COVID-19 has altered the IT industry’s lens to recruitment. Traditional staffing practices that were relevant six months earlier no longer hold appreciative value. Presently, in the overwhelmingly tumultuous times that we are in, the IT industry is aggressively emerging as the reviving backbone of the nation’s economy. If channelized appropriately, the IT industry has the innate potential to accommodate remote working conditions as the “new normal” and promote renewed targets like never before. With significantly higher application rates, the advent of novel recruitment technologies must evolve parallel to staffing trends. In business parlance, “disruption” is regarded as a positive force. It is a technical term typically attributed to innovative practices that create new markets and new value. “Positive disruption,” by extension, is, therefore, an industry’s competence to continually reinvent its brand value. By embracing this ideology of “positive disruption” and embracing the staffing trends of 2021, competitors in the IT industry can align their existing practices with more relevant insights to better achieve their vision.

 

Top Staffing Trends

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered recruitment

AI is gradually being leveraged in staffing practices to streamline and automate manual workflow processes and achieve predictive analytics. Considering AI has the potential to sift through enormous volumes of varying data at high velocity, organizations choosing to recruit are increasingly using AI to identify their ideal candidate pool. In 2021, despite potential recruiters retaining their team size, it is expected that there will be a monumental increase in hiring volume. Therefore, recruiters will be expected to do a lot more with less.

  • One way in which AI can facilitate staffing practices is via online application management. Since applicant tracking recruiter databases are rich in keywords and data points, AI helps recruiters sort and analyze thousands of resumes with ease, subsequently reducing the hiring time and speeding up the selection process.
  • AI promises quality of hire. This lies in its ability to use inputted data to standardize and match a candidate’s experience, knowledge, and skills with a particular profile’s requirements. This integration of analytics is predicted to ensure happier, more productive employees who are less likely to turnover.
  • Additionally, AI-powered-recruiter chatbots integrated seamlessly into the current recruiting stack will help establish real-time interactions with interested candidates. Advanced chatbots like Mya engage in conversation and analyze a candidate’s response using Natural Language Processing for particular biometric and psychometric changes such as body language, voice modulation, eye movement, facial micro-expressions, and speech flows.

 

Use of Digitized Communication Tools

A study by Hays Group revealed that only 75% of candidates complete the process of the total applicant pool. The remaining 25% tend to become disinterested either over a complex procedure or an application that is too long. Within staffing practices, video interviewing is quickly emerging as an effective alternative to face-to-face interactions. Typically, video interviews can be classified as asynchronous (one-way) and synchronous (two-way) video interviews. Having a standardized video interview process helps determine a candidate’s soft skills, eliminates instances of unconscious hiring bias and helps recruiters gain a rich repository of qualitative data to gauge a candidate’s fit. With digitized communication tools, candidate experience is evolving as a critical goal of inbound recruiting and recruiting marketing strategy.

 

Accelerating Mobile Recruitment

According to this staffing trend, there is a growing need for recruiters to create mobile-friendly job listings. According to a recruitment trends report developed by Glassdoor, 89% of job seekers reported their mobile device as an essential job-searching tool, of which 45% revealed using their mobile devices at least once a day to search for a job. Furthermore, at this particular juncture, it is important to iterate that mobile devices and social media go hand in hand. Therefore, a mobile-friendly recruitment experience is essential, but a mobile-friendly social media-driven recruitment experience. These include traditional platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to upcoming channels such as Bumble Bizz, which offers customized network basis the platform’s geolocation feature.

 

Gamification

Gamification is the use of fun, highly engaging, interactive gaming, such as challenges, quizzes, or behavioral evaluations, as a part of the overall recruitment process. It serves as an effective metric of problem-solving, aptitude, cognitive flexibility, and critical thinking and also contributes to the organization’s overall positive image. Generic job interviews no longer yield favorable results and are often futile at accurately assessing a candidate’s true potential. An innovative concept to break this barrier of familiarity and preparedness is gamification. For instance, Google Code Jam is an annual coding competition to recruit talented coders. Domino’s Pizza Mogul invites potential candidates to create their dream pizza. As part of the game My Marriott Hotel, candidates can virtually run the hotel, after which they are redirected to the job application page when they click on the “Do it for Real” button.

 

Summing Up

The IT industry has been continually evolving. However, post-COVID staffing policies will intrinsically depend on how swiftly organizations can shift from traditional to digital. It will be survival of the fittest, or rather, the survival of the most digitized. Organizations that willingly undergo a digital transformation will still afloat and on top of the game.