Meet Andrew Roberts, an experienced cloud engineer who is job hunting for the first time in a decade. Although his credentials are stellar, he’s still got a challenge ahead: Andrew will need to successfully navigate a very different recruitment landscape this time around. That’s because IT recruitment, and hiring as a whole, have changed pretty drastically over the past decade as new technologies have emerged and gradually become more feasible to use.
Emerging technologies in recruitment and hiring
Recruiters and hiring managers are now able to make faster, more accurate candidate decisions, within the context of a relatively streamlined modern hiring process. Let’s examine three of the most prevalent (and exciting!) new technologies, and how they’re helping to elevate existing technology recruitment processes.
Recruitment automation and hiring
For many of us, the concept of automation conjures images of pristine, high-end automobile factories, filled with robots and metal, working away diligently – and largely devoid of humans. While that’s certainly an area where automation is very highly visible, manufacturing actually may not be where we see the lion’s share of its impact.
Consider how manual legacy administrative and HR processes are: Onboarding, offboarding, training, evaluations… All these tasks are urgent, important, and extremely time intensive. Even digitized hiring processes will create an unavoidable glut of “paperwork,” as it were, and until recently, there was no good way around having an actual human being sit and complete or review all of it. Computers, people figured, were good at objective decision-making – the quantifiable stuff, in other words – and humans were… Well, nothing could ever take the place of humans if a subjective decision was needed. Right?
It all sounds very naive in today’s post-ChatGPT world. Artificial intelligence appears to have been the missing link to a higher degree of automation for modern business processes. Unlike even five years ago, now we are more confident in “handing off” tasks requiring subjective reasoning to an AI, thanks to leaps forward in several sub-fields related to the discipline. Advances in natural language processing mean that a properly trained and contextualized AI can be implemented during steps in the hiring process that would have mandated that humans spend precious hours poring over disparate information and connecting the dots to decide which candidate makes the cut. Of course, we’re not removing the human entirely – it’s generally agreed that a human review step should be appended when using AI in this way.
We are, however, still saving businesses thousands of hours and millions of dollars when compared to the legacy way, or even newer digitized ways, of getting things done. Smartly selecting a recruitment automation implementation partner and identifying where improvements will be most effective is important, but organizations that can pull it off have much to anticipate: For example, multinational manufacturer and household name Unilever recently looked to revamp their global recruiting processes with the benefit of automated tooling and AI insights. Using a highly strategic approach, they were ultimately able to reduce the time taken up by the hiring process by approximately 90% – meaning they’re now able to deploy new talent that much faster – and to recover a tidy $1m USD in the process.