From sourcing great candidates and screening their applications to the exhaustive onboarding process for new hires, recruiting is a time-consuming process that drains your company’s resources. Recruiting the right employees can also be challenging; you have to ensure that the hired candidates are not only qualified for the job but also a good fit for your company culture.
Traditional methods have given way to modern, forward-thinking hiring strategies designed to simplify the recruitment process, which involves several steps: candidate sourcing, assessment, and selection, hiring management, and new-hire training and engagement. These innovations are simple to integrate into your process and leverage artificial intelligence for greater efficiency.
In this article, we discuss the most effective hiring innovations with significant potential to create a paradigm shift in recruitment. Read on to learn more about top recruitment innovations that can help you hire quality candidates in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner while improving the candidate experience.
Key Innovations and Technology for Recruiting
Recruiters are always on the lookout for candidates who can increase business growth and revenue while positively contributing to company culture. To narrow the search to a well-suited pool of applicants, recruiters should take advantage of new recruitment technologies that companies have adopted in 2022.
Tools for sourcing top-quality candidates
Here are some widely used innovations and technologies that will simplify your recruitment process and enable you to attract and retain the best talent.
Employee referral programs
Employee referral programs involve encouraging your existing employees to tell their friends about job openings in your company. This positive word-of-mouth is a cost-effective method for attracting top talent that is engaged, productive, and more likely to stay with your company.
Since your employees have a good understanding of what it’s like to work at your company and what the jobs on offer entail, there is a high probability that they would only refer people who are a good fit for the job requirements and company culture. This means that your applicants are effectively pre-screened before you even review their profiles, which ensures that your applicant pool is robust.
A successful employee referral program should include:
Incentives for existing employees to refer people from their network
Updates for the existing employee as the application of the referred candidate is being processed
Recognition to the existing employee once the referred candidate is successfully hired
2. Search Engine Optimization
Google processes more than 300 million job-related searches each month. Without effective SEO, your job listing and business won’t be visible to these job-seeking candidates. Some tips to enhance your online ranking through SEO:
Research keywords and keyword clusters to determine those of relevance to your company.
Use those keywords organically in your content to optimize your site’s discoverability.
Create and maintain a content calendar to ensure that you upload quality content consistently.
Make a plan to disseminate your content; determine what content is best suited for distribution through the channels you have at your disposal, such as your website or social media.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Research and use backlink building strategies to attain a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
With effective SEO, you can drive a meaningful percentage of online job seekers towards your company’s website and motivate them to apply for your posted job vacancies.
3. LinkedIn Recruiter
Digital platforms like LinkedIn give recruiters access to millions of candidates worldwide. With LinkedIn Recruiter, hiring companies can:
Expand their candidate search to include over 830 million LinkedIn members. You can narrow down the applicant pool using LinkedIn’s advanced search filters and recommendations. In addition, you can save time and discover talent by using LinkedIn’s “Find more people like” feature.
Message candidates quickly using LinkedIn InMail, which generates more responses than cold emailing.
Streamline your candidate searches and manage your candidates all in one place.
LinkedIn also allows you to put up job posts to which an unlimited number of applicants can apply quickly using the “Easy Apply” feature.
4) Mobile optimized career site
Most candidates now browse for jobs on their mobile devices, so having a mobile-optimized career site is a must. A mobile-optimized site lets applicants browse available jobs and requirements, send in resumes, and communicate with recruiters in just a few clicks using their mobile devices. If your website is optimized for a mobile experience, interested candidates can apply quickly and seamlessly during their daily commute or on their lunch break in a park.
Tools for assessing and selecting candidates
Once you have found top quality candidates with these sourcing mechanisms, upgrade the process of assessing, shortlisting, and selecting candidates to hire using the following tools.
Automated resume screening
With the benefit of more candidates comes the disadvantage of spending more time on screening. Since the latest sourcing innovations allow you access to an unlimited number of candidates, an automated candidate scanning feature is your best friend in the screening process.
The FloCareer job description to CV matcher automatically matches the requirements of the job to the skills and experiences listed on candidates’ CVs, helping you shortlist candidates quickly and efficiently. This technology-based solution helps companies hire better and faster, with no room for manual error or bias.
Live video interviews and online situational judgment
Video interviewing, which lets you assess your potential employee’s interpersonal abilities and non-verbal behaviors, has become increasingly popular over the past few years. Video interviews let you observe the candidate’s body language and expressions while both parties are in the comfort of their homes, cutting down both time and travel costs. This innovation allows you to widen your geographic search area while ensuring a speedy and efficient interview process.
Online situational judgment, a pre-selection tool used to simulate a realistic job-related problem, is another innovation that helps narrow down the candidate pool. You can display videos, images, or slideshows to present your candidate with real-life scenarios and gauge their problem-solving abilities. You can also record these videos to revisit as you make your final selections. This tool is becoming an increasingly important part of the hiring process as it allows recruiters to assess a candidate’s abilities in real time and get a sense of who they are beyond their resumes.
FloCareer’s live video interview platform allows you to auto-schedule interviews, manage and track candidates, automate candidates’ feedback submission, and even pick up on lip syncing or fraudulent activities, among other features.
Analytics for candidate matching
Advanced data analytics has become crucial for recruiting firms looking to glean insights from increasingly complex internal and external data. Several companies have already integrated data analytics into their talent management systems.
You can use predictive analytics to screen the profiles of your existing employees and identify what the best ones have in common. Refer to that data to create your criteria list when scouting for new candidates; this will help you fine-tune your hiring process.
Tools for engaging candidates
Once you have finalized which candidates to hire, you’ll need to create an efficient onboarding process to enhance your candidate experience and engage your new employees. However, it’s important to consider the candidate experience for all applicants in the pipeline, not just those you hire.
Your recruiting process reflects the professionalism of your company. Providing a good candidate experience demonstrates how much you value your team, which might motivate a sought-after candidate to pick your job offer over those of your competitors. A positive candidate experience also contributes to your word-of-mouth marketing, which is a powerful tool to attract new clients.
Here are some tried and tested practices to engage with your candidates and enhance their experience with your company.
Automate candidate feedback
You should keep candidate experience front and center at every step in the hiring process because just as you are screening candidates, they are also assessing your company culture and working dynamics to decide whether or not to work for you. 1 in 4 candidates reported having a bad experience during the recruitment process. Moreover, 42% of those that had a bad experience would never take a job at that company and 22% would dissuade others from working there. This data illustrates that a positive recruitment experience significantly contributes to attracting great hires.
An excellent way to step up the candidate experience game is by using an integrated tool to automatically send feedback surveys to candidates at different stages during their application journey. By automating your feedback requests and responses, you avoid the possibility of human error or resource wastage that could occur with a manual system. This feedback will help you tweak your process to offer a better recruitment experience that candidates will appreciate. In turn, this will reflect well on your company and help you continue attracting top-quality talent.
Display employee testimonials
Employee testimonial videos can enhance your hiring process by enabling job seekers to learn more about your organization and culture directly from current employees. This social proof goes a long way towards attracting potential employees and motivating them to work for you.
From promoting your vacancies and sourcing, screening, and shortlisting quality candidates to communicating with them regularly for a positive candidate experience, innovative technologies and tools can save you time and money while upgrading your recruitment process.
FloCareer interviewers are equipped with the ideal interview technology and knowledge to help you efficiently shortlist candidates by assessing both technical and soft skills. FloCareer offers a selection of tools, including automated bot-based as well as live interview options that offer your candidates a top-class interview experience. Schedule a demo to learn more.