The recruitment industry has changed dramatically in the last decade. Since 2010, the industry has seen a rapid increase in technological advancements in the field of recruitment automation including:
- Streamlining the recruitment process by leveraging AI & RPA technology
- Improving productivity with automated sourcing
- Improving Candidate Experience & closure ratios of placements
Starting at a time when the market was opening to digital transformation, CEIPAL was founded by Sameer Penakalapati in 2015 with its primary product being Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
“I believe that there is nothing more gratifying than helping organizations find their ideal candidate matches and the job seekers, their dream jobs. I can happily share today that we have achieved the talent acquisition transformation that we envisioned 7 years ago when we started the company,” says Sameer.
Sameer walks us through the evolution of the HR tech market, specifically the challenges and solutions:
What according to you are the major challenges faced by staffing and recruiting professionals?
The staffing industry faces a wide variety of challenges including-
- Finding qualified talent that matches the job profile
- The highly competitive job market
- Lack of highly qualified, skilled candidates
- The monopoly of job boards, leaving staffing organizations with very few options
- Engaging with candidates by identifying the right candidate touchpoints
- Building a talent pool
- Lack of recruitment reporting and analytics
- Candidate ghosting
How does automation help staffing businesses? How has the industry reacted to technology adoption?
While the full-time employees are hired by the HR teams through various sources (job boards, employee referrals, career portals, offline events), the temp/contingent staffing is managed by procurement teams from numerous suppliers. Now we have HR tech solutions that serve both in-house HR teams and procurement teams in streamlined integrated platforms. Using automation reduces up to 70% of hiring time and ultimately saves costs on each hire.
Almost 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on ATS-like HR tech solutions to automate their recruitment processes. It is only apposite that businesses choose ATS systems wisely that cater to their business’s unique needs and solve their problems. While large enterprises are deliberately adopting automation tools for recruitment, small and medium-sized organizations have yet to embrace 360-degree automation.
Gen Z is the workforce of today and tomorrow. How is AI technology helping recruiters to attract Gen Z?
The job market is entirely candidate driven now. Recruiters are perturbed to create a comprehensive workforce, which includes every generation of the workforce. But, to attract especially Gen Z, the traditional methods of hiring are not the answer. Recruiters have to up their game and use an omnichannel approach to attract Gen Z and millennials. To enforce an inclusive and innovative workforce, HR professionals have to opt for a holistic approach and create quality employer branding and candidate experience. Candidate experience has been a major part of the recruitment process. While looking for a job, a Gen Z candidate has multiple offers in hand. A delayed response from the recruiter may cause him to lose out on an amazing candidate. However, a recruiter daily deals with hundreds of candidate profiles and can easily forget or delay responding to an application. Automation of candidate communication has taken the mantle of responsibility from recruiters and leaves zero room for error. Technology-driven hiring has revolutionized the staffing business not just by removing manual administrative processes but also by removing hiring biases and human errors.
The future of recruitment holds ‘candidate’ at a paramount focus. Technology has upswept recruitment into a complete digital stream. Resume parsing, digitization of databases, gamification of assessments, recruitment chatbots for capturing candidate information, e-onboarding tools, etc. are already being used by a large number of organizations.
Sameer shares, “Finding talent is difficult, and it is not going to get any easier any time soon. The trick to creating a successful recruitment process is to keep it human-centric yet tech savvy and give every candidate the best recruiting experience they can get.”