This guide is part of a progression set comprised of Core, Advanced, and Emerging Recruiting Strategy and Sourcing practices.

What it is

Exponential technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI) continue to evolve in their application across functions and industries to solve complex problems and automate a broader range of activities. In the same way, new and more agile ways of working emerge by disrupting existing practices to leverage ever-expanding ecosystems of people and businesses. This is quickly being applied in the recruiting space due to its criticality to the business. It has applications across the entirety of the recruiting process, from attraction to candidate engagement to screening and testing, any of which can powerfully augment the efforts of candidates, recruiters, and managers alike. The practices at this level focus on understanding the available use cases, assessing vendors’ true capabilities (considering that AI and related technologies are still emerging), protecting the organization from potential liabilities, and evaluating them for effectiveness once deployed.   

Using newer technologies also engages internal candidates by deploying talent marketplaces, which opens up new avenues for both recruiters to fill jobs and employees to have expanded insights into new opportunities to grow and advance. Leveraging teams and networks helps build a more robust and effective way to handle spikes or surges in recruiting requirements and bring more diverse viewpoints, solutions, and process improvements to the organization. Growing organizations must leverage these technologies and expand their reach by building or accessing recruiting networks. These networks can provide a continuous flow of qualified candidates, ensuring business continuity and fueling growth plans. Using integrated data and advanced analytics is critical to providing greater objectivity and guidance to management and improving the recruiting process as a whole, instilling confidence in its effectiveness.

Why use it

As remote and hybrid work gain hold due to societal changes and propelled by technology, the war for talent is becoming more intense with lower switching barriers for workers to move into their next best job. Advanced technologies and more agile ways of accessing talent are becoming table stakes for companies. They also produce enormous efficiencies when recruiting teams. The value brought by adopting advanced technologies can be substantial as those offer the possibilities of greater targeting of candidates, higher success rates with candidate screening and selection, and improved leveraging of internal and external candidate pools for greater cost-effectiveness. Engaging teams of managers and employees to develop more agile and rapid-response solutions and candidate processing, particularly with high-profile roles and talent segments, can bring a new level of effectiveness to the recruiting process.

Some organizations are experiencing significant improvements in their recruiting process, such as cutting sourcing costs in half and doubling their sourcing quality and recruiter productivity, resulting in hiring increases that match their growth ambitions. Another angle aided by using new technologies is enhancing the diversity of hires. For example, software applications with AI diversity recruiting features enable companies to automate their sourcing, screening, and interviewing processes, helping those involved in recruiting remove unconscious bias during the entire recruiting cycle.

Outcomes

Adopting these practices offers great promise for highly efficient and significantly more effective hiring activity, with enhanced candidate experience (CX) and accuracy. The leveraging of the new technologies and the possibilities of using teams open the door to greater fairness and equity, as errors in human judgment stemming from inherent (and most often unconscious) biases of hiring managers and individuals can be mitigated by the use of well-trained (and monitored) technological solutions. Using internal marketplaces can bring growth, advancement, and greater longevity to employees, with the potential to build deeper talent pools for permanent/regular positions with contractors or other non-employees.    

Agile recruiting networks engage employees across functions and break down silos that endanger the effectiveness of a corporate recruiting program and process. They can also create a cadre of specially skilled talent ambassadors and assessors who have the natural skills and abilities to engage with candidates, more fairly evaluate them, and “sell” the best of them on the opportunities and cultural match with the company. The use of advanced metrics and analytics to assess processes, programs, and the candidate experience as a whole holds the key to optimizing the quality, speed, cost, and consistency of recruiting practices and the candidate experience. Using data to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the practices enables a more refined view of what steps and systems are deployed and best suited for various (targeted) candidate pools.

Practice guides at this level

Deploying AI talent sourcing technologies to augment reach and accelerate matching.

Evaluating and utilizing AI systems to significantly improve the effectiveness of any and all stages of the recruiting process from deeper candidate pools to predictive performance and workforce planning.

Accessing full talent marketplace ecosystems to increase engagement and career growth.

Talent marketplaces match individuals to diverse types of job-related opportunities and can be deployed internally or extended to encompass other groups outside the organization to tap into the larger talent ecosystem.

Forming agile collaborative recruiting networks and programs.

Agile principles applied to form and operate collaborative recruiting networks through ambassadors representing wide and diverse talent pools.

Developing intelligent recruiting strategies using data analytics.

Data analytics is fundamental to optimizing the quality, speed, cost, and consistency of the recruiting process as well as enhancing the candidate experience.