Vision 2025: The Future
of Recruitment

Introduction

Skillate recently concluded “Vision 2025 - Recruitment in 5 years.” A virtual meetup, with the industry’s stalwarts. More than 30 veterans of the industry shared their experiences, learnings, and their views on the future of recruitment.

The event was attended by more than 2,400 recruitment professionals from all over the world, who listened to the discussions, asked questions, and answered surveys and poll questions related to the recruitment industry.

Not only the event turned out to be a great global platform for recruitment industry professionals, but it also provided us with insights about the current trends and practices prevalent in the recruitment industry throughout the world. We also understood the perception of how things can change in the recruitment industry in the near future and how recruiting professionals can be ready for the change.

With these learnings in mind, we present to you the report - VISION 2025: The Future of Recruitment.

Process

Number of participants :     2400+

The medium of the questions asked :      In-webinar polls to audience and panelists. Email surveys and open questions sent to all registered participants.

Prof ile of the participants :      HR professionals from all over the world. Mostly mid to upper management leaders.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

Based on the discussion with:

Dr. C. Jayakumar

Vice President & Head,
Corporate Human Resources
at Larsen & Toubro

Mohit Sharma

Head of Talent Acquisition
at Societe Generale Global
Solution Centre

Upasana Butta

Lead Lateral Hiring (Talent
Acquisition) at Hero MotoCorp
Ltd.

Mass hiring has already changed a lot over the years. From the days of post box and newspapers, to emails, and now finally to hiring via multiple digital platforms - mass hiring is providing new opportunities and new challenges.

What Are The Challenges Of Mass Hiring?

• Too Many Platforms

  When it comes to bulk hiring, recruiters often feel that there are too many platforms to source candidates. This leads to confusing processes and repetition of applications. A central repository that can bring all these applications to a single platform with a dashboard to monitor can be a game-changer for recruiters.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

• Missing Human Aspect

  The biggest challenge as evident from the poll is getting the candidate to open up. Any process that requires human emotions - feedback, interview experience, overall candidate experience is creating challenges for recruiters. AI and technology, in general, can be a big savior in such situations. Taking feedback, providing transparency through data, and making processes better in the future is where AI is playing a major role.

• Internet-less Regions

  When hiring for blue-collar jobs, a lot of times the candidates are from a rural region without proper internet access. Taking video interviews or assessing via online tests becomes a major issue here. Sending mass-level SMSs on making the hiring process telephone-centric can be of great help in such cases.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

• Systems Working In Silos

  There are a lot of recruitment tools in the market solving a lot of recruitment issues. However, what our industry lacks is a single tool that can take care of end-to-end processes. Tools that either take care of all recruitment processes or integrate smoothly with the existing system can help the recruitment industry immensely.

• Too Much Manual Work

  With departments working separately, recruiters are having to spend a majority of their time coordinating between stakeholders. In such a situation any tool that can automate the existing processes - for example - AI chatbots for sourcing, automatic calendar booking, smart resume extraction, and triggers for communication can all provide great value to recruiters.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

How Can Recruiters Manage Campus Recruitments In A Pandemic?

Here are some of the ways recruiters are managing hiring:

• Remote processes

  First things first, remote interviews and assignments have been the major saving grace for recruiters. Even resume parsers, that can scan through thousands of resumes in minutes have been helpful in shortlisting candidates.

• Proctoring devices

  A major problem with remote hiring is the danger of fraudulent interviews. Proctoring devices that can ensure the legibility of the process has been a great help in this regard. Some of the devices even convey the confidence score of the candidate in question. Intuitive gamification platforms for assessments are the other current rage.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

• Start the process early

  Rather than waiting for the student to be in the final year and for the college to officially begin their placement season, a lot of companies are approaching students early - sometimes as early as a year before the final placements. This not only allows companies to get the best pick of candidates, but it also allows them to have a training period so that the students are all set for working once they join the organization.

• Personalized communication

  A lot of companies have realized that the first job for a candidate can be an even bigger deal for their family. Few companies send out personalized emails and video calls to the parents of the candidates and congratulate them! This builds a relationship of trust and connection that increases the chance of the candidate joining the company.

