Phase 3 in Partnership with skeeled – Getting started with predictive hiring

Having the right people with the right skills has become even more important due to the need to transform and digitalise businesses, which has been accelerated by the coronavirus crisis. As such, hiring and retaining top talent is the number one priority for organisations that want to recover, grow and thrive.

Today, organisations can’t really afford to hire the wrong people. Hiring unfit employees can impact businesses at many levels or even cost you your business. However, competing for the best talent has become harder. The pre-existing skills gap many employers are facing has grown wider since the arrival of COVID-19, resulting in companies of different sizes and from different sectors looking for the same type of digital skills.

Thus, to secure top talent and beat your competition you need to up your game. Incorporating predictive analytics into your talent strategy is key to get reliable insights for better-informed candidate attraction, screening, and hiring.

Bringing in a new hire is always a risk and any tool that helps identify a better hiring decision is essential. Predictive hiring technology offers the best approach to improve and boost talent acquisition.

What is predictive hiring?

Predictive hiring is a recruiting technology that improves recruitment outcomes by using data and analytics to recommend best-fit candidates to recruiters and hiring managers.

Unlike traditional hiring practices, which are often based on fleeting resume screenings and the recruiter’s gut feeling during interviews, predictive analytics for hiring leverages historical data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes.

It goes beyond knowing what has happened, providing the best assessment of what will happen in the future. Thus allowing to make predictions about candidates and improve the talent acquisition process through data-driven decision making.

It’s undeniable that using objective data leads to better decision-making. Yet many organisations keep using subjective recruitment methods. Recruiters form a first impression based on a CV, and that impression is adjusted as necessary during one or more job interviews in order to reach a final decision. The result is that both employee and employer sometimes quickly come to the conclusion that there is no match for the long term.

How does predictive hiring improve your talent acquisition?

Predictive hiring improves your talent acquisition process from end-to-end, starting with the distribution of vacancies on job boards as it is also important to make the right choices when promoting your openings to target and attract the right people.
Then, when someone applies, the screening and selection of candidates can be improved with the use of predictive assessments such as personality, motivation and reasoning tests. One-way video interviews can help you get extra qualitative data related to candidates’ soft skills and interview scorecards allow you to develop a structured interview process that is more efficient than the traditional “go with flow” interview techniques.

Finally, all of this data can be used to assess the match between the candidate, the job and the organisation. Instead of making your recruitment process unnecessarily long and complex to get the best candidate, predictive hiring improves the early stages of recruitment to help you identify and engage with the best talent faster. In a candidate-centric job market, this is crucial to secure top talent as the best candidates quickly lose interest and motivation when they realise your hiring process is lengthy.

Business challenges that predictive hiring can tackle

Any organisation needs skilled, experienced and motivated employees to thrive. Otherwise, the business is likely to struggle and lose its competitive advantage. As such, finding and hiring the right people is crucial for business success.

Predictive hiring can help you with challenges such as:

● Faster recruiting process
● Avoiding the cost of bad hires
● Talent shortages
● Removing bias from the process
● Increasing diversity and inclusion

How to get started with predictive hiring

To incorporate predictive hiring into your talent acquisition strategy and make it work, it’s important to:

1. Define what you want to improve

The crucial first step of any successful project is to define what that success looks like. And implementing predictive hiring isn’t any different. Have a think about the biggest issues your organisation is facing at the moment that better hiring decisions will solve. For example, you might have the issue that a lot of new hires are leaving your organisation after a few months. Or you might have a company culture in need of strengthening and need to hire people who fit with your ideal culture.

2. Find the right partner

Understanding the data needed to make an impact and figuring out the best techniques
and algorithms to use is difficult. And it can be expensive to hire data scientists, and other key technical personnel needed to implement a full-scale HR analytics system. However, there’s no need to go for it alone or to do it all at once. Rather than setting up in-house HR analytics teams, most companies choose to engage a vendor who specialises in custom predictive screening and hiring models. Finding a partner that works with you to solve your hiring challenges will significantly cut cost and time to implement.

3. Use predictive hiring as a guide to making better hiring decisions

Predictive hiring tools are very insightful, but they’re not the ultimate solution in itself. Hiring decisions must still be made by recruiters and hiring managers. Hence, personal intuition will not completely disappear, but you will still be more guided by an objective analysis to judge a candidate. This should increase your likelihood of making the right hiring choices. The predictive technology is there to provide valuable, objective data for you to use and substantiate your decision making.

Finding the right technological partner

Choosing a predictive talent acquisition solution can be challenging as there is a myriad of solutions on the market. Hence, there are a few things hiring managers and recruiters must consider when choosing a provider:

– How is the data gathered? Is there a reliable and consistent data input?
– Do they provide a comprehensive talent acquisition solution?
– What kind of software training and support do they provide?
– Can the software be customised according to your company’s changing hiring needs?

Most of all, it is important to work with a partner with deep expertise in both the technology and the talent market. To best leverage predictive analytics, it must be a part of your overall talent acquisition software and not a separate solution. In the war for talent, using the power of data to make better hires, faster is the only way to stay ahead.

To know more about predictive hiring and how it can benefit your talent acquisition, read skeeled’s ebook.