India Inc warming up to the concept of tech-enabled hiring

BANGALORE, INDIA: The ubiquitous use of mobile has changed not only the way we shop and transact, but also the way organisations hire. According to TeamLease Hiring Landscape report, more than 85% of businesses across India use mobile phones for talent acquisition.

The study also reveals that small business seems to be warming up to the concept of mobile based hiring faster than established corporates. More than 44% of the SMEs use mobiles phones for hiring.

Further, the adoption of technology for hiring is not just restricted to usage of mobile phones; there is a growing acceptance for tech tools like analytics and machine-based hiring as well. According to the study, around 77% of the recruiters use the help of technology to fill their manpower requirements.

According to hiring managers, apart from saving the cost, decreasing the time-to-hire period it improves the interview to select ratio, with a 55% increase in interview-to-select proportion. Further, the dependence on technology also helps them to cut down the bias that dominates the traditional hiring system. Machine based hiring offers them a 20-25% higher yield.

Technology usage is not just restricted to searching it is also extensively used in building the employer brand as well. 

Key highlights of the report:

The talent acquisition dilemma faced by managers, for the immediate future, is whether to trust intuition or trust machine intelligence in hiring. Key considerations in this decision are –

1. Yield from Machine-based hiring is seen to be  20% – 25% higher than that of manual hiring
2. Judgment errors caused by short attention spans – 6 seconds (average) spent on perusing a resume, and 5 seconds on just 6 candidate attributes – and bias make manual hiring relatively inferior

Gig work – a formalized version of freelancing – is upending hiring models across the world, with the mobile-internet redefining the value of flexi-hours for both employers and independent workers. And India is very much on the gig economy radar: 3.5 million of the 20 million daily users on freelancer.com are from India

Big data and Predictive Analytics eliminate human bias and time limitations to efficiently solve for matching the right candidates to the right jobs, and automate screening and hiring processes to enable just in time, agile, hiring

1. Progressing to Proactive & Advanced / Predictive Analytics delivers substantial additional business value
2. Benefits from Predictive Analytics: Decreased time-to-hire (25% of the cases), Cost savings (35%) and increased interview-to-select ratio (55%)

Crowd- and social-sourcing are transforming the talent demand-supply equation and, along with the rapid adoption of mobile-social, revolutionizing talent acquisition

1. Professional networks (42% to 50% over 3 years) such as LinkedIn and social networks (32% to 45%) such as Facebook are today’s melting pots of sourcing
2. Popularity of Social media (19%) and referrals (26%) is accelerating
3. Businesses using mobile phones for hiring up from 56% to 85%. Usage fueled by Small businesses (44%)
4. Mobile - an essential component of application (49% of all cases) and Candidate engagement (33%)

A unified Employer-Consumer Brand, with a unified and overarching value proposition, makes for superior long term competitive differentiation and so, has the potential to radically transform talent acquisition

1. Employers adopting this route are putting an enormous amount of faith in mobile-social (35% channel share) to create empowered employees and enhance the overall brand value
2. Bolstered by best practices of tech-enabled talent engagement the unified brand can deliver up to a 33% increase in hiring throughput and a 20% increase in talent longevity

Rituparna Chakraborty, Executive Vice President & Co-Founder, TeamLease Services, said, “The preference and dependence on digitized hiring is rapidly progressing and the corresponding value that the companies derive from them is substantial. New age hiring tools not only provide answers to age old dilemmas like intuition vs machine based intelligence hiring, but big data and predictive analysis eliminates human bias and automates the process to enable agile and effective hiring, especially in the SME and traditional sectors like manufacturing and engineering.”