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Talent Acquisition As Digital Experience?

​Recruiting is becoming a digital experience as candidates come to expect convenience and mobile contact. Savvy recruiters now have access to new technologies to forge connections with candidates and strengthen the employment brand. 

Introduction

Talent sourcing and recruitment face tremendous pressure. Talent and skill shortages are widespread. Employees are demanding new careers and career models. And technologies and innovations—including cognitive, artificial intelligence, social collaboration, crowds, and the sharing economy—are reshaping the workforce. Leading companies are turning the open talent economy into an opportunity by embracing technologies and developing new models that make innovative use of on- and off-balance-sheet talent sources.

Attracting skilled resources is no longer simply the responsibility of HR. It now stands as a top concern of business leaders, ranking third in our survey this year.

More than 8 in 10 (83 percent) executives say talent acquisition is important or very important.

Finding talent both on- and off-balance sheet has moved far beyond traditional recruiting to encompass the broader scope of talent acquisition (TA). Once the sole domain of HR, TA now involves multiple teams across the organization. Adding to the complexity, the accelerating pace of technology offers a dizzying array of new solutions, even as the nature and sources of talent markets continue to shift. Current platforms struggle to adapt because many are too old to integrate emerging technologies, capabilities, and needs.

Building a strategic and digital employment brand

In today’s transparent digital world, a company’s employment brand must be both highly visible and highly attractive because candidates now often find the employer, not the reverse. To leverage this interest, companies are intensively managing their employment brand, which can “pull” candidates toward them.

Creating an attractive employment brand involves a complex mix of forces. One major factor is the overall workforce experience, which requires high levels of engagement and strong career opportunities. In fact, outreach campaigns to educate and attract candidates may be just as important as customer-focused advertising. Heineken, for example, developed a series of unconventional videos and web interviews to highlight the employee experience and set the company apart.1

Employers must also reconsider how they communicate their value proposition to the workforce. Dell’s Global Talent Brand and Tools team completely redesigned the company’s global career websites to include consistent messaging and images. The team also launched a job search optimization site and an aggressive campaign of candidate-focused content featuring blog posts and a wide range of videos. These were posted on the company’s career sites, its YouTube channel, and another employee – and candidate-focused sites, such as Glassdoor. The videos, which included employees talking about their experiences at Dell, reached a wide array of social networks. […]

Using video as a tool for a compelling candidate experience

The candidate experience is the first phase of the broader employee experience. Yet only 15 percent of global business leaders surveyed this year believe their companies do an excellent job cultivating and monitoring long-term relationships with potential future talent.

Video is emerging as a tool to address this challenge by enabling a more compelling candidate experience. SAP, for example, uses cartoons and video games to illustrate life at the company in an engaging way.6Other organizations are reimagining the age-old job description in a video format. Job postings on Facebook that feature videos receive 36 percent more applications.7

Video is also transforming interviews. AI and a video interview may be better able to identify promising candidates than a traditional interview, saving money and reducing time-to-hire. For example, Hilton used a video interviewing platform to cut its recruiting cycle from six weeks to just five days.8 Video interviewing can reduce pre-hire assessment questions from 200 to just 5 and raises the possibility of one-interview hires.

Indeed, a consensus is emerging that traditional interviewing—subjective and unstandardized—may be an unreliable method for predicting a potential employee’s success. Just as blind musical auditions increased the number of women in American orchestras, efforts to control unconscious bias are on the rise in business.9[…]

Start here

  • Leverage new technologies: The world of recruiting is becoming a digital experience—perhaps leading the pack among the rest of HR processes—as candidates come to expect convenience and mobile experiences. Explore the value of cognitive tools, video, and gaming, especially when they build on social networks and the cloud.
  • Build a digital employment brand: Everything an organization does in the digital and socially networked world affects candidates’ decision to work there. Be sure to monitor and align messaging across sites and experiences.
  • Create a compelling candidate experience: Put yourself into the candidates’ shoes: What is unique about your organization that can add richness to the candidate experience? What qualities both set your company apart and make it more attractive to candidates?
  • Broaden and expand sourcing channels: Open up talent pipelines to nontraditional sources. Think about how best to source and recruit for the many types of talent needed, both on and off the balance sheet, including full- and part-time employees, freelancers, gig workers, and crowds.
  • Integrate sourcing: Talent acquisition sourcing should be connected across HR, business, procurement, IT, and other functions. Move beyond silos toward coordinated talent sourcing channels.

Fast Forward

Accelerating digital, video, and cognitive technologies and ever-increasing transparency are quickly changing how recruiters find and court skilled employees. Rather than continuing to focus on sourcing and selection, recruiters are now relationship builders and managers. They are looking to enable a positive candidate experience for new employees—a task that requires both new responsibilities and new skills.

Savvy recruiters will continue to embrace new TA technologies and hone their relationship-building skills. Indeed, this is the promise of cognitive recruiting. As AI and other technologies take over the basic, time-consuming tasks of sourcing candidates, human jobs will shift. A recruiter in this new world can add value by building psychological and emotional connections with candidates and constantly strengthening the employment brand.

Full article posted here by Michael Stephan at Deloitte.

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