Article: Can technology replace recruiters?

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Can technology replace recruiters?

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The advantage of recruiting technology goes much beyond improving the time to hire. It augments the recruiters capabilities and can collaborate in creative problem-solving.
Can technology replace recruiters?

Once, David Autor, an economist at MIT was quoted saying, “Journalists and expert commentators overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for skilled labor.”

Scan any business journal or magazine, and you can spot the management gurus talking about how machines will replace humans and how the current jobs will get redundant in the future.  Instead, the discussion should be, “How technology can augment human capabilities?” Autor states, “It complements tasks that can't be substituted by computerization. This is the most fundamental but overlooked point."

The advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Analytics, etc. is intended to augment the human capabilities and help them to figure out how the quality of work could be improved rather than diminished.

Similar thoughts were shared by Hari Krishna, CEO & Co-founder of Param.ai and Savita Hortikar, Head - Talent Acquisition at ThoughtWorks during the webcast, “Crossing the next-frontier of recruitment challenges.”  People Matters in collaboration with Param.ai hosted this webcast which focused on the recruitment challenges being faced by companies today and how changing businesses and technological disruptions are impacting the recruitment function.

Here are some key insights from the session:

Paper-pushers to Talent Advisors:

Recruiters’ role will evolve from that of mere paper-pushers to Talent Advisors. Technology will act as a catalyst that can augment some of the sourcing, screening, application, and talent community elements of recruiting that are done manually. In the new role, recruiters will focus on critical and high-impact tasks like building relationships with candidates, talent mapping, competitor intelligence and providing strategic counsel to hiring managers.

AI and automation are must-have technologies in new-age recruitment: 

The Job Description lies at the core of whole recruitment process, as it determines the relevance of applications. Establishing accountability to ensure it is a true reflection of what the role has to offer is critical. Technology can help in creating a contextual and neutral job description to attract the right talent. Intelligent and intuitive recruitment technology helps in negating biases based on demographics like age, gender, race, etc.

Know your problem statements:

Recruitment is a very dynamic function and the hiring priorities changes with the changing needs of the business. Most of the times hiring managers complain about the non-performance of the recruitment technologies.

Hari shares, “Know your problem statement! Understand whether you are facing problems with the sourcing or is it scheduling interviews that you are struggling with. There is a need to bridge the growing technology decision gap.”

Executives must stop viewing technology as separate from their business. Technology investments don’t occur without business decisions. Understand the business, know your problem statements and then invest in technology.

Technology implementation requires a significant amount of process readiness:

Companies start looking out enthusiastically for new tools but fail to inject processes that will lay the ground for adoption by the end users and employees. Organizations need to have a significant amount of process maturity to be able to harness the real potential of such new platforms.

The session ended with a note that technology and automation will not replace recruiters. The experts were of the view that “Continue to learn about the business. It will help recruiters to focus less on transactional, and more on high-value activities that make them a right consultative partner to the company.” Recruiters need to know and understand more about business models, product roadmaps, user segmentation, etc. to advise them and to impact the business directly.

Click here to watch the webcast.

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Topics: Technology, Talent Acquisition, #Hire Better Hire Faster

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