John F. Kennedy once rightly said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

There is not a single aspect of human life that technology has not impacted. The same holds true for human resources as well. Social media, mobile and cloud technologies are transforming the way organizations are looking at identifying and acquiring talent. Recent hiring trends suggest that technology and data are going to shape up a new era of talent acquisition by redefining many new processes.

Though conventional methods will not cease to exist, there will be a humongous shift in the way organizations will decide on their potential hires or how candidates will perceive organizations as a preferred workplace. As Navin Chugh, Senior VP & Managing Director of First Advantage, says, “The nature of hiring has become very dynamic with a complete turnaround in the outlook of organizations and recruiters towards talent.” Social media, the self-updating database of potential employees and employers, is creating a strong need for recruiters to stay abreast with the latest developments in their domains along with having stronger analytical capabilities to be able to establish the best match.

With the new government promising to bring in increased employment opportunities, organizations are not only gearing up to grab the best talent, but also innovate in the way they source and select candidates. The major challenges that organizations will face are finding candidates with the best attitude, an excellent aptitude and ensuring that the candidate stays long-term.

This is where the new-age talent service partnerships come into play so that organizations can identify the best fit from a pool of candidates who can be sourced online and ensure stability and reliability of such candidates. Organizations are also looking at measuring and tracking the return on investment of the talent service partnerships and the new hires, relating it to an impact on productivity and overall growth. Hence, the parameters for choosing recruitment partners are also changing drastically.

Compatibility of thoughts

The vision of an organization plays a crucial role in defining its values, culture and goals and therefore organizations seek a recruitment partner who understands all this and can align its thoughts or ideas in accordance with the same. T. S. KrishnaKumar, Chief Operating Officer, IKYA Group says, “The key to making a partnership effective is ensuring that the organization and the recruitment partner are like-minded and share the same vision. The involvement of an organization’s leadership during recruitment partner selection is, therefore, very important.”

With the new-age talent having access to open sources of information, organizations have also become increasingly conscious of their reputation as an employer. Subsequently, an employer brand will not be able to establish itself well until its recruitment partner also displays the same values. This implies that a recruitment partner needs to be able to synchronize and reflect the same image while hiring. A long-term partnership can ensure the same as Dr G. Rajkumar, CEO of Talentmandi.com, says, “A long-term talent service partnership allows the recruiters more time to imbibe the employer brand and its values.”

Strong analytical capabilities

Screening resumes and shortlisting candidates is passé. With the social media openly offering access to resumes and extended information about people, sourcing candidates is just a click away. However, shortlisting candidates from this enormous pool requires efficient talent analytics. Unlike a decade ago, sourcing is no more a challenge now. In fact, selection has become more complex. Each individual varies from another in terms of attitude and traits. A particular combination of traits might help perform better in a certain job role, but would not work in some other. Talent analytics is one way to do a behavioural analysis of an individual to study those traits and find the best fit. Gyanendra Singh, Chief Operating Officer of Mancer Consulting Services, says, “Hiring managers use this predictive model to recruit better fitting candidates, decrease attrition and substantially reduce costs.”

While analytics is being leveraged in various other ways, recruiters can utilize data analytics to measure the outcome of their efforts, as Dr G. Rajkumar says, “Data analytics is another tool that has enabled the measurement of return on investment for the new recruits and the potential ones as well.”

Domain knowledge and industry expertise

Be it any particular job position, each industry has its own requirements in terms of skill-sets, attitude and experience and a recruitment partner needs to have a strong understanding of the industry for which it is going to hire. For instance, a role in the consulting sector would largely require very polished soft skills while an operational role would require very strong task management and time management skills. Ratan Postwalla, Partner and Co-founder, People Trust, says “Recruitment should be fairly customized to suit the industry needs and hence, it is also very crucial for the recruiter to have the industry expertise or knowledge to be able to find the right fit.”

The Indian market is witnessing a new trend – variabilising talent acquisition. KrishnaKumar of IKYA says, “Organizations are keen to change the composition of their core workforce and alter their talent acquisition model to accommodate as much variable manpower as possible. The talent pool retained by organizations in its core roles will undergo a significant shift in its composition. It is a great opportunity for talent acquisition service companies to expand in this variabilised skills space.” In terms of generic skills, the Indian market is increasingly showing demand for niche skills, and people with multi-country and multi-client knowledge and experience.

Reference check reliability

There is a flood of open forums on the internet where one can easily present made-up image of oneself that might contradict later. This has made reference checks an inevitable part of the recruitment process. A few years back, background checks were done for selected candidates. Now, recruiters prefer to do the same much earlier in order to save the cost and effort spent on the selection process, mitigating even the minutest risk of selecting a fraudulent candidate. Emphasizing the importance of same, Navin says, “Organizations need not wait till the hiring process begins as the first thing a good recruitment partner does is a background screening of the target population of candidates.” A recruitment service firm’s credibility strongly lies in its ability to do accurate and reliable reference checks and save the organization a lot of cost and time, making recruitments more efficient.

Organizations are increasingly opting to hire talent early on, to capture people with fresh and innovative thoughts and at an age when they are flexible to adapt and learn new skills. Consequently, the recruitment partners are also expected to be innovative and energetic in capturing this young pool of talent and engage with them early on so that the best ones can be identified before competition comes in. All said and done, a recruiter has to change with the changing times and be more proactive, energetic, analytically strong, ethical and most of all very tech-friendly to be able to win an organization’s trust. From being a mere support vendor, the role of a talent partner has evolved tremendously and is going to be seen as one of the most vital elements in ensuring an organization’s success.