Challenges Of Mass Hiring While Working Remotely

The Road Ahead For Bulk Remote Hiring

The future of bulk-hiring is an integrated tool of recruitment; something that starts operating at the sourcing stage and takes care of every process till the candidate is successfully onboard.

Another major change can be coordination. Panel members when working separately need to communicate with each other. Taking every member's views and opinions can be a task.

Hybrid models where firms use modern technology, as well as partner with local staffing agencies where needed, can be the future of bulk-hiring.

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

Based on the discussion with:

Vishwanadh Raju

Head - India Talent Acquisition
at Dun & Bradstreet

Aparna Srikanth

Director - Human Resources,
Appsian

Dimple Kaloya

Head of HR Consulting, HSBC
Global Operations, Services
and Technology Centers

Savita Hortikar

Head of Talent Acquisition -
India at ThoughtWorks

Prabhanjan Prasoon

Head- Talent Acquisition
(IT & Enablement) at
Sopra Steria

Aditya Pal Singh

Director Head Talent
Acquisition at Informatica

Even though AI has been the watchword for recruitment automation over the past few years, it is also fast becoming notorious as the latest fad. When everyone is offering an AI solution for everything, the unavoidable question becomes - "How much of AI do we need?"

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

The other integral question is that if AI automates the current human functions, won’t it be replacing mankind in the near future? Here is what the experts had to say:

Is AI Just A Fad?

Depends on the organization and how they use it. At worst, AI can just be the new shiny toy that organizations use to show-off their technology prowess. More often than not this can lead to more complications and sub-par return on investment.

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

At its best though, AI can be the tool that frees recruiters for the more productive work. Recruiters can thus focus on areas like candidate experience and employer branding. Used optimally, AI can add efficiency to the end-to-end processes of recruitment. Here is how it can help:

• Engaging Job Descriptions

  Previously, JDs were simply a laundry list of required skills given by the hiring manager. Now, with a candidate-driven market, it is important that not only the JDs are exhaustive, but they also ‘talk’ to the candidates. AI-backed JD assistants can provide real-time feedback to the recruiter. The system helps in writing more robust and detailed job descriptions which can in return entice the best candidates. Few AI tools can even navigate through the existing collaterals of the organization - blogs and press releases, and ensure that the JDs maintain the same tonality of communication.

• Sourcing Passive Candidates

  In today’s world, every working professional is a candidate, whether passive or active. According to LinkedIn, 70% of candidates are passive, i.e., even though they are not looking for a job, they are always open to switching roles if the right offer comes in. AI-powered chatbots can reach out to passive candidates and convert them into active job seekers.

  A few tools even track the social footprints of candidates to ensure that he or she is the right cultural fit.

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

• Automated Screening

  AI chatbot automatically screens the candidates for the first round. It takes responses from candidates to discover ‘information beyond resumes.’ (ex: notice period, intent to relocate, work contracts, etc). This leads to elimination of pre-screening calls which saves valuable time for recruiters.

• Advanced Resume Parsing

  Scanning through thousands of resumes for every open role, can be a tedious and frankly, an impossible task for most recruiters. Deep learning-based parsers can extract information from the most complex resumes. Modern Resume parsers integrate with the careers page to ensure that candidates don’t have to fill in the same information time and again, even after submitting their resumes.

• Smart Matching

  AI-backed matching is way beyond the traditional keyword matching. The Deep learning algorithms understand the context behind each word in a resume. They also provide AI-powered ranking and can process thousands of applications in a matter of minutes.

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

• Automated Interview Scheduling

  The modern system can block the calendar of the recruiter and the hiring manager to automate the process of scheduling and rescheduling and minimize hassle.

• Insightful Analytics

  Modern recruitment software provides an in-depth analysis of a company’s hiring trends and provides analytics based on location, experience, education, past companies, and skills.

