However, since 2020, digital workplace innovations have boomed and, despite lockdown restrictions coming to an end, many employers are choosing to maintain remote or hybrid working practices.
This means that digital working is here to stay – so, in a world of digital working, how can your recruitment become 100% digital?
Advertising
The labour market is competitive. This means that a proactive approach to recruitment is essential – waiting for candidates to come to you isn’t effective anymore, so you need to make sure that you’re attracting candidates in the right way.
First of all, you’ll need a profile of your ideal candidate – what are their skills, experiences, values? What would they bring to your organisation and what would they want in return? And, very importantly, how might they go about their day-to-day life?
From here, you can think about where these jobs should be advertised. It makes sense that you might not get much response to cleaning jobs on LinkedIn, just as you’re unlikely to recruit senior managers on Indeed, so having a targeted, digital strategy is very important.
Through digital programmatic recruitment platforms, such as Appcast, Perengo or Talentads, you can automatically target your potential candidates – including ‘passive’ candidates, who might not be actively seeking a new role – based on your candidate profile. This means less time spent manually uploading ads to jobs boards and more high quality, appropriate candidates applying for your roles.
Branding
When recruiting digitally, it’s not always easy for potential employees to scout you out and see if you’re a good fit for what they’re after. This means your employer branding needs to be on point.
If you’re using a digital selection process, you also need to have a strong digital presence. This means being active on social media, where your candidates might spend their time, to allow them not only to easily see and experience your business, but communicate and engage with you too.
It also means having a good careers page with solid SEO to make sure anyone looking for or interested in the types of roles you’re offering can find you easily. Include words and terms that your target audience will search for, and make sure you’re including lots of photo, video and testimonial content to help your candidates picture themselves working with you.
A strong careers page can also be a great way of developing a talent pool – potential future employees who have expressed an interest in working with you. By asking for key information, such as specialist skills and experiences, or what roles might particularly interest them, you can directly market your new opportunities to an existing group of motivated people.
Applying
Whether you’re expecting tens, hundreds or even thousands of applications, the application process is incredibly important.
Digitising your recruitment process is all about making it simpler and more efficient for everyone involved, so a good application form on your website can do wonders for streamlining your process.
Rather than managing an inbox full of attached CVs and cover letters, an online form can gather consistent information from all candidates and feed directly into your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or CRM, saving you valuable time downloading, saving and adjusting to the varying formats of CVs on offer.
You can also integrate Situational Judgement Tests (SJT) into your application process to help candidates understand exactly what the role might entail, and also help you shortlist top talent from those less suitable.
A swish form also gives you more opportunity to establish your employer brand – pop in some testimonials, videos and photos to keep your candidates engaged and help them get more excited about the prospect of working with you.
Shortlisting
An ATS can even help you streamline your shortlisting process.
By looking at keywords or essential qualifications in applications, an ATS can filter out less qualified candidates, which is particularly helpful for employers who receive large quantities of applications.
By integrating matching technology into your application process, you can also automatically score some elements of candidates’ applications to help you select the top prospective employees numerically and sometimes without bias.
An important point to consider, however, is that under UK GDPR law, candidates have the right to be assessed with human intervention, which means that purely automating your shortlisting process could land you in hot water. So it’s important that, if you’re using automated systems to help narrow down your candidates, there’s a person there checking that the people who haven’t been successful have been discounted for legitimate reasons.
Interviewing
Virtual interviews can be real time-savers in the recruitment process – and can be much simpler to coordinate and manage. Without having to get different staff from different offices into the same room for a whole day, digital interviews can make the whole process much more flexible.
You might consider introducing pre-recorded video interviews, where candidates are filmed in their own time answering questions on their own. They don’t need to be long but can help narrow down those shortlisted and identify the higher quality candidates before investing large amounts of time on face-to-face interviews.
And on the main interviews themselves, conducting videos over Zoom or Teams can make the process not only more straightforward to manage but also more inclusive – for example, candidates with physical impairments can participate without bias, neurodivergent candidates can manage their own environment to give their best, and candidates from lower-income households don’t need to worry quite so much about looking the part in an expensive suit.
Another digital practice can be allowing candidates to self-schedule interviews. Using tools like Doodle Poll can provide your candidates with flexible time and date options, meaning less time and pressure rescheduling interviews for those who can’t make their given time and – better yet – less drop out from qualified candidates at this stage.
Communicating
One of the biggest challenges in recruitment, particularly for roles that attract a lot of candidates, is keeping in touch with candidates.
It’s quite common for candidates to get the standard response: ‘Due to the number of applications we receive, we are unable to provide feedback to all candidates. If you have not heard from us by two weeks after the closing date, assume you have been unsuccessful.’
This seems like an easy way of managing communications – only get back to the handful of candidates you’re interested in and save yourself time.
However, this has the potential to alienate future talent – just because they’re not right for the position right now, it doesn’t mean they might not be in the future! So keeping in touch with all of your candidates is essential for maintaining your employer brand.
The good thing is that, with an ATS, you can schedule these communications automatically, so you can still save yourself the time whilst keeping your candidates informed. It’s always better to know you’ve been unsuccessful than to be left assuming.
You can also schedule communications at each point of the recruitment process to keep your candidates in the loop, from receipt of an application to job offer.
Pre-Employment Screening
Once you’ve made your hire, don’t forget about the all-important pre-screening of your new employees.
Whether you’re hiring one or 100 new employees a year, at Reed Screening we want to make it easy to bring the right people on board. We have extensive experience working with medium and large enterprises who recruit more than 50 new employees every year. Currently, we work with clients that have more than 800 new starters every month that all require a high level of screening. In 2021 we screened more than 120,000 candidates.
Our experience can help you understand the specific requirements you need when undertaking employment screening, specific to the industry you work in.
To find out how we can support you with your recruitment through pre-employment screening, get in touch and take a look at our range of on-demand screening packages.