We’re at the halfway point of 2020, and it’s clear we are at the starting point of a period of significant change in talent acquisition the speed of which none of us would have predicted six months ago. It’s also evident that Recruiting Automation is one of the critical pillars of this change. I’ve always felt that as an industry we’ve had a very head in the sand attitude to automation and debate has been overly focused on specific tools and minor details. That has to change, and we have to look at automation from a strategic perspective.
At the recent TA Global Gathering digital conference, I delivered a presentation on recruiting automation strategy, and I’m really pleased to able to publish the audio from that presentation as this episode of the podcast.
Key points I cover:
• The rise of intelligent recruiting
• Why automation is so important right now
• What can, should and actually is being automated
• The potential for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in talent acquisition
• The importance of strategic thinking from TA leaders
• Five fundamental questions to address
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:19]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 283 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We’re at the halfway point of 2020 and it’s clear we’re at the starting point of a period of significant change in talent acquisition, the speed of which none of us would have predicted six months ago. It’s also very clear that recruiting automation is one of the key pillars of this change. I’ve always felt that as an industry we’ve had a very head in the sand attitude to automation and the debate has been overly focused on specific tool and minor details. This has to change and we have to look at automation from a strategic perspective. At the recent TA Global Gathering online conference, I did a presentation on recruiting automation strategy and I’m really pleased to be able to publish the audio from that presentation as this episode of the podcast.
Hi everyone, it’s Matt Alder from the Recruiting Future podcast. Over the next 15 minutes I want to explain why I think automation is a critical topic in talent acquisition right now, and what you need to be doing to understand and act on the implications of that. Automation is nothing new. The word originates from ancient Greek, and Homer wrote about both robots and automated machines in the Iliad about two and a half thousand years ago. Automation in factories has been happening for hundreds of years, and the digital revolution of the last 20 years has seen automation become widespread in pretty much every facet of our lives. So what about recruiting? Well, as we know, technology adoption and behavior change is a slow process in recruiting. Earlier in the year I wrote a blog post about the evolution of technology and the pace of change in recruiting. Based on what I was seeing from my consultancy work and also hosting nearly 300 episodes of the Recruiting Future podcast. In the last 20 years, we’ve gone through three phases of change in recruiting. The first one, round about sort of 99, the year 2000, was the move towards online recruitment. The Internet gradually became mainstream and, you know, we moved all of our offline processes. Online advertising moved out of newspapers and onto job boards and the ATS was invented and, you know, the process of automation automating recruitment kind of started right there. Moving on about 10 years, 2009, 2010, we move into a phase which I would call connected recruitment. We saw the rise of social media, the rise of the mobile Internet and the rise of cloud computing. This connected recruiters to audiences in a way we’ve just not seen before. If we move on 10 years from that, we’re really on the cusp of what I would refer to as intelligent recruiting. We’ve seen the development of artificial intelligence, the adoption of data science, automation, which is obviously what we’re talking about. We may have blockchain in our future, but also the real importance of experience in recruitment. And to me, that combines to make intelligent recruitment. Now, this has not been a linear process. There are organizations that are still taking their recruiting online for the first time and the social media and mobile revolution have been a very, very slow burn in the case of some organizations. But really, I think we’re at the next stage now and over the next few years we’re going to see the rise of intelligent recruitment and the rise of recruiting automation. Now, from the conversations I have with TA leaders on the podcast and many vendors in the sector, it’s very clear that we’re only right at the start of the automation journey. What’s also clear though, is that the COVID 19 pandemic is accelerating everything. Now. That’s because automation, if it’s done properly, and we’ll come back to what I mean by that, offers the answers to many of the challenges that employers now find themselves facing halfway through 2020. It allows talent acquisition teams to do more with less. And it provides an on demand resource that can scale up and scale down as things change. It offers a way of dealing with high volumes of application in an empathetic and effective way. And we’re looking at a very complicated market moving forward. All around the world, there are millions more people actively seeking work than there were in January. At the same time, with so much uncertainty in the market in general, it’s going to be much more difficult to persuade people to move jobs. And that may actually exacerbate Skill shortages in certain areas. But of course the overall drive to automation from companies was, was happening already and it’s speeding up. So we were starting to see, you know, much more automation in everything that we, that we do. All the research that’s come out recently has said that the majority of companies want to speed up automation within their business processes and within the way that they serve their custom. And there’s absolutely no way that talent acquisition is going to be an exception here. Automation is absolutely happening in recruitment and as a TA leader, you need to help to drive the change or the change is going to be driven by another part of the business, leaving you with no say and no influence. So this is a critically important time. So what’s the current state of play when it comes to recruiting automation? And as I said, we’re right at the very start of this journey and there’s a very, very long way to go. So what can be automated, what should be automated, what’s actually being automated, and