With so many functionalities, it is no wonder that our respondents upheld the potential of AI:

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

AI Can Help HR Add Business Value

HR today is not seen as just a support function to businesses. HR today is defined by the business value it generates. Speed and time is of essence to every business leader in making decisions. AI will not only bring transparency to the system, but would also provide measurable metrics that could quantify the success of HR from a business point of view.

HR also needs to figure out the different ways to measure these metrics. To understand the effectiveness of employer branding by using social media listening tools. Tracking metrics like Talent brand index from LinkedIn (percent of people who know about your company that also express an interest.), and traction on messaging from company leaders can be some of the effective ways of measuring employer branding success.

In terms of employee satisfaction index - internal surveys with open-ended questions can be the best way to understand employee emotions.

Is AI In Recruitment Minimizing Humans Or Empowering Humans?

The Road Ahead

Expect most jobs to become a hybrid of AI capabilities and human intuitions. Rather than replacing humans, AI will use the power of data to empower humans in decision-making. AI would have a lot more context and would know the various stakeholders and their needs involved in a business decision.

Another way, technology can change the game is by integrating various small processes to create end-to-end automated systems. The existing massive cloud technology has only catered to major business needs, without taking care of the finer, smaller process-based nuances that go into the day-to-day functionality of recruitment.

A lot of future AI would be about predictive analytics. We already have tools that can analyze the past history and behavior of candidates to predict the culture fit and success rate in an organization. With technology making recruitment a service, expect organizations to demand prediction of success and failures from recruitment technology.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

Based on the discussion with:

Rochelle Noone, MS

Vice President of
Human Resources,
Diversity & Inclusion

Naveen Narayanan

MD - Human Capital
Consulting, Solutions &
Transformation

Kathy J. Goss

Diversity & Talent Practice
Leader at Chicago Trading
Company

Jimi Vaughn

Vice President,
Diversity & Engagement
at Company 3

Amie Kelson

Head of Change Management,
Communication and Training
Company, Walmart eCommerce

Susan Schmidlkofer

SPHR - Global Director of
Diversity and Inclusion at UPS

An age-old problem that has become a recent phenomenon for recruiters all over the world, diversity and inclusion is perhaps at the top of the mind of most recruiters.

In the US 44.2% of millennials classifying themselves as non-white, while being 16% more diverse than baby boomers. In such circumstances, it becomes clear that Diversity and Inclusion are not just ethical issues, but will have a major business impact in the near and long-term future.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

What Does Diversity Bring To An Organization?

Diversity brings More ideas, more angles, more innovation, and different experiences to the table. Exposing your procedures to people from different cultures makes an organization more robust and agile.

How Can Organizations ‘Manage Diversity’?

Companies often talk about ‘managing diversity’. More often than not this means hitting their ‘diversity hiring’ targets, retaining diverse employees, and getting a better inclusion score in a random survey.

Diversity cannot be managed but cultivated. The culture of D&I needs to be run throughout the organization.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

What’s The Biggest Mistake Organizations Make When It Comes To Diversity And Inclusion?

Following are the biggest mistakes when in the field of diversity and inclusion:

• Believing there is one silver bullet

  There is no single point of problem or solution for D&I. Diversity is about providing a level playing field and different organizations might have to fill in different holes in order to facilitate that.

• Underestimating the problem

  Companies often assign the D&I problem to a separate ‘diversity group’ in the organization. Or at best, inclusion is supposed to be taken care of by the HR department. D&I is an issue that is often prevalent through all departments and levels of the organization - from upper management to the grassroots employees, from the technical department to client-facing roles. Till every person in the organization is trained to face the D&I issue, organizations won’t make sustainable progress on this front.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

• Depending too much on motivation

  Often when a crisis comes up, or a D&I campaign is done in an organization, all of the upper management is pumped up to put in efforts in this direction. However, once the dust settles in, and the issue is no longer as highlighted, all efforts cease to exist. Organizations need to strike when the iron is hot and make processes and systems when the motivation is high. Documenting processes would mean that the management can be held accountable even when the motivation dries out.

