Recruitment

Recruitment: Effective hiring in the digital age

Beef Central, 15/06/2018

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Labour recruitment - Copy

 

ASK any agribusiness about its top challenges for 2018 — the odds are good that recruiting and retaining staff are somewhere towards the top of that list.

Smart businesses operating somewhere along the beef supply chain know that they’re only as good as their best workers, and will prioritise seeking-out the best-of-the-best for their operations. That applies regardless of whether they are employing only one or two staff on a grazing property, or 30 in a large feedlot.

As technology continues to evolve, it plays an increasingly important role in the way companies approach the talent search and the hiring process. Managers or business owners looking to hire new staff need to stay ahead of the future of recruiting and keep up-to-date with what’s on the horizon.

Cost is another significant factor for the shift into the digital space. Legacy print media ads aren’t cheap, especially if an ad contains detail. Online options, including a link to a full job description, can be a fraction of the price.

It’s all about digital

When LinkedIn and industry-specific online job listings first began to gain traction, they were seen as supplements to the traditional paper resume and in-person interview. Today, the world of recruiting has gone nearly 100pc digital.

From the resume to the search to the interview, Australian agribusiness is moving towards a digital hiring model. Moving forward, the traditional written ‘resume’ will be displaced by constantly evolving representations of individual experiences, skills and aptitudes that exist purely in the digital realm.

Digital profiles can provide far more insight into a candidate, with greater currency, than a traditional resume can, and many recruiters now realised that.

Twenty years ago, a resume was a piece of paper. Now, it’s a collection of all candidate data that can be found online, like social media profiles, participation in online communities, conferences and meet-ups. Employers looking at candidates can learn a lot about whether a person will fit, and learn if he or she has the right skills for a job from their online profile.

For out-of-area candidates and first-round interviews, the phone call is quickly being replaced by the more high-tech skype video interview. An increasing number of employers are leveraging webcam and video interviews to streamline the hiring process.

Today’s job seekers know their worth and are aware of the competitive landscape. They see opportunities everywhere, and if one employer takes too long to respond or makes it difficult to apply, they’ll quickly pass it up for another job opening.

Modern recruiting is already here, and is not going anywhere, so managers need to learn to embrace it and not get left behind.

Here are some ways to keep up-to-speed:

Invest in an online recruitment platform

A common hurdle in the digital age of recruiting is not making the application process fast or easy enough for candidates. One way to address this is by using recruitment technologies that include candidate job portals, employee on-boarding and off-boarding portals, and specialty tools that foster sourcing via job boards and employee referral networks. These integrated platforms are more cost-effective and enable the collaborative hiring of top talent employees. These can all be integrated with your current websites or simply creating a ‘Work for us’ page on your website — just make the process engaging and simple.

Your ‘employment brand’ is a key selling point

Savvy candidates will evaluate company brands before applying for or accepting a job, much in the same way they evaluate their grocery brands when shopping. Savvy candidates will be researching you as much as you’re researching them, so make your website a strong tool for engaging talent.

Company websites are a top job hunting-source for candidates. These business ‘shop-fronts’ serve as a one-stop shop where job hunting begins. So regardless of your beef business’s size, it’s imperative to have a well-designed website to deliver a cohesive brand image that reflects your business’s mission, vision and values. The company brand experience, in combination with detailed job descriptions and an online application, engages job-seekers and helps them determine proactively if they are a cultural fit to the organisation, and whether to apply.

Employers need to focus on passive candidates

As the number of Generation Y — and soon, Gen Z — workers continues to increase, hiring managers have learned that these employees’ expectations about the hiring process differ from those of older generations.

This generation is raised on technology, and many millennials do not accept the old-fashioned legacy concepts of recruiting and work. To be effective and attract them to work for your business, managers are going to need to engage Gen Y and Z candidates in new ways.

This is especially true of passive candidates — individuals who are not necessarily seeking a job, but are open to new opportunities. While some employers have no shortage of applicants who reach-out as soon as an opportunity is posted, this is no longer the norm for most companies.

Today, it is far more important for a hiring manager to be proactive when finding candidates, and they can do this through social media and anywhere else they have a web presence, since today’s candidates expect employers to search for them and take their online branding and positioning very seriously.

Data analytics are getting more sophisticated

The use of social networks and other digital profiles as candidate search tools has opened up a much wider talent pool for recruiters to draw from, but the time it takes to do that research could end up taking hiring managers away from their most important task: actually hiring.

The next trend will be not just sourcing social and mobile recruiting data, but actually applying intelligence to summarising the important information from the candidate’s social presence and also resume.

High-quality analytics programs already have been applied to customer data to help businesses make better strategic decisions. Candidate information will increasingly get the big-data treatment, so hiring managers can quickly and easily locate the best people for the job.

Data analytics may even help recruiters discover which passive candidates are better to approach.

One of the ways big data is impacting recruiting is around using social data to identify people who are more likely to be open to new opportunities. Tools can use people’s online public footprint to help predict when they might be ready to leave an employer and seek a new job.

While digital tools will never fully replace the human instinct necessary for identifying the right candidates, an ability to stay on top of technological trends could be a recruiter’s biggest advantage going forward.

 

Source: Meat Processors Pty Ltd.

 

 

 

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