Presented by Hiretual
Although some are cutting their hiring investments and downsizing their recruiting teams, it’s actually getting more expensive to attract suitable talent and convert them into new hires.
The average cost-per-applicant (CPA) in the U.S. has gone up 60% from last year, an uptick caused by specific pandemic-driven factors.
The CARES Act implemented this April gave unemployed workers a $600 boost in weekly benefits — a sustainable sum that has discouraged individuals from going back to work. Another important fact to note is that many companies are looking for professional workers that have not been affected by unemployment the way the hourly workforce has. Given the current economy, a majority of those in the professional talent pool are not taking any risks and would rather stay at their current roles.
Job openings are on the rise again, but this doesn’t necessarily mean long-term optimism for employers. To keep talent attraction costs at a sustainable level, hiring teams need the right resources to build pipelines during the upcoming stage of job recovery — a giant spike in hiring, otherwise known as the ‘Great Rehire.’
Succeeding in the ‘Great Rehire’
It took three years for the unemployment rate to drop below the 8% baseline after the 2008 recession because employers were unprepared for such drastic changes in the job scopes for many roles across the board.
The need for some jobs had been completely erased, and employers had to shift talent resources to functions they may not have spent as much on as before. Similarly, one of the biggest impacts of the pandemic has been forced digital transformation for all businesses — it’s no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a necessity. We’re seeing tech jobs lead the pack with a 13.4% month-over-month growth leaning toward roles in IT staffing, software, and digital operations.
Taking the lessons we’ve learned from the last recession, hiring teams must start preparing for both immediate and long-term business needs now before an all out war for talent begins in 2021. The continued evolution of recruitment technology will become pivotal for this strategy.
During the last recession, a new generation of recruitment was boosted — online recruitment via LinkedIn. The success of LinkedIn in addressing what employers lacked helped the company far exceed expectations during its IPO debut at the end of the recession.
Similarly, the Great Rehire will be spearheaded by a new generation of technology to help employers navigate an online recruitment market that has evolved far beyond the scope of just LinkedIn.
Moving beyond a talent database
I say this often — there is a stark difference between a data-driven team and an intelligence-driven team. What we’re currently seeing in data-driven hiring teams is the 80/20 dilemma. We’re spending 80% of our time finding and organizing data from platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub, job boards like Glassdoor and Indeed and resumes collected during recruitment marketing events. That leaves us only 20% of remaining time to spend analyzing that data for pipeline-building.
To prepare for the massive hiring surges in 2021 and effectively compete for talent with other companies, employers need to spend their time actually acting on the data they’ve collected. Instead of relying on data availability, employers need to start adopting a data intelligence approach that brings talent data points together. This infrastructure acts as a powerful middleware between external online databases like LinkedIn to in-house systems like an ATS or CRM.
At Hiretual, we call this recruiting with a “central talent data system.” This centralized loop of data actively recognizes and acts on structured and unstructured data to enrich old candidate information with newly sourced online data, remove duplicate data entries and provide teams with a dashboard of talent pool insights powered by AI/ML pattern recognition.
Southeast Asian ride-share giant, Grab, uses this approach to develop consistent and real-time engagement with local, regional, and global talent. Grab’s hiring team uses Hiretual as their talent data system to drive sourcing through efficient pattern recognitions and iterative searches. The team has successfully deployed a sourcing strategy that leverages real-time visibility into applications in their ATS, inbound recruitment marketing leads in their CRM, and open web communities like Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Kaggle.
Simplifying talent acquisition with contextual data
Grab oils their recruitment machine with a strong integrated framework powered by NLP-based data fusion. It is a knowledge graph for talent acquisition that informs the hiring process by analyzing queries and answering questions. So, rather than being additive to existing workflows, this well-integrated infrastructure consolidates processes within your tech stack.
The billions of entities and trillions of edges embedded within this graph gives rise to a scalable and responsive infrastructure for data federation, processing, and self-expansion. Ultimately, this will remove hours spent manually cleaning and organizing large volumes of multisource data to consolidate and simplify your hiring process.
Hiring teams can now use that 80% of their time to bring the human element back into recruiting. By optimizing existing strategies based on identified patterns from an online talent pool, more effort can be spent on heightened candidate engagement and a better candidate experience to bring talent attraction costs back down.
Making recruiting people-focused again
Data intelligence doesn’t dehumanize recruitment, instead it does quite the opposite. It creates more time for hiring teams to focus on personalization. Messages become less cookie-cutter, outreach becomes more intentional, and employers are able to reach a more diverse and inclusive scope of job seekers for current and future goals.
The companies that succeed in the Great Rehire will be the ones that best understand their candidates’ needs and their own organizational needs. This is the future of AI in recruitment, and it’s already here –let’s make that leap and welcome it.
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 CEO/Co-Founder at Hiretual.
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