what will be automated in the future? Now this is only a very short presentation, so there’s, there’s no time to go into much detail. If you want more detail, then I would highly recommend subscribing to the Recruiting Future podcast as I’ll be featuring a lot of content on recruitment automation moving forward. And indeed done, you know, quite a few interviews on the topic with a number of different practitioners and a few vendors recently. I want to give you an overview though. As I say, and I’ll say this sort of countless times, we’re very much at the start of the automation journey in recruitment. But even, even though we are, we’re seeing automation being used at all stages of the recruiting funnel. Talent Attraction is taking big steps towards automation. With the rise of data driven programmatic advertising, career site systems that personalized content experience, chatbots that open up communication channels with job seekers, automated pipeline nurturing and the continued development of automated sourcing, something that’s been with us for a fair few years now. In selection. We’re seeing chatbot driven filtering, automated assessment and interview self scheduling tools. All of these are sort of continuing to improve both in terms of sophistication and in terms of adoption. And we’re also seeing automation in pre boarding and, and onboarding. As I say, though, I’m only touching the surface here and there are lots of other examples of recruiting automation that I’m sure many of you are already aware of. We’re also only the beginning of the journey. Robot Process automation, or RPA is going to be a real game changer in terms of tying a lot of these separately automated processes together. And I’m going to talk about I’ll be talking more about that on the podcast in the coming weeks. I think one of the biggest problems that I see and one of the biggest issues that we have with we have in recruiting in general is our obsession with shiny new tools and new technologies and, and also a tendency to endlessly debate the tiny little details and implications of them. Now, I, I truly believe that the employers who are going to get proper competitive advantage from automated recruiting are the ones who are going to be able to take a helicopter view and work through automation at a strategic level. And that really brings me on to the key point of this presentation. I believe that what happens in talent acquisition in the next 12 months will shape it for the next decade. As I said earlier, automation is happening whether talent acquisition likes it or not. And it’s vital that we step up as an industry and take control and shape the direction in which we’re moving. Automation strategy isn’t about individual tools, it’s about dealing with some of the fundamental questions which every organization, every organization faces when it comes to automation. So I’m going to talk about five key areas to think about and focus on. Firstly, data. Now, there are two parts to this, but firstly, the key thing is what data is being used to drive automation. One of the things that’s always held recruiting back has been the continued reliance on resumes and job descriptions. Now, using subjective bits of text as a basis for matching and selection isn’t giving us the results we need. Now, some employers are already way ahead of the game here, but most still need to sort of rethink their approach and rethink it urgently. And this leads us on to the second issue, which is bias. The debate about bias in artificial intelligence just continues to rumble on. On the one hand, AI has the the ability to mitigate human bias, whether that’s unconscious or conscious bias. But at the same time it has the ability to massively amplify bias by if it’s driven by data that has bias encoded into it, TA leaders need to be continually asking questions of vendors, demand more transparency and above all look carefully and critically at the results they’re getting from AI recruiting processes. And this brings us on to the second data issue. Effective automation is driven by effective analytics. Now, there’s an absolute imperative to improve the levels of data intelligence in talent acquisition, particularly now, where demonstrating ROI has probably never been more important. If you don’t have data analytics as part of your core TA setup. You really need to fix that as soon as possible. The third key area is the relationship between humans and machines. Understanding where the human touch points need to be in your recruiting process is essential. Offering a high quality candidate experience remains incredibly important and there are going to be judgment calls to make about when you use a chatbot, when you use an automated process, or whether you use an actual human at various different stages and what’s going to give you what’s going to provide the most effective candidate experience. It’s another huge topic and it’s something I’ve been covering extensively on the podcast. If you if you want to delve into it a bit deeper, the fourth key area is content and messaging. Automated recruitment, marketing and pipeline nurturing is great, but they’re not going to work without empathetic content and messaging that really sells your employer. Brand storytelling and content creation are critical to the success of automation, and it’s important that you have the right specialist resource either within your TA team or available to your TA team to deliver this. The fifth issue is having the agility required to deal with shifting demands. And this is something that everyone is living through right now. I mean, this has pretty much got to be the most uncertain time for businesses any as any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. And the ability to move quickly and adapt to changing circumstances is just proving to be absolutely critical.
So to summarize, automation is happening and you need to own it. It’s going to affect every area of talent acquisition and there are some big issues to work through over the coming months and years.
If you want to learn more and hear from some of the practitioners who are at the cutting edge of this, I would highly recommend subscribing to the Recruiting Future podcast. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcast. By S Searching for Recruiting Future. You can also search all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com. if you’re a practitioner who’s already doing great things with automation, I would love to interview for you for the show. So please get in touch with me. My email is metashift.co.uk
Thank you very much for listening.
