29 Mar Employee Power! The Changing Face of Recruitment in the Digital Age

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me and my colleagues in the industry of talent recruitment that the traditional human resources process is becoming less relevant – the practices are not keeping pace with the reality in the digital age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these poor practices extend to the hiring process. In the past, it hasn’t been uncommon for potential candidates to be treated akin to cattle. To illustrate the extent of this phenomenon, I will repeat an oft-quoted statistic – each potential hirees’ CV is looked at for about seven seconds. I don’t think that any person in their right mind would suggest that this is enough time to evaluate a person’s workplace effectiveness.

These attitudes may stem from the industrial revolution, the invention of the assembly line meant the creation of tens of thousands of low skilled jobs. New machines were being invented, and workers were essentially glorified cogs in these machines, performing the same repetitious and inane tasks day in day out. This model of employee treatment has persisted to a greater or lesser degree for more than 150 years. However, the information revolution has seen sweeping changes to this long-standing status quo. There has been a massive increase in the demand for highly skilled (and more importantly talented) workers, and the reality is that there simply aren’t enough workers to meet the demand. This has created a massive shift in power in the HR space. In short, it is now an employee’s market, and organisations will have to actively compete to snatch up the top talent before their competitors do.

So how can you be proactive in your search for the best employees. Of course there are many methods to do this – talent scouting is one traditional way to do this, while in-depth interviews with every candidate are another. But there are two obvious problems here. First – they’re time consuming, and second – they’re prohibitively expensive. While you can’t put a price on good talent, I have spent my career looking for ways to find the best candidates in a way that’s fast and cheap – and I believe I’ve perfected it at Talegent. Talent assessment allows you to screen candidates rapidly, and more importantly accurately, thus saving your HR department time and money. To illustrate, let me quote another statistic (I swear this will be the last). CV’s are about 8% predictive of an employees workplace performance, Talegent’s software on the other hand is 40% predictive – five times better. When you come down to brass tacks, a CV is an excellent tool for seeing how good employees are at writing CV’s, but not much else.

We live in a changing age, we no longer have to rely on vague and unscientific metrics to measure employee ability. It is now possible to quantify everything from a candidates emotional intelligence to their tendency towards workplace safety. So why would you settle for anything less?