COVID impact: Digital recruitment process to continue, say experts

Corporates are increasingly adopting technology-aided recruitment tools that can be leveraged remotely and can ensure hiring as well as business continuity amid disruptions, and the virtual model of recruitment is here to stay, according to experts.

There was a rush towards new-age technology-aided recruitment/HR tools in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and new-age recruitment tools will continue to be leveraged extensively and increasingly in the future too. “Corporates want to have data-based and analysis-driven inputs to make recruitment decisions and they employ various modern tools to ensure candidates’ cultural and job role fitment,” said Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer – Mettl.

Read | Hybrid working model to remote interviews: Job trends that are likely to stay post-pandemic

These tools range from pre-employment aptitude, cognitive, domain, and psychometric assessments to virtual interviews to data-driven campus hiring intelligence to predictive analytics for future skills to competency frameworks and accompanied job-role mapping.

“Pre-employment technical assessments, advanced coding simulators and online coding interviews are in huge demand too for hiring software developers, data scientists, data mining professionals, and front-end and back-end developers,” Gupta said. Moreover, with traditional campus hiring getting challenging by the day, companies are adopting a virtual route for their entire process of hiring — selection, screening, interviews, and onboarding. “The end-to-end management of campus hiring processes like building campus intelligence, sorting the campuses, engaging the students with virtual activities, selecting through online assessments, video interviewing, and post-hiring engagement are successfully being done online with the new-age platforms,” Gupta said.

Sector-wise, IT & ITES companies, Automobile, FMCG, eCommerce, Lifesciences, Manufacturing have adopted these new-age technologies for their recruitment needs. “IT/ITes is the biggest chunk of clients taking our assessments,” Gupta said, adding that the total number of candidates proctored in 2020 stood at 8.9 million.

According to Kaushik Banerjee, Vice President and Business Head of Teamlease.com & Freshersworld.com, HR Tech has now made its position strong and is working on some cutting edge technologies to give a better experience and desired output to the HR and Talent Acquisition teams.

When asked if new-age screening practices will be retained by the companies in a post-pandemic world, Banerjee said, “For sure, post-pandemic a layer of personal touch will be added, however, to ensure they respect each other’s time and efforts in commuting – the virtual model will continue”. Digitisation solutions have added proctoring technologies to eliminate undesirable activities, Banerjee said, adding “our pre-assessment solution CEAT, helps recruiters to identify and scrub 85-90 per cent of the talents at one go. Out of over 40k customers, 60-70 per cent are using this facility to identify candidates”.