It is Time for the Recruitment Industry to Catch up With the Technological Boom It's a shame to witness that $350 billion worth of recruitment industry market can be so fragmented

While digital, technology and the cloud services are creating a breakthrough in every single sector you can think of, the recruitment industry still works the same as it used to in the 1960s

We are in the era of Instant coffee, paperless mortgages, meatless meat, voice-based virtual assistants, surgeries being performed virtually on patients, drone-based deliveries, augmented reality, AI-driven shopping experiences, staff-less supermarkets and driverless cars, but the recruitment process, unfortunately, seems to still work on old-school principles.

In the current state of the industry, Job-boards, recruitment agencies and pre-employment verification agencies form the 3 pillars of recruitment. This is how traditional recruitment has happened in the past and has not witnessed much of a change, although all the industries around us have been going through mind-blowing transformations and technological break-through.

Not Coping in With the Past

Traditionally, employers have always provided job specifications to external agencies, or advertise directly on job boards and candidates looking for jobs are either cold-called by agencies or they apply for jobs on job boards. The job description often moves from one hand to another, often incorrectly interpreted when it changes hands and ultimately gets advertised on the web incorrectly and attracts a bunch of talents who may not be the best fit. Different recruitment consultants decode and execute the requirements differently. The common practice is to match keywords while finding candidates in the market, this is so outdated and inefficient way of sourcing. In traditional methods of sourcing candidates, a lot of significant information is overlooked and eventually, the data loses its original intent, tone and the completeness. The real job role that the job-seeker will eventually end up doing may be completely different than how it gets initially advertised.

It's extremely sad to see that one of the world's biggest sectors (manpower and human resource) which is considered the centre of all other sectors is still hanging round in limbo.

What Should an Ideal Recruitment Practice Look Like?

It's a shame to witness that 350 billion USD worth of recruitment industry market can be so fragmented, disjointed and weak. It is still a very much employer-driven market and candidates have less or fewer choices when it comes to their next roles. As they say that good people make good companies, the practices formulated should be candidate-centric and the market must move towards a more candidate empowered zone. A self-motivated, driven and passionate workforce is the key factor in driving the business and making all the difference.

In this era of technological transformation, there is a compelling need for a single solution that not only understands the pulse of the employers like a human-driven recruitment agency but also has all the underlying technology to take both the employer and candidates on a digital journey. There is a need to bring a greater degree of fairness, and transparency in talent selection, greater visibility on the actual job specs and higher accountability with advanced levels of control on the hiring process and effective matchmaking.

This is What Needs to be Done

One must take a holistic approach to bring changes to this sector, there is a need to bring one single integrated system that can provide the end to end hiring solution to companies without employers having to deploy a number of fragmented solutions to make things work for them.

The integrated solution must be a cloud-driven candidate-centric sourcing system that should eliminate the necessity to read or procure long CVs but provide an opportunity for employers to make very quick decisions on the potential of a job-seeker before deciding to engage with them over a coffee. The solution must provide the same level of human touch to the sourcing side like an agency but must integrate with the market-leading Google search solutions like Google's cloud job discovery search and other similar cloud enable search solutions which can help employers seamlessly draw millions of job seekers' attention in one go.

Technology cannot solve everything, employers also need a sophisticated team of recruitment consultants who can leverage this technology framework and source candidates who otherwise are passive and not really up for a change.

Also, there is a massive need of this kind of integrated solutions that can not only help companies discover candidates and potential talents but also provide the end hiring managers with complete real-time visibility of the person's joining formalities, pre-employment check status, and onboarding status. Often, additionally, the solution may demand to provide those extra bits of bells and whistles like the ability to process payroll, provide online appraisals and 360degree employee feedback and online timesheets, online invoicing and online expense reports.