The top 5 tech trends that could improve or damage your small business’ hiring process
Traditional hiring is a long, expensive process of shuffling through CVs, holding hundreds of slightly different interviews and seeing all of your top candidates lose interest. Tech can drastically improve your hiring process, but it’s easy to go overboard, lose any personal touch you had and create a bad candidate experience.
As someone who has recently hunted for a job in tech and started working in recruitment, I’ve experienced a lot of the new tech that’s meant to improve your hiring process first-hand.
Spoiler alert: lots of it just makes it worse.
Common hiring process issues that need tackling
What are your top complaints about hiring? Lots of us would say:
- Hiring a good employee costs too much money.
- It takes too much brain-power and dedication from me – I’m trying to run a business here!
- Hiring takes way too much of my time.
- There’s too much admin – I have to sift through CVs, reply to emails, arrange interviews, give feedback and prepare contracts.
Tech can solve every single one of these problems, but it could also create more.
5 Tech trends you could use in your hiring process
1 – Job descriptions
If you want to make the best use of your time, it’s best to put a lot of care and attention into your job description. But even the most experienced recruiters still make glaring mistakes.
It’s easy to copy and paste some random job description for a similar role or use a template and call it a day, but this is a seriously bad idea.
Instead put some care into your job description and use tech to check it.
You can use job description language trackers to ensure that you’re using neutral words. The wrong phrase could be putting off people of a certain gender, race, age or those that have a disability.
2 – Applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Applicant tracking systems use AI to make hiring decisions for you. They’re generally used to screen CVs for you, cutting recruitment times significantly.
However, your ATS can make the wrong decisions. ATS tend to use keywords to screen CVs, so if a candidate explains their experience in a creative way, or they have transferable experience, they might not pass screening despite being exactly what you’re looking for.
Some ATS software goes beyond the initial screening phase, helping you shave significant time off the entire hiring process. But is it better than using a recruitment platform?
3 – Automated testing
Testing has become ever more important over the years.
As more and more companies begin to see more value in skills over experience – for example Elon Musk stating that none of his workers need a degree – we began to see a need to actually test these skills to back up our hiring decisions.
Automated testing can be an amazing way to test applicants for technical skills. For example, typing ‘hackerrank test python’ into Google will bring up hundreds of tests to give any junior developers you’re screening.
But beyond personality tests and technical challenges, we really believe that your application tasks should be built around the job you’re hiring for.
You could end up testing the wrong skills and hiring the wrong person if you use the wrong test.
4 – Interviews with robots
Here’s a hiring trend that I seriously hate – automated, one-way, robot interviews.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of being interviewed by a robot before, you’re not missing out on much. Lots of big-name companies are using these one-way interviews to batch-test hundreds of applicants and it’s been getting on my nerves.
The one-way interview was not built for your candidate experience. It was built to save you time. But although it might help you, it can seriously annoy your candidates.
Not only is the software often awkward and confusing to use in a high-stress situation, but talking to a robot isn’t something your candidates will need to be good at. Trying to communicate your enthusiasm and passion to a blank screen and counting down clock isn’t fun, realistic and in my opinion, doesn’t show anything to employers.
If there’s one hiring process tech trend to skip this year, one-way interviews is the one to choose.
5 – Chatbots
But I actually don’t have anything against robots. In fact, using a chatbot to keep your candidates updated and warm is a great idea!
As opposed to having candidates hit up your inbox or phone, directing them to a frequently updated chatbot is a great way to save time.
It’s like a having a recruiter in your pocket to do all of the communicating for you. And although the chatbot probably won’t be able to answer too many questions, it should keep your candidates content to wait for the next stage.
It is important to not rely on chatbots too much though. Nothing beats personal communication when you’re trying to build a great candidate experience.
So please never substitute feedback or initial communications with a polite robot, it’s just not the same!
Need more tech to help you reduce cost and time?
Skip the screening process and have all of your communication managed for you on the DigitalGrads hiring platform. And for any help perfecting your application task, download our free task guidelines document!