The recruitment industry has completely evolved over the past 20 years. New technologies have transformed the way employers recruit and manage talent. From paper CVs to job boards, applicant tracking systems and online assessments, a lot has changed over the years. While advancements in technology have offered us solutions to challenges that employers faced a decade ago, the industry is ever evolving and recruiters today are dealing with new challenges when hiring the best talent:
It’s not a surprise that if you think this candidate is pretty great, someone else may too. It is likely that the roles they apply to will be similar and the compensation would not (should not) vary too much. In the end, many candidates say the interview is a deciding factor. Was it a positive experience for them? Did they get some insights into the company culture? Interact with the people they’d be working with? When speaking with the hiring managers, was the interaction clumsy and more like an interrogation rather than an interaction? Was anyone from the senior leadership team involved in the final stages, even if briefly? Regardless of the job market, great talent should be valued and treated as such during the process. Does your recruitment process reflect this?
Many of my clients take this into consideration when they decide to take on video interviewing – particularly globally. The process can begin with a welcome message from someone in the senior leadership team. This message can also be used to discuss the company core values, show different locations of the business and be followed by a cool branding video. The pre-recorded questions that follow can then be asked by a hiring manager, to which the candidates respond with a video recording. Questions were determined in collaboration with the Hiring Managers and the recruiters so that they addressed important knowledge based criteria, while still following the natural flow of an interview, something the hiring manager may not have experience in. The process was fun, seamless, informative and unique- how often does your first interview with a company start with the CEO? That’s an interview to remember.
If you’re trying to reach out to great talent, there is a good chance a few hundred other recruiters are trying to do the same. How do you stand out at the beginning? If these candidates aren’t familiar with your company, if they search for you, will they like what they see?
Building a brand is incredibly important when trying to attract talent. If your aim is to be cool and innovative (and subsequently have cool and innovative employees), does your website, marketing materials, ATS and recruitment process reflect this? Consider creating corporate videos that show candidates what you can offer them. Great office, cool perks, fun staff… let them know!
In a study by Bersin and Deloitte, they found that the single-biggest factor in a recruiter’s performance is their relationships with their hiring managers.
Many of my clients have said to me, an unintentional advantage of using video interviewing has been improved relations with hiring managers. When I first began working in this industry, I didn’t quite understand this. I figured “you both have the same objective, to find the best talent, wouldn’t your relationship already be amicable?”. Unfortunately this is often not the case. A few different things go wrong in a traditional hiring manager/recruiter relationship:
Here is an example of how video interviewing improved the process:
