With all the new technology and services on the market, it’s tough to know where to begin during your hiring process. You have to decide whether to hire a recruiter, enlist the services of a staffing agency, or keep recruiting in-house. Once you make that call, you need to pick the right partner or invest in the right support tools.
Beyond applicant and candidate tracking systems and Linkedin searches, there are many other avenues for finding and attracting the best talent. From data insights to candidate screenings, new software can take the pain points out of all your sourcing and decision-making. Here are some data-driven tools to help you find the very best candidates for the job.
1. Analytics Tools
You can apply different kinds of advanced analytics tools at virtually any point in the hiring process. From evaluating candidates to improving diversity, the more data you have, the better. One of the most interesting use cases for this kind of data, however, is performance analytics.
With performance analytics, you get deeper insight into how employees perform in their roles. You also get a more thorough understanding of the behavioral traits and decision-making processes that help them succeed (or don’t). Basically, these programs can help you determine what the secret sauce is that makes someone a good employee at your company.
Analytics tools can help you analyze resume data, social media and LinkedIn profiles, behavioral assessment results, and more. With that data, it can then find similarities between past winners and current candidates. Then, it can offer recommendations and help you select the right talent to move your company forward.
2. AI-Powered Job Descriptions
AI can save you a lot of time and money putting job descriptions together by removing some of the legwork. AI can analyze other job postings, your company’s specific requirements, local laws, and more to generate basic job listings.
Whether you plug your criteria into ChatGPT or into dedicated software, generative AI can provide the basic structure of listings. From there, you can add some personality into the mix, adjusting voice and tone to attract the right candidates.
That said, an experienced human with a good editorial eye should always review any published content that represents your company. And for more sophisticated content or thought leadership, you definitely need to contract with or hire professionals.
3. Candidate Sourcing
While they can be helpful, you don’t have to rely solely on job site search filters to identify candidates. And you don’t have to manually assess all of the hundreds or thousands of results, either. Instead, you can use data and web scraping tools to comb all these entries for you.
Data mining and web scraping tools can analyze LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and social media to source potential candidates. Some programs integrate with LinkedIn’s API to directly analyze any number of data points. Using these tools, you can increase the pool of potential candidates, while easily narrowing results to only the best.
By aggregating data from all across the web, these programs can also find potential matches who didn’t even apply. They can find students who haven’t even graduated yet and predict their future success. They can also turn up unexpected gems that ease the search process, like identifying internal talent who should be considered for promotions.
4. Video Interviewing
When you think of video interviewing, you probably imagine platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams that let you interview candidates online. But with new interviewing technologies, there’s so much more to it than that. Modern candidate interviewing software can actually schedule and conduct the interviews for you, using chatbots and screening questions.
These programs can also analyze both verbal and non-verbal cues, finding not just answers to questions, but important additional information. Some software can assess body language, facial expressions, vocal modulation, and word-choice and other speech patterns to evaluate candidates.
With video interviewing tools, you get a well-rounded picture of your candidate and know whether they’ll be the best fit. You get access to deep data about their skills and personality traits, plus interview transcripts, assessment reports, and hiring recommendations.
5. Behavioral and Skills Assessments
Candidate assessments now go way beyond simple quizzes to test knowledge and competency. They can now offer gamified, immersive VR experiences that mimic real-life scenarios and predict realistic on-the-job outcomes.
Advanced virtual skills assessments can also modulate difficulty levels in real-time, as candidates progress through testing. They can analyze results, scrutinizing the phrasing of written or verbal responses to spot subtle differences in grammar or competency.
Because assessments are analyzed with AI, there’s little room for bias or human error in selecting the most skilled candidates. But careful action must be taken to ensure AI is evaluated and corrected for biases in historical training data.
Keeping the Human in Human Resources
No matter what tech innovations you choose to employ, your human resources should still be people-first. Always choose tools that are user-friendly and intuitive, to ease your team’s operational burden. You don’t want to have to replace your valuable current employees because finding new team members got so frustrating!
The same goes for the candidate experience: don’t make great candidates talk to too many robots. Tech should never feel dehumanizing or frustrating, or you risk losing out on the perfect candidate. Choose platforms that help your company run more smoothly, without sacrificing the genuine connections that make your brand unique.