• Limiting ‘diversity talent’ from ivy league schools:

  Top organizations often identify a school or a set of schools with a record of producing stellar ‘diversity candidates.’ However, such behaviors not only show prejudice towards certain institutions but it also deprives organizations of some of the best diversity talents out there. Until organizations keep an open mind about giving chances to candidates from all kinds of institutions, they will find it hard to find quality candidates for ‘diversity hiring.’

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

• Thinking of inclusion on popular terms

  When it comes to inclusion, organizations often think of minorities or LGBT groups. However, if a person becomes a father, his lifestyle might change dramatically and he might need his team’s support to still make him feel included. Inclusion goes way beyond the popular terms and analogies used by mainstream media.

• Non inclusive JDs

  A lot of JDs today use terms like rockstars and hustlers. Studies have shown that such terminology often attracts more male candidates than females. Using more inclusive language in JDs can be a starting point in diversity recruitment.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

What Can Diverse Candidates Do To Be Successful?

The problem often is not the diversity of the candidate but the lack of it. Recruiters often find that the candidate they hired for their different views and opinions is now echoing the traditional traits shown by leaders in their position. For example - Female employees often try to show analytical prowess rather than emotional intelligence as they believe showing emotions might make them perceived as weak.

What Metrics Can Recruiters Track To Improve D&I?

It’s a lot easier to measure diversity than it is to measure inclusion. For diversity though, organizations need to be careful that not only the number of hires, but their success - that is promotions and attritions need to be measured.

For inclusion, newer metrics like ‘Belonging Index’ have come that measure how happy and inclusive a workplace is. However, open-ended internal surveys can help measure inclusivity in a much more comprehensive way.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

Can Smaller Organisations Focus On D&I

D&I is not just a good to have for organisations. Organizations with a diverse workforce have a straight impact on the profitability of the organization. In such situation, it is imperative that smaller organizations too focus on inclusion and diversity.

Even though smaller organizations often don’t have a diversity dashboard and their D&I department is understaffed, recruiters often can make a much bigger impact in the diversity and inclusion aspect in a smaller organization, than they can in a larger one. Hiring 3-4 female engineers can completely change the ratio of diversity in the tech team in a startup, whereas the same would have negligible impact in a larger organization.

Inclusion & Diversity: Practical Course Of Action For Enterprises

The Road Ahead

The idea will be to bring equity in performance management. AI software that can tell if there was a bias in a certain promotion decision can be the future of D&I. Technology can mitigate existing human biases by automating few processes or blocking out bias-provoking information. For example - Modern systems can hide Personally Identifiable Information from resumes so that candidates are shortlisted on the basis of merit only. Some software also identify the various small nuances that contribute towards biases. Emotion Recognition software can identify the decisions that are susceptible to decision bias.

Even with modern tools enabling recruiters, organizations first need to start with creating robust systems that can stand the test of time. Organizations working as a whole in the fight against diversity are more likely to win the battle of D&I in the future.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

Based on the discussion with:

Shivani Popat

VP - Human Resources
at Genpact

Dr. Saumya Badgayan

General Manager - Corporate
Strategy, HR AND IR,
Gold Star Jewellery Pvt Ltd

Nikhil Joseph

Practice Lead - Talent
Acquisition, Infosys

With the coronavirus pandemic, remote hiring became the new norm. Suddenly, an activity that was specific to a certain set of recruiters and candidates became common for all systems of recruitment.

With such changes taking place so quickly, a lot of recruiters are facing issues in hiring and retaining top talent.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

What Is The Difference Between Remote and In-person Hiring?

The important thing for recruiters to understand is that the fundamentals of hiring remain the same. Recruiters still need to source the best candidates, delight them with candidate experience, set up amazing interview processes and then provide a smooth onboarding program to maximize the chance of success of a candidate.

The processes now though have to be coordinated more thoroughly. Without the luxury of the same-space availability of hiring managers, candidates, and the recruiting team - recruiters need to up their game in the coordination space to ensure smooth processes. More diligence in processes like background checks and the interview environment is also the novelty of remote hiring. Experts believe that most of these procedures will smoothen out automatically as recruiting teams and organizations get used to working remotely.

Which tools help recruiters the most in remote hiring?

