Recruitment 3.0: Looking Outside The Box

It is a startups’ world; investors are putting up tough questions for leaders of companies on how they plan to hire and retain their top talents. Recruitment, or rather talent acquisition has come a long way and the landscape is changing fast.

Recruitment 1.0 that took place in 90’s was a plain vanilla lateral hiring – post a job and wait for applications to fly in via direct emails or calls to consultants. Candidates were in abundance and talent search was dependent on creating large in-house bank of resumes. Then came Recruitment 2.0 that saw use of online technology like job boards and CV search engines. Both Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 were essentially focusing on active job seekers. The beginning of a new century saw start of a new digital phase – social media as an enabler in growth of passive recruitment. Value created by private recruiting consultants or agencies, so far, was no longer seen as sublime.

It is clear that success in the world of Web 2.0 has stemmed from the understanding of the next generation of the web, the semantic web or web 3.0. Another big aspect of the web 3.0 is this whole concept of sharing economy – people sharing code, answers to queries, personal data and everything to help others.

We are now entering an age of connected data (Big Data, Open Data, Personal Data are all part of the story) and connected people, and if the idea of using the principles of next generation of technologies to win current battles has any weight, we need to ask what defines recruitment 3.0 and how will it shape innovation in the current age of the web?

Recruitment 3.0 combines the benefit of shared internet and smart algorithms – scoring talent and connections against a checklist of trust, culture and skill match.

Recruitment 3.0 is all about leveraging the shared economy benefits combined with robots programmed to understand complex data and examine context besides content from all connected data points including historical, social and personal data related to it from all devices in use viz. mobiles, tablets, laptops, IOT wearables etc. The combination of both forms Recruitment 3.0 .

While at one end there are robust engines to gather social data, the focus is on a technology to enable relationship building and facilitate hiring high potential passive candidates. The technology of social analytics or data science at the backend will prove beneficial in the longer run; it’s the longevity that matters in creating long lasting trustworthy relationships to be able to ‘refer’. The very premise of Recruitment 3.0.

The pool of passive job seekers is where companies can get their maximum talent from; they are in the market open to  job change, but do not register or apply through standard job boards,  and generally reach out to a select group within their own well established networks. They do not actively use job boards and are usually less responsive to cold calls.

It is estimated that in a candidate-deficient market, with a host of companies competing for particular skill-sets, the global war for the best talent is being fought out among 5-6% of active job seekers inferring that 78% of passive candidates relevant for certain roles are not engaged in job searches.

How can companies then justify the rationale of using recruiting agencies or using traditional job boards when the efforts still does not get them the 78% of non-active highly capable talent meant for acquisition.

Recruitment 3.0 also runs on the fundamentals of corporate and employer branding where the internal audience, namely stakeholders, customers and employees,  are the biggest influencer and brand ambassadors who can mobilise best of the resources for a company, only if they volunteer. It is dependent on time and sensitisation about  the requirement, a time consuming and highly human interface dependent task.

Talent pool is shrinking every day. Graduates are considered less skilled. The top ones from premier institues are given  direct managerial roles and within a span of 7-8 years these managers become top executives and again inaccessible for companies to hire. Then there are ‘switches’happening too fast too soon. It is becoming tedious and ever more challenging for companies to either wait for high potential candidates to apply or make attractive propositions to tempt them into submitting a candidature.

Hence at the core of Recruitment 3.0 is that everyone is a candidate including passive job seekers, and the larger goal is to  seek out talents taking into consideration the candidate’s personal behaviour on social web, his networks and trustworthiness other than the basic  skillsets, education and experience. This all can now be analysed to provide insightful data on sought after candidates to companies looking to hire the best fit.

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