How businesses can optimize the talent acquisition process

Recent months have seen the jobs market disrupted in a manner unseen since the 2007-2008 financial crash. According to the Office for National Statistics, between March and June 2020, the number of UK employees on payrolls fell by 650,000; the International Labour Organization found that a staggering 1.25 billion employees worked in sectors marked as being at high risk of a “drastic and devastating” growth in layoffs and slashed wages and working hours. With such a grim outlook for employees, businesses have also been pushed to be more agile, stress employee engagement more than ever and institute the most efficient talent acquisition process possible.

The evolution of recruitment

Talent acquisition leaders are once again at the dawn of a game-changer, known as Recruiting Enablement, which will transform the hiring experience to make it more effective, efficient, relevant and able to facilitate more human interactions.

Recruiters are facing an unprecedented task of addressing pressing talent acquisition challenges and will need to adopt new tools and strategies that expand diverse talent pools, enable tailored employer value propositions, improve decision making, mitigate bias, and speed up the alignment of recruiting with desired business outcomes – all regardless of strategy, complexity and volume.

What is Recruitment Enablement?

Cutting costs and driving efficiency is a must which is where Recruiting Enablement comes into the picture. As a practice, Recruiting Enablement encompasses the processes, content, and technology that empowers talent acquisition teams to recruit both efficiently and effectively at high volumes and high velocity. This must be complemented by Recruiting Enablement technology, as provided by Oleeo, which drives automated and data-driven recruiting decisions.

It’s no secret that recruiting is becoming more and more challenging. Technology must be more innovative, empowering recruiters to continually test and support diverse and inclusive strategies through multiple configurable workflows. We are putting that into place at Oleeo with a Recruiting Enablement platform that uses cutting-edge tools to ensure the alignment of recruiting with the desired business outcomes regardless of strategy, complexity and volume.

How does Recruitment Enablement work?

Such innovations are needed to help recruiters around some of their biggest challenges including talent shortages, rising competition, candidates casually applying for vacancies and shortlisting later and corporate pressures around diversity & inclusion levels. Tailored Recruiting Enablement technology can alleviate these burdens. Done well, it can help recruiters design highly configurable workflows that allow for specific, more relevant content to highlight unique role value propositions told from a more inclusive perspective, thereby improving culture fit and driving success around performance indicators like retention, offer & acceptance ratios and culture fit.

Recruiting Enablement empowers recruiters to expand their reach, articulate a more inclusive employer value proposition, build meaningful relationships with diverse talent, and make the right decisions faster than their competition. They can also quickly automate configurable workflows that support diverse and inclusive recruiting strategies at scale.

Rooting out unconscious bias

By automatically routing out bias during every stage of the recruiting process — from debiasing job postings to attract more diverse candidates to serving up more inclusive content to using intelligent selection to more fairly rank candidates on skills and competencies – Recruiting Enablement helps recruiters ensure every interaction, regardless of final hiring outcome, remains personal, inclusive and unbiased, protecting the employer brand.

The automated cycle of recruitment means you should have a better talent pool of candidates coming through that reflect the future leaders you want to join your organization. Clever data techniques will recommend candidates who unequivocally perform better and thereby deliver more revenue, profit, or stay longer in the business. It means that a business can go on to use algorithms based on how employees perform in the business rather than what line managers decide at the interview.

The importance of data-driven decisions

Reducing reliance on the gut instinct of recruiters and hiring managers by enabling them to effectively utilize the plethora of recruiting data they already have is essential e.g. data on high, medium and low performing employees; candidate demographics, sources of hire and background data; assessment and psychometric data and structured interview data.

Gaining efficiencies in hiring isn’t just about making your processes streamlined. It is also about looking to automate and speed up tasks like candidate screening, assessments, and background and reference checks, to name just a few. As an example, British retail giant Marks & Spencer uses Oleeo to hire in 3 days using a simple 2-touch process. The right recruiting technology will allow recruiters to perform tasks in bulk.  Whether applied to candidate selection, moving candidates to a new step, scheduling interviews, converting in-person interviews to virtual interviews, or something else, your tech should let you do this in one step versus many.

At the highest level, the Recruiting Enablement process is about empowering recruiters to make the best possible hires every day, as efficiently and effectively as possible. This includes:

• Designing, testing, and configuring workflows that support diverse and inclusive recruiting strategies – at scale
• Automating processes to serve up relevant content to candidates and to fast track qualified candidates
• Streamlining administrative tasks such as interview management and gathering hiring committee feedback to identify qualified candidates more quickly
• Leveraging data throughout the talent acquisition process to make better, evidence-led decisions

With intelligent automation, configurable workflows and data-driven recommendations, Recruiting Enablement is poised to help recruiters and the organizations they serve achieve a recruiter experience that does what recruitment marketing has done for the candidate’s experience – make it more effective, more efficient, more relevant and most importantly – more human again.

Keeping a tight talent acquisition process will ultimately help to attract talent that matters.

To learn more, register for Talent Acquisition in New and Uncertain Times: Becoming Part of the Data Revolution, to view the full session on-demand.