Recruitment and technology have always developed hand in hand. Likewise, changes in the way society views labor and money have driven shifts in the ways that businesses look for new employees. Here are four ways in which the recruitment industry has changed in the past decade.
The Internet Has Changed Everything
The dawning of the internet age has driven changes in nearly every field – including recruitment. Recruiters and candidates are far more likely to make contact online than over the phone, and there is far less need to candidates to search for local work. All sorts of recruitment platforms rely upon the internet, and online networks are a key source of candidates for headhunters to plunder. A whole article could be written about the ways in which the internet has changed recruiting. It is safe to assume that it has changed everything in some way.
Companies Are Embracing Virtual Recruiting Platforms
Virtual Recruiting platforms are very similar to project management platforms. They collate all of the information, messages and data to do with a recruitment drive onto one dashboard. This helps recruiting companies to make sense of the data they are collecting and make the right decisions about who to employ.
Headhunting Dominates Talent Searching
In the past, companies would find new talent by putting an advertisement out in the press or among networks. It would then be up to applicants to find these advertisements, assess their own suitability and then make moves towards applying for the job. The recruitment sector has, in recent years, moved away from this model. According to a recent article by Peter Cappelli in the Harvard Business Review, the majority of people in the United States who found a new job in 2019 did not go looking for it. Companies routinely headhunt prospective candidates without those candidates ever making a move towards them. They then tempt these headhunted candidates into an interview with promises of a glittering career and, sometimes, lots and lots of money.
There is no real evidence to suggest that this method is much more effective than the traditional advertising route. One thing that it is successful at doing, however, is ensuring that professional headhunters and recruitment consultants keep getting work. Such is the way of the business world.
AI and Data Science Are Being Used to Find Recruits
Recruitment is always limited in its success. According to the US department of labor, recruitment drives are usually only around 16 percent successful in finding the right candidates. For every hit there are quite a few misses. Recent research into how big data analysis and Artificial Intelligence can find and narrow down good candidates for a brief has been well received by businesses looking to make recruitment a more efficient process.
As humans continue to create more data during their online lives, interpretation of that data will become more useful in finding candidates. Too much reliance on this technology will risk the depersonalization of the recruitment process, however. A hybrid model is likely to emerge in the coming year.
