Creative use of technology stems from successfully blending the right people with innovative practices tuned for results. The panellists expressed this critical reflection in the Tech HR Day 2 Fireside Chat session on "Facilitate Creativity Using Technology. Moderated by Sudarshan Ravi, the founder and CEO of Rippe Hire and joined by Satish Rajarathnam SVP, HR, Mphasis, the two deliberated on how a focus on creating better ways to use technology within recruitment helped Mphasis address their talent needs.

Creativity is a powerful tool for Sudarshan, who explained how technology today can create powerful ways for companies to address talent demands. But, reflecting on the challenges of the ecosystem today, he added how while creativity can create robust solutions, it is also rare. Satish Rajarathnam shared a similar perspective adding that while creativity is a necessary attribute for success, "technology and creativity often don't go hand in hand. Unless there is a conscious effort to leverage technology in a way that spurs creativity." 

Yet the potential of creativity and technology fuelling the use of each other remains pivotal to business success. "Creativity and technology can combine to deliver a cocktail of delightful experience, powerful employer branding and enable high value talent acquisition outcomes," noted Satish.

Creating better pathways for success

Skills shortage has been a significant challenge for companies across the board. With market forces and the changing nature of technology constantly reshaping talent demands, companies cannot build newer ways of hiring the right people. As job markets continue to be disrupted, noted Sudarshan, Mphasis built an award-winning talent acquisition program that creatively leveraged existing tools and tech to address the problem. 

Sharing his journey, Satish added how creativity was at the heart of being able to address the talent demands. "We established a segmented approach to address our talent challenges. By creating different communities of practice, empowering our recruiters and interviewers, reworking our onboarding experience, to create better ways to reach the talent community," he added. 

But an essential aspect of using technology to build creative and impactful practices was empowering individuals and building a targeted approach. Taking the talent acquisition model at Mphasis, Satish added how important it was to empower recruiters, interviewers, and other stakeholders to be creative with their assessment and use technology to cut down the time taken to perform routine and transactional tasks. 

Taking a segmented approach

One of the crucial aspects of creating an impactful recruitment strategy was for Satish and Mphasis to create different communities of practice. This helped segment the entire approach to addressing talent needs and created a way for the company to hire the right people. In addition to improving the efficacy of using technology to hire people, using a segmented approach helped Mphasis to be creative in finding solutions. While interviewers were segmented to be skilled and develop holistic ways of assessing candidates, a particular focus on helping recruiters source better candidates and talent pools meant using technology creatively.

Focus on people to create the change

Sudarshan highlighted the importance of candidate experience and how companies often avoid paying attention to it. Mphasis created a robust mechanism that prioritised candidate experience and ensured the end-to-end hiring process.

"We began by addressing the importance of our recruiters, our interviewers, our hiring professionals," explained Satish. "They were our pillars and they helped transform candidates into ambassadors and not just those who join us and leave. By enabling them to provide our candidates a clear exposure into the career they can nurture and skills they can develop, our entire recruitment function helped transform the candidate experience by hiring the best people." 

Sudarshan noted how significant growth Mpahsis has experienced over the last few years depended critically on how effectively technology could create creative hiring.