As the pandemic continues to change the world of work, employees are demanding greater flexibility. According to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee survey, given the choice, 54 percent of the employees said they would choose flexibility when they work. More than half (67 percent) said that productivity can be measured irrespective of location.

The implication of this shift will be felt across a host of HR trends. Chief among which remains talent attraction and hiring.  While a hybrid work culture comes with its own sets of challenges and opportunities, hiring the right talent remains a business imperative. With companies focusing on resilience and agility, business leaders are keen on getting the right talent to manage their businesses during this uncertain time. 

How can technology improve a recruiter’s ability to source, assess, and hire the right talent better in the new world of work that many companies are beginning to enter? Here’s how:

Sourcing talent: The advent of remote work has presented recruiters access to talent previously left untouched. Companies searching for tech talent, for example, have begun looking beyond geographical restrictions to source the right talent. Technology applications including tracking systems can help build robust social media for recruiting candidates. [J1] Depending on the hiring niche, companies can map skills to platforms. For example, apart from job boards, recruiters can also leverage platforms like Stackoverflow, GitHub, etc. for hiring technology talent.

Automating processes: Automation and smart AI are playing a greater role in accelerating a recruiter's role today. Automation can now be strategically deployed to make manual and laborious activities automated, thus removing the recruiter’s active involvement in the process – especially at the stage of data collection and onboarding. AI, today, can also automatically screen through resumes and even schedule interviews with shortlisted candidates.

Tools like chatbots can be trained to address basic queries. Questions on anything from skills, and qualifications, to past experiences relevant to the job can be asked by bots. Using intuitive AI, prospective candidates can be ranked and qualified according to the recruiter’s criteria. Saving you the job of filtering out the good from the bad.

Enabling communication: With remote work options restricting how much a recruiter can physically interact with the candidate, video conferencing tools like zoom can not only ensure they can interview and hire candidates with a face to face interaction, it can also create a robust candidate experience. By communicating with candidates regularly, recruiters help smoothen the onboarding of employees as well. At a time when prospective candidates turn to full time employees all without physically interacting with business, communication tools help in driving engagement. Video conferencing and other connectivity applications make new-age recruiters more adept at hiring the right talent.

Overcoming challenge areas for Mid-sized enterprises

In an age where remote work becomes a part of the everyday workplace, using the right tech tools can help recruiters find the right fit for their companies.  But that hasn’t necessarily been the case with every organization.

Once the pandemic hit and lockdown was enforced, many mid-sized enterprises had to reboot their technology strategies to ensure a seamless work from home experience. Many were forced to make their processes lean and this meant letting go of people and cutting out parts of their business.

With relatively low levels of technological adoption, mid-sized enterprises need to align their HR technology stack to make the most of the pivot to digital.  Many of them still depend heavily on the traditional non-technical systems for sales, marketing, etc. This extends to HR management and by extension to the recruitment function. While remote work brings in larger pools of candidates, without the right technology, such talent pools remain inaccessible. To address such challenges, mid-sized enterprises need to begin investing and building their recruitment technology.

This article is part of a series on preparing for a flexible future of work in partnership with Zimyo.