As employers look to satisfy their corporate diversity objectives, they often have to balance this with getting a good culture fit within their teams. It’s a fine balance to achieve both and it’s not becoming any easier to achieve in the current challenging climate for human resources and hiring managers.
There seems to be a constant flow of news currently about challenging times for employers finding new talent to replace those that have either resigned of retired during the coronavirus pandemic. This constant stream of news perhaps highlights some of the problems and issues that exist in the recruitment sector as unemployment statistics from most countries would indicate there is sufficient talent available. A trawl through LinkedIn (on an anecdotal basis) reveals plenty of qualified and experienced talent looking for work. Is it the narrow job requirement specifications or fear of cultural fit that is causing this disconnect?
Irrespective of training and understanding of unconscious bias in the recruitment and selection process it cannot be completely eradicated. Added to this maybe an emphasis on only recruiting people who are a good ‘cultural fit’ for a team, recruiters immediately reduce the size of their potential talent pool. A focus on only recruiting talent with the perfect ‘fit’ can lead to a workforce of ‘clones’ where diversity is severely lacking.
Any organisation facing recruitment challenges should probably take a look and review their selection and recruitment processes. Of course, having a good ‘fit’ for the organisation and its teams is a factor but it’s about time this was relegated to a deciding factor of minor importance. With a greater emphasis on being an employer that embraces diversity, open roles can be filled faster and organisations can actually fulfil in reality what is often just ‘policy words’ used in their recruitment copy to satisfy a corporate objective. By reprioritising diversity over ‘fit’ can mean that open roles do not stay unfilled for many months whilst waiting for the ideal ‘fit’ candidate.
Using tech hiring tools can greatly assist in reducing any unconscious bias that exists in human resources teams and among hiring managers. Tech tools allow recruiters to set parameters for open roles that focus on skills, experience and the ability to get a job done. By allowing the technology to rapidly arrive at an accurate shortlist will make the whole process faster and cheaper. Whilst ‘fit’ can still be a consideration it perhaps should be relegated to an optional process at the final interview and assessment stage.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to deliver more efficient recruitment without bias is Hire Digital. A start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management ATS software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.