The war for talent is real. Onboarding and retaining top talent are becoming an ongoing challenge for organizations. It means that HR and business leaders need to turn to smarter, more accurate, and faster means of identifying, selecting, and onboarding the right talent.

Achieving the ideal hiring metrics is crucial to talent acquisition, especially when recruitment is a high-volume game. The recruiter must focus his or her efforts on value-adding recruiting services and move away from mundane and transactional hiring tasks so as to get the best hiring outcomes. This is where technology can prove to be a game-changer, and there is a compelling need to identify and implement the right HR software for hiring automation.

The avenues to implement HR technology are many today, with the advent of artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, and other HR software. The key is to identify and implement the best HR software that achieves the strategic and operational hiring objectives. The latest on the block to achieve this seems to be the “intelligent hiring assistant”, much like an Alexa-like personal assistant.

What is an intelligent hiring assistant and what can it do?

To hire the right talent, knowing your candidates in and out is essential. This know-how comes from myriad data sources, thanks to the ultra-connected and data-driven world that we live in. There is a lot of manageable and meaningful data about potential employees in the digital footprints that people leave behind- on social media, in employment records, on Google, and so on.

Much of this data can be categorized into two types

• Reactive data: Data obtained as a result of candidates responding to a request or action.
• Non-reactive data: Data that is publicly available and does not rise from specific responses of the candidate.

Marketers have been leveraging such reactive and non-reactive data for consumer insights, creating psychological profiles of consumers for segmenting, targeting and positioning. Why cannot talent acquisition teams follow suit and create a psychological profile of candidates using similar data? This is now very much possible with the help of hiring automation software such as hiring personal assistants.

A personal assistant would work by searching non-reactive data from online sources and combining it with reactive data to make sense of it. It starts with building the right algorithm to understand who is an “ideal candidate” for a role, in terms of skills, traits, attitudes, and behaviors. It scans candidate/job seekers (both active and passive) profiles words and statements, gestures, sentiments, etc., and matches these with the job description to arrive at a “best fit”. Clean and valid data that can be analyzed and understood, is thus at the heart of an intelligent hiring assistant. But there is more to it, an intelligent assistance built right can assist in hiring every step of the way, from engaging with candidates to suggesting recruiters on the next steps they should take for a successful hire.

Why avail the services of an intelligent hiring assistant?

There is a pressing need for TA teams to optimize the hiring process. Here is how an intelligent hiring assistant can help:

Communicate with Candidates

Creating a great candidate experience is vital to building a strong employer brand. Candidates today expect high levels of communication and engagement from their prospective employers, at every step of the hiring funnel. An intelligent assistant can analyze, assess and respond to candidates’ queries through the applicant tracking system. This helps build an ongoing relationship with potential employees without much investment of human labor. For example, an inbuilt chatbot can help give candidates immediate feedback on their applications, keeping them well-informed.

Cut the Clutter

Recruitment is an intensive process with hoards of data at every stage of the pipeline. A hiring assistant can intelligently cut through the clutter- manage email threads in large volumes, sift out relevant profiles from large databases and act on online databases that have a large number of low-quality applications. It helps the recruiter focus on high-quality, relevant applicants and focus their efforts on selection rather than screening.

Get Accurate Candidate Information

A hiring assistant uses data mining algorithms to parse online data and fills in gaps in candidate profiles. Not only are candidate profiles scrutinized thoroughly, but engagements and interactions between employers and employees are tracked to find the best candidates to engage with, leading to a true and real-time view of candidates and therein better candidate screening.

Make an Intelligent Selection

The latest in hiring is to have a hiring assistant in candidate assessments such as interviews. A hiring assistant can pose the right questions to candidates based on the candidate’s previous responses. What’s more, much of this happens in real-time, with an intelligent algorithm directing the questions.

Better Productivity

With the above benefits, recruiters can now take their eyes off mundane and manual hiring tasks and focus on strategic TA aspects like quality of hire, culture fit, etc. This means more productivity to the recruitment function in terms of time-to-hire and even cost-per-hire in the long run. It can create better value-add to recruiters’ profiles and professional lives. It also means that companies can now scale up their recruitment efforts without the need to put in place a large team.

The ClayHR Approach to Intelligent Recruiting

We at ClayHR have leveraged the best of technologies to help companies realize their talent acquisition goals, whether it is about internal hiring or external hiring.
Some of the objectives of the intelligent ClayHR applicant tracking system are:

• To hire internally based on the best match of skill set, availability and project needs.
• To streamline external hiring by publishing positions externally on the website and social media and integrate with other job boards.
• To customize the hiring process flows and assessment templates to review and approve candidates.
• It goes one step ahead and fosters a long-term talent perspective by helping nurture candidates that are not ready to join yet.

All in all, ClayHR Hiring Automation aims to reach out to better candidates and share a simple and intuitive way to track and evaluate their applicant information to create the best hiring outcomes for its engaging companies. This is a great start to making emerging technologies like AI work for attracting, engaging and retaining the best of talent.

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