Today’s recruitment needs thinking outside of interview rooms

Recruitment candidates must always be treated as well as we treat our customers. Embracing new recruitment and technological techniques is a great step towards doing this.

Traditional interviews are always useful to assess your candidate’s social skills and establish if they are a good fit for your organisation. But now we understand that the more data we have, the better and more reliable the recruitment decision will be.

Our recommendation would be to always assess your candidates using a variety of techniques and assessments. That way, you can accumulate the data you need to be fully confident in recruitment decisions.

Each year, new tools and assessments emerge to help us evaluate a person’s skill set. For 2019, these new tools include:

* Recruitment marketing — This is a step before the recruitment process begins, a combination of employer branding with your candidate’s “user” experience (UX). This ensures the potential talent is aware of your existence, your organisational mission, and has previously seen evidence that your organisation is a great place to work.

* Constant talent pool development — Having an applicant tracking system (ATS) combined with recruitment marketing software ensures you are building relationships with candidates and constantly developing your talent pool.

* New soft skills assessments measure personality traits and come in new formats such as “game based assessments”. Assessing through a gaming style format is perfect for graduate level entrants or tech-based organisations.

* Job trials create a real-life situation where we bring a candidate into the workplace and observe their skills and behaviours literally at the workplace, thereby turning the concept from simulation into reality.

* A traditional interview can now be replaced with a casual meet-up in a more relaxed place — for example a coffee or a lunch — to create an environment where a more candid, more real conversation can take place. This enables you to see the candidate interact with the real world and provides insights into their character which you cannot see when they are in the interview room.

* Video Interviews can help with efficiency when recruiting or sifting through multiple candidates. Platforms can help with questionnaires that the candidates answer and record. These can be watched by psychologists and transcribed into competency scores. We don’t suggest eliminating face-to-face meetings as it’s important to keep the human side of HR, but these tools help significantly with sifting through candidates and collating data.

Embracing technology in 2019 is essential. Why do we ask for a CV when we actually just need a link to a LinkedIn profile?

Online platforms for administering psychometrics can now be linked to talent management softwares such as Comaea, for ease of administering and collecting candidate data. When you hire your successful candidate, you can then manage their career and development from the same software. We can even assess candidates virtually now to save expenses on flights and hotels.

We can’t fear these advancements. As the human element, we must control and utilise them to create win-win situations for candidates and organisations.

— Karen Beggs is Talent Management Manager at Knowledge Group