Even though the advancement of technology has provided a plethora of tools for every process- from sourcing to interviews, to the onboarding experience; a system that can take care of the end-to-end recruitment process can be god-sent for recruiters at this time. At a time, when departments are forced to work in silos, a tool that smoothly takes care of A to Z of recruitment can be a game-changer.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

Do you believe employees are less motivated in a remote environment?

As in the case of an in-person office, it depends on the department and the individual. Largely speaking, remote work has not shown any ill-effects in terms of motivation and productivity of employees. However, at times executives whose KPIs are based on coordination have found it tougher, to begin with.

Managers too are still learning to not micromanage just like employees are learning to work with self-motivation. Expect this to become the norm as both managers and employees get used to working separately.

Is remote work here to stay?

Largely, Yes. The idea of saving costs for both employees and organizations, no travel, and working in pajamas are too good for employees to leave so soon. It would not be absurd to believe that 80% of the current functions will continue to operate remotely even after normalcy resumes. The idea of a ‘headquarters’ for an organization will cease to exist, and decisions will be made from the living rooms of employees.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

How difficult is it to work as a remote recruiter?

The onus is on the organizations to ensure that remote recruiters imbibe the culture of the company. The systems and tools that organizations follow should allow easy adoption for remote recruiters.

Once organizations focus more on the recruiter’s skills rather than the location, organizations can get better diversity in their recruiting team - more women, people with disabilities all will be more attracted. The gig economy can be another avenue that can be exploited for recruiting purposes.

How can remote work provide employee satisfaction?

We all work for the claps, but what happens, when those claps can no longer be heard. Organizations need to understand that humans are social beings and interacting and being appreciated publically is one of the major needs of the workspace. To adjust to the remote environment, organizations can follow a hybrid model - where good work is appreciated in front of everyone virtually, but a physical moment - let’s say - a letter of appreciation is also provided to the employee. Such a hybrid model can be the blueprint of future employee satisfaction programs.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

What are the challenges of remote recruiting?

Following are some of the challenges faced by recruiters during remote hiring:

• Fraudulent activities

  Someone else giving interviews, lip-syncing answers, dodgy background papers.

• Never-ending working hours

  With recruiters working remotely and across time zones, it becomes difficult for them to be alert 24*7.

• Lethargy of WFH

  The monotonous routine and workspace of the living room can take a toll on the recruiter’s productivity.

• Invisible Culture

  The candidate can no longer come to the office and get an experience of the company’s culture. The recruiter now has even more onus to communicate and show the company’s culture and values.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

• Missing Emotions

  For a lot of creative roles, it is important to understand the passion and emotions of the candidates. Bringing them to a physical space in small numbers, while complying with the government regulations might be the best foot forward.

Remote Hiring - How To Hire & Retain Remote Talent

What are the metrics to measure when hiring remotely?

With remote hiring still a novelty for all functions, the metrics to measure are still evolving. However, in a pandemic situation - The cost of hire has become a major metric to track. The manner of evaluations has changed as well, for example - the transportation and halting charges of recruiters are now almost non-existent. Other metrics like recruitment productivity, quality of hire, stakeholder satisfaction continue to hold their merit.

The Road Ahead For Remote Hiring

The biggest positive from remote hiring is the access to a larger candidate base from all over the world. Not only can recruiters hire from abroad, but they also now have access to the candidate pool from Tier 3 and 4 cities who no longer have to leave their home towns in order to work.

The one big suspicion for remote hiring and working processes is its longevity. Can employers sustain working from their living rooms with distractions in the long run? Can companies continue to strengthen the team spirit while working separately?

The future perhaps lies in a hybrid model - where the concept of necessary office space isn’t there but at the same time - employees would continue to meet each other and their managers from time-to-time depending on their functions and the nature of work.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

Based on the discussion with:

Sahil Nayar

Senior Associate
Director, KPMG

Neetal Vaidya

Vice President, Human
Resources - India,
TIBCO Software Inc.

