The pandemic has raised new barriers in ‘candidate to employee journey’. From hiring to on-boarding to development, the employee journey experience has really gone through many changes in the last few months. The year 2020 saw a huge dip in talent demand, faced multitude of changes in how business operates and suddenly managing the workforce remotely became a huge challenge as well as the priority.  Cost pressures persisted more than ever. Too many changes in no time kept HR and business leaders busier than ever. However, one thing that predominantly evolved was Technology coming to rescue paving the way to many digital transformation growth stories. A big shift which was felt across almost all industries was the Selection, Pre-onboard and Onboard process - all were now being digitized. 

It is well seen that organizations that need to hire rapidly and in large numbers are turning to technology driven tools for rebuilding their workforce. New ways of hiring through technology solutions are playing a pivotal role in designing and deploying recruitment strategies in many efficient ways. In fact, many organizations that are introducing new technology are making an effort to dispel fears and improve morale by providing professional development opportunities and training with the help of technology solutions for improving candidate to employee journey.

Arun Satyan, the Founder of Hyreo, in his session at TechHR 2021, beautifully summed up the changing role of recruiters versus the changes in candidate expectation when it comes to the new age hiring process. Recruiters now have to manage the scale, consistency and stakeholders’ expectations - all at one go amid the volatility of the talent market. On the other hand, candidates' expectations have undergone a big change, expecting quicker response from recruiters, personalization in the hiring cycle and seeking more clarity in the organization's hiring process. Keeping the challenges in mind, Hyreo began its work in the recruitment process to improve candidate experience using artificial intelligence. It is the world's first recruiting CRM with deep conversational AI and virtual hiring capabilities. The team of Hyreo has been offering a customized candidate relationship management (CRM) tool helping organizations build lifelong  relationships with candidates.

Now, the question arises how organizations can design recruitment strategies, keeping candidates at the center of the process? 

RecruitTech is an answer to the given question and is gradually gaining momentum in India with companies adopting new ways of managing the entire talent acquisition life cycle helping companies automate the human resource’s hiring segment to a larger extent. Besides, the shifting focus to bring informal workers to formal workspace is also aiding the growth of various hiring strategies keeping candidates/applicants at the center of the process. The three broader frameworks that Arun reflected upon while designing recruitment strategies are:

Simplify and Communicate Strategy

Candidate engagement data based on Hyreo’s multiple tech installations reflects that 49% candidate interaction includes queries on selection process, steps in the hiring cycle and offer related questions and 21% candidate gives negative feedback owing to bad communication or lack of clarity. Hence, simplifying the application process, clearly communicating the steps and creating an engagement between the teams are exceedingly essential while creating the right hiring process.

Stay in Touch Strategy 

29% of candidate/applicant states that recruiters come back late with their responses in the hiring process. TA teams are generally not quick enough when it comes to responding to queries. It is also observed that around 18% candidates’ declines offer owing to expectation mismatch. Such data highlights the need for better strategies centered on candidate reach-outs with defined RACI and reporting alongside leading the agenda of embedding an empathetic approach in the overall process.

Using Data as a friend Strategy

Data is the key while trying to make impactful changes. Data driven decisions at each stage of hiring process is the new way of solving complex business processes including talent hiring. Knowing and measuring candidate pulse through sentiment analysis and feedback needs to be a part of the new process and augmenting HR teams with the right technology tools will make all the difference in a big way.

To sum up, the undeniable role of technology is not only adopted while automating recruiting processes, but also significantly has a tremendous impact while building a great candidate experience. HR Leaders are looking at 2021 as a major turning point in the way the hiring function is changing for good keeping the operational and market dynamics in mind and RecruitTech is a fast evolving and preferred sector helping companies build efficiencies amidst high volume with lower costs.