Presented by Hiretual
What is the Great Rehire? In a previous article here, I explained it as a war for talent expected in the first half of 2021 signalling a new phase of business recovery and fierce employer competition.
In a Hiretual survey sent out to 350 recruiters this November, over half of them cited competition from other companies as their biggest hiring concern next year. In this article, I’ll cover the ‘how.’ How can companies start moving toward data-intelligence adoption in talent acquisition to effectively beat out the competition and attract desired talent?
AI hiring in 2019 vs AI hiring in 2021
As recruiters prepared for 2020, employers were using AI to lower time-to-hire by increasing touch points with the employed workforce and implementing automation in the candidate sourcing and engagement process. However, these challenges have been replaced by more critical needs that come hand-in-hand with an unpredictable 2021 market outlook.
Instead of prioritizing time-to-hire (the duration of time from the first candidate engagement to when they accept the offer), we found that more than half of recruiters are now focused on decreasing their talent sourcing time in 2021 — which is the time spent researching, finding, and identifying qualified candidates to engage. With record numbers of candidates looking to work remotely in the coming year, recruiters will have to expand sources of talent far beyond their usual geographic footprint while maintaining efficient collaboration within internal remote teams.
Bracing high competition for remote talent
The widespread adoption of flexible work arrangements will be the largest contributor to hiring surges in 2021. Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are already planning to keep their employees at home in the first half of 2021 while Twitter has even announced a permanent work-from-home policy.
It’s only inevitable that more companies become motivated to commit to virtual workforces in efforts to attract talent the way large enterprises do. Unemployment rates for those with Bachelor’s degrees and higher have dropped from 8.2% in April to 4.1% in October, further proving that flexible work is becoming a catalyst for job recovery especially among recent graduates and the millennial workforce.
Hiring a virtual workforce will naturally open up a significantly larger talent pool. Employers will have to get down to business and adopt an infrastructure that supports global talent acquisition without doubling or tripling the time taken for hiring teams to find and identify that talent.
Without Hiretual’s AI hiring technology, our users would spend up to 10 hours a week sourcing talent within their geographic footprint alone. Our AI sourcing and automation turns 10-15 hours of scrolling through social media and job sites into a two-minute search across 45+ online platforms, giving teams more time in their day to A/B test strategies and build long-term plans. In a global remote talent pool, these optimizations will be necessary for companies to spend time building a talent attraction model that works for them even in the most unfamiliar markets.
The social media workforce
If you’re unemployed in 2021 and looking for a job or an opportunity to build a personal brand, where would you go first? Social media.
Social media recruiting isn’t new, but it will become a more critical source of talent in the coming year. It’s not surprising to any of us that most job search activity this year has taken place on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Over 60% of our survey respondents predict social media to be their primary source of talent in 2021, followed by professional tech platforms like GitHub, StackOverflow, and Kaggle.
With AI hiring platforms, recruiters can start building out their social media strategy by sourcing through all these platforms at once and then identifying where their top candidates are most likely going to be. Tools like Hiretual are also equipped with data intelligence to objectively understand candidate behavior and expectations with information found on their public profiles, ultimately decreasing sourcing and screening time in a saturated social media environment.
Data as sourcing’s biggest asset
And then there’s data, or the lack of data more than anything. Snowflake’s giant IPO this year reflects a dire business need across all growing organizations — more data visibility and an easier way to make sense of it even when you’re not working in the same building as your data analytics team.
To beat the competition, hiring teams need quicker access to information and less effort to get there. Thanks to cloud-based data warehousing, information extraction is no longer tied down to rigid structures. Hiretual is part of a new generation of AI recruitment technology that simplifies the extraction of insights from recruitment data warehouses like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Taleo, iCIMS, and more.
As teams continue to work remote, expand global talent pools and capitalize on social media, recruitment data in 2021 will become more complex as it comes in from more sources. Hiring teams will find success using this information for business intelligence strategies that answer the big questions.
What are our competitors doing that we’re not? Where will we find the qualified candidates we’re looking for? And most importantly, how can we ensure a conversation with them?
Lessons learned from 2020
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this year, it’s that things can change at any point of time. Nobody is certain just how stable the job market will be, but we do know that putting a pause on hiring isn’t sustainable for any business.
AI technology in the recruitment process prepares companies for the unexpected by giving teams breathing room to assess a situation and make flexible changes along the way. The winners at the end of the day are the ones who have enough insight to pivot through crises and align themselves with fluctuating market needs.
A company isn’t made by revenue, it’s made by people. It’s long overdue that we empower the recruitment function with more strategic resources, and not look at it as something disposable.
Hiretual helps hiring teams centralize talent management to build robust, diverse and inclusive workforces with AI technology; learn more about us here.
Steven Jiang is Co-Founder and CEO at Hiretual.
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