As the U.S. unemployment rate sinks back to pre-2020 levels, it may look like a return to pre-pandemic recruiting challenges. Don’t be fooled, though: While candidate and skills shortages feel familiar, approaches you’ve used in the past aren’t likely to be as effective now. Too much has changed in the past two years. The great news is that your best-in-class hiring practices don’t have to change. Instead, hiring teams need to build capacity to flex their process in response to the ever-changing normal.
Why can’t hiring processes stay the same?
Business is booming, and hiring is up right now, but companies still don’t have enough candidates to fuel their growth. When every hire is hard-won, every edge in the process makes a difference. That’s why hiring processes can’t stay static – they need the nuances to create a competitive advantage.
Here’s an example: The trend now known as the Great Resignation is a reflection of shifts in what employees want from their work and their employer. They’re no longer willing to stay in jobs that lack meaning beyond the paycheck. As candidates, they’re more careful about understanding who and what they’ll be working for before accepting an offer. Recruiting teams that find more meaningful ways to give candidates these insights are more likely to quickly scoop up the best talent.
How to build hiring agility
Recruiting teams can respond more effectively to a constantly-shifting hiring environment with these strategies:
Ramp up your ability to efficiently assess candidate pools of any size. Better assessment allows recruiters to advance fewer but higher-quality candidates in the process. Modern Hire’s science-based Virtual Job Tryout® lets you assess up to 15,000 candidates a day and give each one a deep look into what the role is really like. Modern Hire also offers easily scaled text-based assessments that, through validated selection science, allow you to predict candidates’ turnover risk. Efficient assessments let you narrow your funnel sooner to focus more time on top-tier talent.
- 96% of a global online retailer’s candidates agreed Modern Hire’s Virtual Job Tryout helped them determine if the role was right for them.
Increase hiring speed through automation. Recruiters lose out when they can’t offer candidates a streamlined process and digital interactions. Candidate-facing hiring tools like automated interview scheduling help you increase speed to hire and cut down on delays and inconvenience for candidates. Hiring tools like Automated Interview Creator and Automated Interview Scoring also leverage advanced selection science and AI technology to interview more effectively and drive better hiring performance. Both tools are backed by validated science and can help recruiters create a fairer process. Automated Interview Scoring, in particular, is proven to reduce bias in hiring by 70%. The efficiencies created by these tools can help you respond effectively to high candidate volume, low flow, and swift swings in between.
- 100% increase in candidates screened
- 10-week reduction in time to hire
- 57% increase in diversity of new graduate hires
Roche Diagnostic transformed its campus recruiting during the pandemic with Modern Hire.
Seamless, end-to-end processes that improve hiring experiences for all. Look for a platform with components that connect seamlessly to workflows that support hiring across the enterprise. While flexibility is critical, it loses some of its value if your process feels disjointed to candidates and recruiting teams find themselves constantly cobbling workflows together. Choosing a virtual hiring platform that is both flexible and an end-to-end solution solves that issue and improves hiring experiences for all.
Apply predictive analytics to your hiring process. Predictive analytics give recruiting teams the tools to measure, adjust and improve candidate selection against goals such as increased new hire productivity and retention. With predictive analytics, you can pick up on trends in hiring sooner and adjust for them with less impact. In addition, as the adoption of AI continues, organizations that don’t rely on predictive analytics and data-driving hiring will be at an increasing disadvantage in the talent market.
Whatever the future holds, it’s clear that recruiting teams need to position themselves now with greater hiring agility to be ready. And long-term agility is just one of the many strategies you can pursue to ensure hiring success. Find out more about the most important trends in talent acquisition this year and best practices for future-proofing your hiring process in our white paper, 2022 Hiring Trends: Will There Be a “Next Normal”?