traditional CV (curriculum vitae), another word for résumé.” YOU THINK? Of course skills-based is more effective, but there are nuances to getting skills-based hiring right.
Are we finally at a point where we can stop using résumés to screen talent? We all hope so, because it’s highly inefficient, ineffective, and biased. You can find tons of research to back this up, or just go to LinkedIn and read the posts and comments from job applicants, recruiters, and even hiring managers lamenting about how bad the current hiring process is working today. I would argue the root causes for that dysfunction are the tools (e.g., résumés, job descriptions, legacy ATSs, etc.) we use in recruiting, and the processes those tools dictate we use.
There is so much talk in companies about “Skills Gaps” and “Improving Retention” and “Improving Productivity.” You fix those problems by hiring the best possible people you can. And you are NOT going to hire the best possible people you can by using résumés. In the same way there is so much talk within talent acquisition about “Improving Efficiency” and “Quality-of-Hire” and “Improving DE&I.” Guess what? You are NOT going to solve those problems by using a résumé either. In fact, you are likely to only exacerbate them.
There are smart, practical, highly-effective, and easy solutions that completely automate the screening process without using/needing a résumé, and I’m not talking about some ineffective biased AI algorithm. I know these solutions exist because I’m a founder of one of them!
AI in Hiring, Artificial Intelligence, ATS, Candidate Experience, Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Hiring Assessments, Hiring Manager Engagement, Leadership, Resumes, Talent Acquisition Problems
Almost exactly one year ago I posted about a coming tsunami of applicants hitting the market (link in comments). Since that post, tech companies alone have laid off over 244,000 people (link in comments), and that’s not including smaller startups. To put that number in perspective, those same tech companies “only” laid off 80,000 at the height of the COVID pandemic from March – December of 2020, and only 15,000 layoffs total in 2021.
And that is just the tech industry. According to a recent Randstad Risesmart study (link in comments), 96% of companies took some sort of downsizing action over the past 12 months, and 94% anticipate taking further action in 2024.
You can see this tsunami of applicants playing out by just looking at some of the jobs posted on LinkedIn. They’ll be posted for hours and get hundreds of applicants.
In my post a year ago, I wrote about how talent acquisition (TA) teams were going to get downsized. With a lack of innovative tools, recruiters (or even TA leaders) would find themselves drowning in a wave of applicants. Unfortunately that is exactly what is playing out.
I probably don’t need to enumerate all the challenges that come as a result of having too many applicants and no way of efficiently and effectively screening all of them.
What does all this have to do with a lion and gazelle running?
Well, unfortunately many TA teams didn’t fundamentally change their tools or processes to handle this wave of applicants, and as a result they are dealing with those consequences.
In 2024 TA teams are either going to be hiring, albeit with an even smaller team, which means an even higher ratio of applicants to recruiters. Or, they are not going to hire in hopes the market returns in 2025.
Whether you are hiring (i.e., lion) in 2024 or not (i.e., gazelle), you should be implementing innovative technology NOW (i.e., running) as opposed to waiting until the problem is out of control, as I wrote about in a different post (link in comments).
You can’t control the market. You can’t control the hiring your company wants to do. But you CAN control the technology you use to manage those hiring peaks and valleys. If you don’t plan to put solutions in place in early 2024 to solve the coming problems in 2025, by the time you realize you have a problem…it’s going to be too late!
ATS, Candidate Experience, Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Hiring Assessments, Talent Acquisition Problems
If you look at labor force statistics, they are confusing. Supposedly we’re sitting at 3.5% unemployment, 62.5% labor force participation rate, 225k jobs cut in the tech sector alone over the past 15 months, and inflation has made everything from gas to groceries way more expensive.
Anecdotally we saw talent acquisition (TA) teams struggling to find talent just 6 months ago, and now we see posts about having too many applicants.
One could argue that managing job applicants has never been more challenging than it is right now. With the ease of applying to jobs online, the bipolar hiring environment, high expectations from applicants and hiring managers, it’s made the process downright miserable. No wonder TA has one of the highest turnover rates of any department in a company.
We expect technology to help us with this management, but in many cases the technology TA teams use acts more like a band-aid rather than a cure. But that could be fixed if companies upgrade their technology.
It’s very likely applicant volume will continue to increase. If you’re still on that old fashioned train of “we’re going to stick to reviewing applicant résumés one-by-one in our ATS,” then the higher volume is only going to exacerbate the problem.
If there is one area that should be automated in TA, it’s the reviewing/screening of applicants. And I’m NOT talking about using a machine (i.e., “AI”) to do the same process a human does of scanning résumés for keywords. I’m talking about ACTUALLY screening 100% of the applicants faster, easier, better, less biased, and giving the hiring managers exactly what they are looking for in a candidate.
There is a way to stop going through every haystack to find the needle, because as that haystack gets bigger, so do your problems. But you will NOT solve any of these problems if you can’t shake the “this is how I’ve been taught and how we’ve always done it” mentality.
Candidate Experience
? “Stressful” and “time-consuming”
Do these words describe your applicant experience?
If you’re thinking the answer is “no”… are you so sure about that?
3 out of 4 job seekers are frustrated with the process.
Could you be losing out on great talent?