Thomas Crawford

Director, Training &
QA at Tinder

Startups are a new rage - not just for the economy but for recruiters and candidates as well. In 2020, amidst the global pandemic, startups created more than 3 million jobs in the US alone.

In such circumstances, it becomes necessary to take a deeper look into the startup hiring scenes - what are the basic practices, what attracts candidates to startups, and how has the pandemic affected recruitment in these nimble, dynamic organizations.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

What are the different challenges of startup hiring?

Some of the biggest challenges in startup hiring are:

• Having an HR mindset

  Often when a company starts, the focus is on survival. The idea is to focus on revenue generation and the HR function often takes a backseat. What companies need to understand is that their long-term success depends on their first few hires. Your first hire will decide your 100th hire. Your 100th hire will decide the first 1000 employees.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

• Lack of budget

  Budgets or the lack of it will always be an integral part of startup hiring. With limited resources, the top management needs to prioritize the areas they need to hire for. For example, In the case of a tech-based startup, the company will do better to hire an experienced VP of product or engineering, rather than hiring multiple managers.

• How to build credibility

  Another challenge of startup hiring is convincing candidates about the company. With the brand still in the nascent stage, startups need to sell the vision, the story of the company in order to attract like-minded employees. Companies also need to convey how their product is making an actual impact and what potential lies with the invention.

• Convincing candidates to leave a reputed organization

  An extension of the previous problem, the situation becomes even more challenging if the candidate is already working with a big brand. Startups need to understand both the push (the reason why candidates might want to move out of a big corporation) and the pull (why the candidate might want to join your company) to attract the best talent. Generally speaking, attracting young talent (late teens and early twenties) who want exposure or senior folks (in their 50s) who want a change of pace, are the better options for startups.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

How can organizations identify the culture fit?

Working in a startup is all about having a positive attitude. More often than not you are working with a vision and a dream rather than tangible benefits. However, it becomes a little difficult for recruiters to judge someone’s attitude based on one interview. Here are a few tricks to get a better judgment of someone’s attitude on the first go:

• Talk about failures

  Everyone wants to boast about their success, only a few however can utilize failures as their learning experience. Asking about their biggest failures and what they learned from those experiences can be a great way of understanding the mentality of a candidate.

• Are they hopeful or anxious

  Everyone has a story. But rather than the ingredients of the story, the more important part is how they put it across. Are they putting a positive or a negative spin on it? Do they sound hopeful or anxious about the future?

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

• Owning up or blaming

  Once they share their story and talk about their biggest failures, it is important to gauge who they are attributing their failures to? Are they owning up to their mistakes and trying to improve on them? Or are they blaming someone else or external circumstances trying to avoid the responsibility? Asking these questions would help recruiters in understanding the entrepreneurial spirit of a candidate.

What should startups prioritize when hiring?

There is always a question about the list of things startups should look for in candidates while hiring. And even though, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, here are the few things startups can use as a north star while hiring:

• Experience vs Youth

  The idea is to strike a balance. On one hand, a startup needs an attitude to get things done. On the one hand, the experience can be invaluable for an organization looking to build a long-term future. Hiring experienced leaders and empowering them with a team of skilled, enthusiastic professionals might be the ideal road ahead.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

• Prefer Referrals

  Not only referrals are an efficient and cost-effective way of hiring talent, but referrals also ensure that the hired candidates already have a proven track record of success. Having a structured employee referral system and getting the word out by the top management on their social media accounts might be some of the best ways to hire quality talent.

• Skills vs Culture fit

  The old adage - “Hire for attitude and train for skills” holds even truer for startups. Identifying talent with a shared vision and training them to do specific job roles can be the best foot forward for startups.

Startup Hiring & Challenges: How Do You Hire Your Next Unicorn?

The Road Ahead For Startup Hiring

What recruiters need to understand is that there is no one size fits all solution to startup hiring. Enterprises with more history, bigger brands, and a fatter paycheck will always pose a threat to smaller organizations in the war of talent. However, despite the odds being against the startups, a lot of big corporate houses do actually lose out to startups on talent!

