As hiring practices change, companies will need to incorporate human resources technology into their talent acquisition model to stay competitive in the labor market, writes Tim Rowley, COO & CTO, PeopleCaddie.
For employers today, the importance of hiring skilled and specialized workers may be equaled only by the urgency of building the skills and specialized expertise of their existing workforce. Marshaling the resources to address both sets of needs – often while an industry’s landscape changes underneath the feet of a hiring manager – may feel like the ultimate tightrope walk.
“The hardest challenge for HR managers today,†Michael Stephan, US Human Capital national managing partner for Deloitte Consulting, told ,Toolbox, “is how to keep the machine running, while also upskilling the workforce to meet the rising needs of super jobs.â€
One of the most effective and efficient means for tackling this problem head on has been the adoption of human resources technology. In addition to online job boards, many software-based sourcing solutions are beginning to gain traction in the market. These top-of-funnel solutions assist HR professionals in quickly building a deep pipeline of qualified passive candidates and can enable your recruiters to focus on providing rich recruiting experiences and building relationships with qualified candidates, rather than spending too much time searching for them.
The Digitization of the Hiring Process Has Arrived
For the companies that are late to the HR tech game, falling behind the competition – if it hasn’t happened already – is a likely inevitability. There is no hack, no feasible workaround, that can replicate the proficiency and scale of hiring achieved by HR technology. Industries in which the war for talent isn’t as competitive as others – such as those typically hiring physical labor rather than white-collar or office workers – may currently feel less urgency to make use of HR tech. These companies may also find it challenging to find their labor inputs with digital tools. But seismic changes underway in the labor market are fundamentally shifting the balance between demand and supply. A company in one of these mature industries that opts to blissfully ignore that shift runs a tremendous risk: the realization of a desperate need for HR tech well after the need arises.
Technology companies, as you might imagine, have been most proactive in adopting new HR tech. Given the massive number of open IT jobs and the scarcity of talent in the industry, tech companies have an urgent need. These companies are also typically filled with employees who are best-equipped to effectively deploy and adopt new HR tech. But finding great talent is becoming increasingly difficult in every industry, and companies often have limited resources relative to their number of open requisitions. We recently brought on a recruiter who, at her previous firm, was left with roughly 150 open positions to fill after a series of layoffs. Although this is an extreme case, HR teams are regularly forced to make tough decisions about how to allocate their time.
When hiring professionals are tasked with finding permanent, contractual and freelance resources, the rational decision is to focus on the company’s permanent resource needs – typically deemed to be those that are most important to an organization. Finding a contractor for a three-month assignment, which may take just as long as finding a permanent hire, falls to the bottom of the priority list. This dynamic will often leave the search for contractual and remote freelance talent languishing, prompting employers to lean in on agencies for help fulfilling their remaining workforce needs. HR tech companies understand that permanent needs are the focus for most organizations, and therefore have aggressively focused on producing solutions that target permanent hiring.
Learn More: How to Use Active HR Technology for More Equitable Hiring
Proliferation Across All Industries
Tech companies might have been amongst the first to adopt these hiring technologies, but now myriad industries are tapping into the benefits.
Pitney Bowes, a postage technology company, recently used an AI chatbot for candidate screening and was able to reduce the time it took to fill a job by nine days, according to the Financial TimesOpens a new window . Likewise, Great Wolf Lodge has used similar technology to increase its applicant flow; while utilizing an AI assistant caused Houston Methodist Hospitalsee a 30% increase in “hard-to-fill†candidates, and 88% of interviews were scheduled on the same day.
The combination of Baby Boomers retiring, more workers joining the gig economy, and increasing competition and economic volatility are driving companies to seek flexible workforces composed of permanent, contract and freelance workers. As this trend gains greater momentum, it will be paramount for companies to effectively navigate a more dynamic labor market. The HR tech solutions of the future will integrate both artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to address opportunities for optimization across all three of these resource types, equipping employers with the tools to thrive in this new environment.
Adapt or die. It’s an old saw that, in this case, may sound alarmist. But the reality is that hiring practices are changing, and companies that fail to incorporate HR tech into their business model are going to find competing in the future labor market to be a towering challenge.