Rapid advances in technology and a power-shift to candidates means that recruitment agencies will be forced to adapt to a changing playing field and find new ways of working to stay competitive. Are you prepared to compete for the best candidates and business opportunities? Read on for the top tech trends that all recruitment industry leaders should be aware of in 2020.
Robotic Process Automation
Recruiting is an industry where success is created from human interaction. However, the increasingly fast-paced nature is forcing recruitment consultants to spend more and more time on administrative tasks – managing databases, parsing and extracting CV data, reformatting CVs – and many are dissatisfied and demotivated by the hours spent weekly on mundane, repetitive tasks.
Furthermore, there is huge pressure to find the time for meaningful, productive candidate and client interaction. This is why the most strategic recruitment agencies will identify the business processes that can be effectively automated.
At the core of this trend are innovative recruitment automation solutions. Businesses that ignore the benefits of recruitment automation tools are likely to lose their candidates to tech-savvy competitors. On average, employees in the HR industries are losing on average 14 hours a week on manual tasks that could be automated. That is a significant waste of time, money, and productivity.
Automation is best suited to repetitive tasks that require precision but do not require human creative judgement. For example, we have seen how introducing candidate selection algorithms can, in fact, hinder the recruitment process by throwing out qualified candidates before they are even seen by a human. On the other hand, CV formatting is a simple, straight-forward task, yet it is highly time-consuming for recruitment consultants. This can be automated to streamline the recruitment process and speed up time-to-hire for your clients. The Allsorter.com platform formats CVs with precision, speed and accuracy, while allowing the recruitment consultant to easily review the process and edit where needed.
2020 will see businesses that utilise automation in the most effective way increase their competitive standing as they free up recruiters’ time to spend on more value-adding tasks.
HR Analytics
The use of data-driven metrics is one of the leading trends in the recruitment industry. Finding actionable ways to interrogate your data can be invaluable in building a strong pipeline and becoming a proactive recruiting force. By understanding emerging trends in client demands and candidate supply, business resources can be focused on areas of strategic advantage. Despite this, currently data analytics adoption is only at 9% in HR departments.
A data-driven approach is an absolute must in today’s recruitment market. Particularly if you wish consistently and quickly find the best candidates. Quality-of-hire, time-to-hire, and cost-of-hire are key HR metrics that drive company business decisions. This means that if your clients are watching these metrics, you should be too, as negative trends in these areas could be a warning sign that you are about to lose a client.
Some of the benefits of analytics in recruitment:
- Provides insight into the effectiveness and value of your candidate sourcing strategies, for example, which advertising platforms work best for which type of roles.
- Enables proactive, rather than reactive, recruiting by recognising trends in hiring and predicting demand.
- Opens up the potential to learn from and improve processes within your own recruiting process, such as tracking which business activities are yielding the highest return on investment.
- Allows you to predict which candidates will be high performers and identify those who are likely to be unreliable.
What do these recruitment trends mean for you?
These hiring trends show that although technology is assuming a more central role in the recruitment process, human interaction is still a critical component of successful recruiting. It is crucial to note that although technology may seem to be the central focus, your digital strategy should only be present to empower your team and drive an exemplary candidate and client experience.