Staffing Industry in 2019 - Role of Technology and Mobile

The current trend in the staffing industry is clearly indicative of the fact that the global staffing industry, as well as the modern recruiters, are increasingly investing in applicant tracking systems and other staffing technology that would help them to increase their efficiency and thereby attracting more candidates. Apart from this the increasing use of mobile optimization for applicant tracking systems and as a candidate engagement tool is truly gaining momentum and is a rising trend in the staffing industry.

The New Face of Global Workforce

The global workforce today is undergoing a tremendous change in its appearance. The change though is very natural as technology innovates with time but it has serious management implications for a business that has employee pool involving an age span of huge chasm which in certain cases is 40 years or more.

Managing such varied age groups is not a small achievement if you consider the differences in skill sets, work habits, employer loyalty, training needs, and the type of IT tools they use. External market factors are also in play an equally important role.

With the technological changing at a rapid pace, information is shared in newer ways and stored in the cloud. Moreover, the advent of social media and the impact of automation are among other influencing factors which might result in workforce unpredictability.

When it comes to the use of software applications for work-related purposes, 51% of Millennials compared to 33% of Boomers report using online/cloud-based tools for word processing/spreadsheets

Workers from the same generation have similar career goals, but they don’t always see the workplace in the same way. Nearly half of Millennials believe stereotypes are at least somewhat of an issue in the workplace compared to fewer than 1 in 3 older workers.

Despite the media coverage of the automation trend, only 1 in 10 workers report actually knowing someone that has lost a job as a result of automation.

Candidate Engagement With Technology

Across generations, men were likely to consider technology more of a significant factor. However, this difference is less pronounced among Millennials. The difference between Millennial men and women when it comes to the significance of technology in choosing a potential employer is 12 percentage points compared to 23 percentage points between Gen X men and women. Following are a few steps of candidate engagement with technology

Identify the problems with your candidate engagement.

What do job seekers perceive as a bad experience? According to various research reports, the top complaints candidates have about the application process are:

An extremely long application
No confirmation email
Long hiring process
Unable to contact a recruiter
No notice when a position is filled

The biggest problems hurting candidate engagement are tied to poor communication, a lack of information, or a time-consuming process.

If you are having a problem with candidate engagement, chances are due to at least one of the issues listed above. However, the best way to identify what’s wrong is to analyze your own application process.

Identifying what’s wrong with your own application process can involve:

Examining your recruiting metrics: what’s the average time spent at each stage?
Assessing your conversion rates: are there significant drop-offs that indicate engagement could be a problem?
Surveying candidates: ask candidates for feedback on what they didn’t like about your application process.

Understand what good candidate engagement looks like

Most of the job seekers seek the following things from the recruiters:

More communication
Notification if passed over
Timeline of the hiring process
Human contact after application
Timeliness of replies

Unsurprisingly, 4 of the top 5 aspects of the hiring process that candidates want to be improved involve better communication.

Again, the best way to figure out how to improve candidate engagement is to identify what’s going on with your own process.

Now we know the issues and what candidates actually want. How do we reconcile this to create better candidate engagement? The solution obviously comes to a good applicant tracking system that ensures better candidate engagement and minimum attrition rate.

Leverage technology for better candidate engagement

One of the major benefits of recruiting technology is the ability to automate repetitive tasks, such as screening or even initial outreach via a recruitment chatbot.

This type of automation frees up recruiters for more value-add tasks around network-building and communication.

Technology can be leveraged to improve candidate engagement for the main problem areas:
How individual workers choose to rate their own tech abilities also falls along generational lines. Across all generational cohorts, a greater proportion of men rated their use of technology as cutting edge compared to women. This finding is consistent with what has been found in previous iterations of this study. However, Millennial women rated themselves higher when it comes to technology utilization when compared to older women.

Mobile Recruiting – Not Just a Fad

Everyone and their mother has a smartphone, tablet or laptop. People were spending up to four nights camping out on Fifth Avenue to get their hands on an iPhone 5, and yet a whopping 98% of Fortune 500 companies still don’t have a mobile optimized application process.

Impact Of Mobile Optimization And ATS In Staffing Industry

ATS is a responsive software that allows a seamless experience between desktop and mobile devices which is optimized for mobile as well.
Candidate Landing Page with a prominent search bar, quick links.
New Search Experience that provides clean and clear job listings with filtering options and social media sharing capabilities.
Job postings that have an instant “apply” and “save” buttons, social media share options, and recommendations for similar jobs.
Apply Process made easy, completely mobile with simple resume upload options and optional sign-in.
Talent networking made easy to gain the ability to save multiple resume versions and create targeted job alerts.