The key is hyper personalization of talent, understanding what their needs are, telling them how they can contribute, and what’s their take away. Catering your story to the need of the candidates will be the way ahead for startups.

Onboarding: Challenges During Remote Work

Based on the discussion with:

Jennifer Lea Smigelski

Director, Talent, Learning & Organizational
Development, Thai Union Group PCL

J'Neane Victor

Head of Employee
Onboarding at Lyft

Salina Vavia - Johnson

Sr. Human Resources Analyst

Christopher Ford

Global HR Operations Executive

An often overlooked, but important function of recruitment - Onboarding has faced a completely different challenge during the pandemic. "How do you welcome someone to the office, when the office is closed?"

With teams working remotely, recruiters have become innovative with the onboarding process. Here is how the process has changed:

Onboarding: Challenges During Remote Work

What Are The Changes In The On-boarding Process Due To Remote Work?

• The most important thing is to remember that onboarding is a verb, not a noun. Rather than treating it as a task that needs to get over with, recruiters need to treat onboarding as a continuous process that starts with rolling out of the offer and can continue even after a year of the candidate’s joining.

• Recruiters need to understand that they no longer have a physical square to show their culture to the incoming joinees. On-boarding needs to be engaging, surprising and a connecting process for the joinee.

• Organizations need to understand that it takes a village for the onboarding to be successful. Everyone from the hiring manager to the existing team members need to play their part to make a joinee welcomed.

Onboarding: Challenges During Remote Work

How can companies convey their culture while working remotely?

• Company overview videos

  With the absence of a physical space to show work culture, a lot of companies have started creating short overview videos as a part of the orientation process. This allows recruiters to convey the company ethos in a short, crisp manner while spending more time building connections during the orientation period.

• On-boarding blueprint

  Much like other processes, on-boarding should also provide a blueprint for the coming weeks to the new joinee. It should have the to-do tasks, milestones to achieve, and important contact information. This will let the candidate know what they can expect in the coming weeks and how should they prepare for it.

• Team-building activities

  With the advent of the pandemic, a lot of organizations have bought their fun activities to a halt. Actually, team activities are now more required than ever. Virtual activities that can foster teamwork and trust among employees of various departments can be the key to breaking the ice with new joinees.

Onboarding: Challenges During Remote Work

• Virtual onboarding buddy

  With a physical onboarding buddy unavailable, the same concept can be carried out in a virtual manner. Virtual onboarding partners can help new employees in understanding the functioning of the company and make them feel comfortable.

What metrics should organizations track for the on-boarding process?

The most important point is to ensure that the effectiveness of the onboarding process gets measured. Here are some of the ways to get it done:

• Benchmarking indexes

  Before starting any process for the newcomers, it is important to know what the existing baseline is. Therefore, conducting surveys like - employee sentiment, job satisfaction, etc. on the existing employees to set the benchmark might be a great starting point.

• Qualitative feedback

  A lot of time, simple quantitative surveys aren’t able to capture the true emotions of the new employees. Asking open-ended questions about the onboarding process, and asking for feedback, can elevate the on-boarding process to a new level.

Onboarding: Challenges During Remote Work

The Road Ahead for Remote Onboarding

Remote Onboarding is here to stay. First of all, most companies are not going to go back to 100% physical attendance. Even for companies that do, everyone will note be comfortable coming back to the office as soon as it opens. Some candidates might even like joining remotely as they don’t have to travel.

Both recruiters and employees are going to struggle for a while in the new remote onboarding system. But as long as both the parties accept not being 100% as the norm, we will see continuous improvement as more time is spent in the current regime.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

Based on the discussion with:

Chris Deaver

Sr Director HR + Exec
Coach, VMware

KimLoan Tran, PhD

Chief Learning
Officer, TIBCO

Dave Jennings

#1 Wall Street Journal Best-
selling Author, President of
Learnable Solutions

Tina Bright

Vice President,
Talent Acquisition at
Universal Music Group

Niharika Rai

Global Talent
Management Director,
Honeywell

Eveline Shum

Director - Talent
Management, Safety and
Productivity Solutions

Every single person in this world has been affected (either directly or indirectly) by COVID. If we extrapolate the statement - Every single person on this planet has faced a crisis in their lives.

