Our CEO, Sanjoe Tom Jose, recently spoke with Vadim Liberman, Editor at ERE Media, as part of ERE Digital, a practitioner-led event that aims to help recruiting pros elevate their roles, departments, and organizations.
Here’s a breakdown of the conversation’s highlights. You can also watch the session by clicking the video below.
The reality is, Sanjoe explains, the top concern of organizations today is speed. Competitors are often speaking to candidates at the same time you are. Often, organizations are ready to make an offer only to hear that the prospect has accepted something else. The difference between hiring top talent and none at all always comes down to speed and time to hire.
That said, other obstacles may be getting in the way of an organization’s recruitment success that they aren’t even aware of. For example: “There’s been a significant change in the way candidates experience the hiring process [since things turned digital],” says Sanjoe. “Lots of the cues that candidates traditionally used to understand a company is missing.” Here he refers to things like walking into a physical space and making small talk with potential colleagues.
The absence of this experience can be uncomfortable for candidates and significantly impacts the hiring process in ways that organizations may not be attuned to.
Change may be uncomfortable, but it’s fundamentally good. “Expectations are higher than ever when it comes to finding the next employer,” says Sanjoe, pointing out that potential hires are looking for recruitment experiences in the same place they shop retail, or play games.
Having high expectations means that companies must rise to the expectations and, in turn, be better. Thankfully, tools like Talview can streamline this growth process through remote hiring. Very few organizations are meeting candidates where they want to be met right now, so the opportunities are significant.
Vadim asks what many in the industry are wondering: is there really a talent shortage?
There is the same amount of people looking for jobs as there always has been, Sanjoe explains. But the gap between what they want from the hiring process and what employers are offering is larger than ever. So, in this way, there is a shortage: it doesn’t pertain to the number of people who are potential hires, it pertains to the amount of talent that can be caught with a flimsy fishing net.
Bonus: Find our latest white paper on the tech talent shortage here.
Tech evolves quickly and must reinvent and iterate every few years to keep up with standards and trends. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of saying we brought in the best technology and now we are set for the next five years,” laughs Sanjoe. “Things must always evolve.”
By nature, the demands of the customer and industry will always be a step or so in front of the technology that they need. This shouldn’t dissuade tech companies, rather it should empower them to iterate as efficiently as they can so that the gap is a healthy distance, not a disaster.
Because of this gap, companies are not just looking for what tech vendors are currently offering – they’re shopping for what they seem capable of offering in the future, or continuously.
“Maybe five years ago this was not a major criterion of evaluation,” says Sanjoe, “but now it’s incredibly important to choose partners who you are confident will innovate and evolve as the recruitment industry does.”
It’s through these partnerships that speed can be attained.
“We see Talview as an orchestration that will allow companies to adopt digitization with efficiency and significant scale. But the data is always the most important.”
With offline recruitment, most conversations, exchanges, and feedback are person-to-person and not recorded in any adequate way. That’s a significant amount of missing data that could be used to improve processes; things like micro details of candidate behavior, how long it takes the average person to go from step A to step B, or how candidates respond to different parts of the process.
The data is capable of much more than just improving the process – it offers significantly valuable insights that can help organizations make better decisions in all matters of their structure.
Here’s an example: “90% of talent decision making is based on interviews,” explains Sanjoe, “and interviewing is a very subjective process.” Interviewers may be making mistakes like speaking for longer than they allow the candidate to speak for. With digital recruitment, organizations can review the conversations and make helpful adjustments to the interviewer’s process.
“If you make better talent decisions you build better teams. Everybody wins.”
“It’s not about how much technology you use; it’s about finding the right tech that works for your organization in a digitized world,” says Sanjoe.
The core of the Instahiring methodology is that if you can take control of your time to hire, you can take control of your entire hiring process.
“Hiring metrics show that the best talent available in the market is available for an average of ten days. The average turnaround for a company to hire is anywhere between thirty and fifty. Six out of ten candidates who drop from a hiring process do so because it took too long.”
Long processes also up costs. So, if you take control of the speed at which you hire candidates, you’re seizing opportunities on the best talent and doing so with lower costs.
At the end of the day, organizations need to put themselves in the shoes of candidates in a digitized world and select a partner that can help meet them halfway.