How Technology Gets You to the Best Talent – Virtual Recruiting Strategies for a Pandemic

By Ajay Trehan, Founder & CEO, AuthBridge Research Services

It is no secret that a global talent war is brewing outside. Picture this: 60% companies surveyed in India by Mercer Mett said they were looking to hire talent for new positions. As per Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey, more than 40% respondents in 31 countries are considering leaving their employer this year, and 68% of the Indian workers ranked opportunities to develop skills ahead of salary increment (47%) when evaluating a new job, as per an RGF International Recruitment Report.

Put all this data in the background of a World Economic Forum forecast that half of India’s workforce will need reskilling by 2022 (even before COVID-19 led disruption), and three things become apparent:

• Real talent is rare and has multiple opportunities they can cash into
• In the aftermath of a pandemic, real talent is looking for more than just competitive pay
• Understanding what the talent is thinking is the best recruitment strategy for 2021

What is talent thinking?
Understanding your candidate like you understand your customers should be your starting point. Your ideal candidate is a tech-friendly, digital native who has lived through a pandemic and hence values growth opportunities, company culture, a positive employer brand, and tech-readiness above all. They expect you to find them where they are (digital and social), treat them with a seamless, tech-enabled onboarding experience (like their friendly food delivery partner or favourite ride hailing platform) and offer them diversity and flexibility to work from home, office, or both. Expect to turn full-time contracts into gig-work as a gig boom means that the talent finally has an option to work on their own terms.

What does it mean for your employer brand?
65% of recruiters surveyed for a LinkedIn Report mentioned keeping up with changing hiring needs as the top priority for their teams. This translates to providing a strong employee value proposition and a culture that inspires growth, learning and innovation while offering flexibility, diversity, and inclusion. One of the easiest places to start for any company of any size is by freeing HR teams of quantitative tasks that chip away at efficiency and do not have any impact on employee morale, company culture, and employer branding. Building automation and technology into hiring processes not only improves efficiency and impacts the bottom line but also enables HR stakeholders to take on more strategic roles and weave qualitative experiences into employee onboarding journeys.

Five technology trends that are inspiring hiring and onboarding everywhere

• End-to-End Digital Employee Onboarding
Offering a digital onboarding experience is no longer optional in a post-pandemic world. The biggest differentiator for employers, hence, will be creating one-stop, seamless onboarding journeys that bring all stakeholders together. Our clients consistently report efficiency gains of up to 70% with end-to-end onboarding platforms that bring features like document collection, candidate verification, form submission, timely notifications, and real time dashboards together for a transparent and agile onboarding experience. API integration with HRMS and ATS systems and an informed AI, capable of giving ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decisions bind the whole process together.

• Database-Driven Verification
Pandemic-driven disruption allows employers to draw from a talented pool of resources across the globe. To reap benefits of a wider network, however, the employers must tackle latency in onboarding journeys and treat their candidates/new hires like financial services and online fantasy sports platforms treat their users. This means facilitating an app-like experience for candidates where basic due diligence happens seamlessly behind the scenes, never once causing friction or delays. Database-driven instant identity checks, education checks, previous employment checks etc. all serve that end. At AuthBridge, use of OCR, data analytics and face match technologies have shown us the potential of these databases in building real-time, scalable, and reliable onboarding journeys.

• Digital Signatures
2021 is no time to ask employees to post signed copies of onboarding documents to your postal addresses. Yet an unbelievably large number of employers do just the same for lack of information or tech inertia. Cost-friendly e-sign solutions, with multiple levels of access control, advanced privacy settings and cloud sharing options, make uploading, signing, and managing documents digitally easy, cut time to hire and position your brand as a tech-led brand to an employee from the get-go.

• Gamification of Onboarding Experience
Make learning fun for new hires by introducing leaderboards, level-up challenges, and incentives for completing training faster and better. This not only leads to better employee engagement but also results in better knowledge retention. Badgeville, a leading gaming company, reported 90% increase in employee productivity with a gamified onboarding strategy. With automated resource sharing and video-interaction with peers and managers at multiple levels of engagement, new hires are bound to feel more connected to the company and culture.

• People Analytics
Talent analytics roles have grown by 111% (a LinkedIn report) since 2014 for a good reason. Use of people analytics can help organisations draw actionable insights for people strategy and ultimately identify performance drivers, build diverse teams, and set benchmarks for hiring. Repositories for ex-employee data, like the one used by AuthBridge, provide valuable insights on attrition so that you can keep an eye on the talent movement.

Moving towards mission critical recruiting
We have already seen the power of strategic recruiting during the pandemic, with many organisations bringing contractual employees onboard for gigs, taking difficult decisions to let go employees and calling them back to work as businesses picked. With disruption being a way of life for the HR in the future, a successful recruitment strategy will be the one that can pivot to create a bigger business impact. Tracking qualitative metrics like time to hire, source channel effectiveness, quality of hire, retention rates, candidate experience rating etc. will take priority. The fact that 68% HR professionals also feel that better recruiting tools and technology is the way to boost recruiter performance is a sign we are on the right track.