LinkedIn recently published a fascinating study on the future of hiring – one that includes what talent professionals and hiring managers really think of interviews, one of the fundamental pillars of traditional recruitment.
According to the experts, interviews are a flawed way of assessing soft skills like leadership and adaptability (63%), unable to assess candidate weaknesses (57%) and typically biased (42%) based on charm or charisma. In short, traditional interviews simply can’t evaluate many of the things you will be looking for as you try to find, hire, and retain the best talent. Worse, the information that can be revealed in an interview is often tinged with bias based on appearances, charisma and charm.
Interviews remain a valuable opportunity to meet a candidate and get to know them. However, they don’t effectively evaluate many of the things you should be looking for in a candidate.
To make an informed decision before you make a job offer, consider adding new tools and approaches into your recruitment process. With new technologies on the rise, making them more affordable for SME budgets, here are 5 new interviewing tools that you can consider using to help find top talent.
1. Expand your talent pool with video interviews
Traditional interviews are here to stay and are usually so resource-intensive that few businesses have time to consider other useful tools. Recorded or live video interviews can be a powerful way to accelerate the interview process, reaching more candidates and dramatically lowering your costs.
As a result, you can introduce new tools and techniques without slowing recruitment to a crawl.
2. Automate recruitment with artificial intelligence
Reading CVs and job histories is a needlessly slow process and it is all too easy to miss that perfect candidate in a flood of names. Artificial intelligence helps in two ways: by automatically finding the most relevant candidates and eliminating the risk of human error and overlooking the ideal recruit.
LinkedIn Recruiter is just one of the most popular examples, using artificial intelligence to find candidates and alert you if someone with the right skills is open to new opportunities.
3. Assess vital soft skills online
In a conventional application form/CV and interview process, soft skills are notoriously hard to measure. For the most part, you only see whether a candidate is a good problem-solver, team player, or leader once they join your team. Online assessments are an effective way around this.
Platforms like Pymetrics offer online games that measure cognitive and emotional traits, underpinned by neuroscience. The results of these games are translated into a useful summary that is far more reliable than the self-made claims on an application form – not a replacement for other aspects of recruitment, but a way to get a more complete view.
4. Bring candidates into virtual reality
As the technology matures, virtual reality (VR) looks set to become an increasingly familiar part of recruitment. Major organisations like Lloyds Banking Group are using VR to immerse candidates in customer-facing scenarios as well as games designed to highlight natural behaviours and soft skills.
VR is also a valuable tool in attracting the best, most forward-thinking talent. According to The Guardian, Lloyds Banking Group’s own VR project was a factor in whether candidates accepted the job on offer.
5. Improve candidate communication with a chatbot
Chatbots are a growing tool that is frequently underused. In the earliest stages of recruitment, chatbots can automatically answer quick questions about your role, helping candidates build their understanding of your organisation. However, the possibilities go much further.
Sophisticated chatbots can also be used to analyse large numbers of candidates in real-time, asking them pre-screening questions and even making basic decisions about whether a candidate should proceed to the next stage of the process.
Combine new tools with expert help
It’s a great time to get started with new interview tools to help expand your talent pool. But, before you do, don’t forget the importance of having a clear job specification to make sure you get the right candidate for the role.
If you need any support with your HR responsibilities including defining and writing effective job specifications, Park City can help. As your first step, see how we can handle writing effective job specifications. If you require more support, ask about our Recruitment Consultancy services.
