Human resources have changed drastically with the rise of IT and data science. Modern recruiters don’t waste time searching for the best candidates on their own. Instead, they use big data to find new talents and keep potential applicants informed about the company’s job opportunities.
Recruiting software enables HR managers to avoid generic searches, so now they can post positions and filter applicants based on a number of highly specific preferences. This is very important because studies prove that businesses that use a maturity model, perform 30% better than their peers on the market.
If you want to improve recruiting, you should also exploit the new technology. In this post, we will show you 5 ways recruiters should use big data to find the best candidates.
One recruiter claims she has so many resumes to review that she takes only 7 seconds with each one. Is this enough time to grasp the qualities and skills of a candidate and make the best hiring decision? Or, is there another way? She could be using a software program that can scan and analyze thousands of resumes in minutes.
Applicant tracking systems can search for professional experiences, job titles, skills, and certificates with job descriptions to compare candidates and eliminate those who are unqualified. This saves time and allows only the finest candidates to move on.
For instance, Silicon Valley-based Juniper Networks uses LinkedIn to track and analyze career paths of its former employees. Doing so, the company learned more about their professional preferences and upgraded its talent management strategy to attract new candidates and prepare adequate onboarding programs.
Big data is not only great for collecting and analyzing basic information, but it is also good at conducting complex personality tests to evaluate job applicants. Some companies already use the Hogan Personality Inventory to predict candidate performance and reduce the number of bad hiring decisions. This sort of test makes conclusions based on facts and not personal impressions, which has always been one of the weakest links in the HR chain.
Chatbot technology uses big data to quickly process information and establish communication with prospects. Ubisend, a company that builds chatbots for businesses, cites a Hubspot study that says 48% of people would rather connect with a company via a live chat than any other channel of communication.
The reason is simple – chatbots ensure instant communication and can provide answers to applicants about the position. At the same time, chatbots help companies reduce operational costs and make the hiring procedure faster than before.
You can keep potential employees informed about the hiring needs of your company through your website. By creating an engaging website with interesting articles and blogs, you can create a community for potential hires and give them a reason to keep returning to your site. You can also expand this community by inviting people to your site through social media. Then you can use data analytics to develop audience profiles based on visitor interactions with your website. Understanding visitor behavior can help you reach out to members of your website community on the pages they visit most often when job opportunities arise.
With this channel of communication, you can also reveal the human side of your business and show people how things work behind the scenes. This is exactly what Google does with Facebook videos – it presents the funny side of the business, strengthens relationships with followers, and looks for potential job candidates.
Big data has changed the very nature of human resources. It has enabled recruiters to make more precise and data-driven decisions, improving the overall performance of HR units. In this post, we showed you 5 ways recruiters should use big data to find the best candidates. Don’t hesitate to use our suggestions and let us know in the comments below if you have other interesting ideas about this topic – we’ll be glad to hear them!