But be it professional or the personal world, how we respond to a crisis often has far more reaching outcomes than the crisis itself. For HR professionals, leading during a crisis becomes even more important as the whole organization looks towards them for inspiration during emergencies.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

Why Does Crisis Affect The Productivity Of Employees

COVID has been challenging even for employees who have not lost their jobs or faced salary cuts. The acronym VUCA - Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity has been never truer than for COVID.

The Human Brain loves autonomy and predictability. The current pandemic takes all that away from the brain and messes with it. That’s why a lot of people complain about feelings of loss and grief without reason. Our brains are working harder because of a lack of a well-practiced routine. That’s why the chemicals in our brain tell us that we are stuck - resulting in lesser productivity.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

What’s The Best Style Of Leadership In A Crisis?

Even though there are various kinds of leaders who can be effective during a crisis, all of these leadership styles follow what we call the “Exemplary leadership model.” Here is what it consists of:

• Align one's action to the shared values of our team.
• Inspiring a shared vision of change - show the team a clear path of possibilities
• Challenging the status quo and taking risks
• Enabling others to act. Providing autonomy to others by trusting the peers.
• Encouraging the heart and normalizing exceptional performance.

Any leader can stick to the above principles and add his personality to create the optimal version of crisis leadership.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

What are the skills required to lead during a crisis?

Here are the top skills required for leading in a crisis:

• Listening: to peers, team members, and other leaders.
• Partnering: Not vertical but horizontal partnerships.
• Transparency: Being open about the situation and the road ahead with the team.
• Thinking differently: Abnormal situations call for abnormal and innovative solutions.
• Self-awareness: Knowing his sphere of influence - what they can or can’t control.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

What are the key trends in talent management during a crisis?

Some of the key trends that we identified include:

• Leveraging technology

  Technology has turned out to be the biggest connector within the organization. Technology has dramatically increased the reach of learning and development programs, upskilling and reskilling, workforce planning and strategy, change management, as well as engagement and connection amongst employees.

• Culture beyond boundaries

  Earlier the culture of an organization was defined within the confines of its building. Now, every HR is trying their best to penetrate their culture outside the walls.

• Transparency with data

  With organizations working remotely, everyone is heavily reliant on data to provide transparency about the functioning of the organization. Expect more tracking and analytics on data as WFH stays for longer.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

• Too much learning

  The extra time saved from commuting to the office, along with the feeling of being stuck has meant that more and more individuals want to upskill themselves. However, this comes at a price - with individuals spending all their time on computers - ‘screen fatigue’ is a reality. Often there are too many courses and not enough implementation. ‘Just in Time Skills’ can be the path ahead for L&D programs as employees would demand skills that they need to learn and use urgently.

What are the major learnings for leaders during the COVID pandemic?

Here are some of the major learning for HR leaders:

• Not knowing is ok

  Crisis by its definition is a rare occurrence. The fact is amplified when the crisis in once in a generation pandemic. Leaders need to understand that no one is ever fully prepared for a crisis. No one is taught the exact skills that they will require when an emergency occurs. What HR professionals should know is that skills are learnable, and everyone can learn when the need arises.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

• Challenge the status quo

  Adapting to the situation and changing directions as needed is a much-needed trait for crisis management. Being nimble with decision-making can help organizations sail through turbulent times.

• It’s a marathon. Not a sprint

  Leaders need to prepare themselves for the long haul. Those who can’t learn, unlearn, and re-learn would be considered illiterate in a crisis situation.

How To Lead When The World Is In Disarray?

The Road Ahead for Crisis Management

Organizations often halt their ‘transformational processes’ during a crisis. They believe that the current need is for survival, and anything that aims to make long-term changes can wait. However, waiting for things to go back to normal’ can be counterproductive for organizations. Why do you need transformation when ‘normal’ things are working fine?

Organizations need to ensure that they use the crisis as a trigger to transformational changes that can get them better prepared for the next emergency.

Skillate Introduction

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