Unimed Caruaru

Helmar Fernandes

When it comes to digital trends in HR, one role has a more sensitive bias: using technology to recruit and hire the best talent.

I would like to explore both sides of this subject: the candidate experience and the recruiter experience. I can do this, because I got the chance to be on both recently. After 15 years recruiting and hiring people for different positions, I decided to find a new opportunity as an employee.

That is when I started my journey as a candidate and here are the lessons I’ve learned:

When I was younger, submitting a resume to apply for a job used to be a handwritten resume delivered in person. (I’m not that old, things have changed very fast). I started myself a career in HR when I was 19. I remember starting to organize applications in a Lotus 123 spreadsheet. It was my first attempt at creating a database of resumes to track the hiring processes in a fast-growing company.

That is when large companies started with the first solutions to receive applications in a single database that should be, at first, capable of collecting data from candidates and optimizing the work of recruiters.

Actually, the first solutions were merely job boards with the function to gather applications without resorting to any screening process. In th e late 1990s, there was an evolution with the first software capable of screening resumes in a digital process based on key words. Some of these solutions are still in the scene. What they did not realize is how painful an ATS could be for a candidate and how many biases a software would have in a screening process. Thorough the 2000s, many other e-recruitment solutions have appeared in the market mainly focused on shortening the screening process, especially in large companies where, even today, there are hundreds of applications for a vacancy, many of them without the prerequisites to be eligible for the job. In this scenario, the ATS was really handy. But we were way too far from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Algorithm-based prediction, and Big Data Analytics.

“Making the application process simple, fast and intuitive is the first step in attracting the best candidates”

The late 2000s dictated a new era in candidate experience. A time when the Applicant Tracking Systems emerged as the perfect solution to automate hiring processes. ATSs like Taleo, SAP SuccessFactor, IBM Brassring, Workday, still are the most popular solutions among leading companies. The question is: are these solutions capable of screening and evaluating the best talent for a job? To what extend should the ATS carry out the recruiter’s work? The truth is that, as the recruiting software has evolved, so has the way we hire people. If ATSs were built to streamline the recruiter’s job, it made the candidate experience painful and frustrating, filling out endless forms for each application with all the information already there on the resume.

Recently, the way to find the best talent has changed, especially among Gen Z. It is no longer important to know where you graduate from college, where you are, whether you’re married or single, black or white, Hispanic or Chinese, cisgender or transgender. On the contrary. We’ve finally figured out that different people, think differently. And this diverse thinking brings new solutions, innovation, and disruption to the way we do everything. These are the skills that are setting a candidate apart.

Fortunately, aware of this reality, the ATSs started to make the application process easier. I will not name any of them , but some solutions were faster in simplifying the process. Just upload your resume or even connect you LinkedIn profile and you’re all set. But most the them still rely on keywords, predefined skills, and so. First, top-trending platforms started to integrate behaviour assessment tools into the software. In my opinion this is the breakthrough in the ATS history. Recently, The best recruitment solutions are using gamification to narrow the candidates pipeline. And now we really have some fantastic tools to help the recruiters in their work.

The biggest challenge is exactly not losing a good candidate just because she lives outside the area, of because it is a wom an who has recently given birth (believe me, some companies still do that).

Making the application process simple, fast and intuitive is the first step in attracting the best candidates. Applying assessment tools, games and tests along the way will help the recruiters focus on the one job they really need to master, in order to find the best candidate: the interview.

Some companies and some ATS solutions are working on chatbots during the early stages of recruiting process. Or even using machine-learning to perform structured interviews. But this is a subject for another article.

If you are a recruiter you know that, these days, it’s all about the candidate experience. There are great solutions to help you in your journey, to speed up the processes, but don’t forget that you are the only person capable of seeing motivation, the sparkle in the eyes, the disposition, and most importantly: how much the candidate matches the culture, the values and dreams of the place where he is Willing to work.