Talent acquisition: Implications of technology

Talent acquisition

Technological disruption taking place everywhere. People adopting technology for all most every aspect at an alarming rate. Changes in the recruitment process are witnessed with the advancement of information technology and the widespread use of social media platforms. Digital footprint enables understanding of individuals’ behavior more than ever, (Lambiotte and Kosinski, 2014) and this could influence the hiring of specialized knowledge workers in the digital age. 

The selection of the best fit for the job has been a challenging task always. Reduction of tenure has evident and this is particularly common among younger people. It is found that average employee tenure is 2 year while it is 10 years in older workers (US Department of Labour, 2018). New developments such as flexible work arrangement, teleworking along with changes in employee tenure, etc. bring fresh challenges for human resource management in general and recruitment process in particular. 

According to the Armstrong standard recruitment and selection process comprises 3 stages, defining requirements, attracting candidates and selecting candidates, (Armstrong, 2006). Recruitment and selection further include job posting, employee referral and advertisement for vacancies, submitting a job application, shortlisting, screening interview, selection test, interviewing and selection. Each of these functions has affected by the technology to varying degrees.

Implication of technology 

Employment web sites, commonly used for posting of opening vacancies. Online submission of application for the job is also an inbuilt feature of these web sites. Some of these web sites also provide carrier guidance and employer review features. Some of the employment web sites are specialized (https://www.jobs.nhs.uk – advertise job vacancies for NHS UK) and generalize sites cater for all categories, (https://www.glassdoor.com and https://www.indeed.com/).

Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are now increasingly been used for recruitment management. Job seekers often subscribe to their dream company’s social media handles such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook page. Therefore organizations now use the social media platforms for building the corporate image, promote the corporate culture and posting of the new job opening. The use of social media is cost effective and could reach a wider audience in a matter of seconds.  LinkedIn, a professional networking platform with 610 million current users are commonly used for job posting and verification of applicant talents and experience. Its users are usually influential in nature because most of them are working in a decision-making capacity in their current position, (LinkedIn, 2019). LinkedIn has purposefully build functions to facilitate the recruitment and selection process.

Further, digital tools help many ways in recruitment management. Once the job vacancy is posted, an interested applicant can apply for the post by filling the online application. Keywords are been used for screening and shortlisting. Validation methods are applied to verify the basic requirement allowing easy short-listing of applicants. These features save lots of time in the HR department.

HRM departments shall embrace the disruption created by the technology and align the recruitment and selection strategy to suits to the digital age.   

References 

1. Armstrong M., 2006. Human resource management. 10 ed. London: Kogan Page Limited.
2. Lambiotte, R. & Kosinski, M., 2014. Tracking the Digital Footprints of Personality. [Online] Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6939627 [Accessed 8 5 2019].
3. LinkedIn, 2019. LinkedIn. [Online] Available at: https://about.linkedin.com/?trk=homepage-basic_directory [Accessed 04 May 2019].
4. US Department of Labour, 2018. Employee Tenure in 2018. [Online] Available at: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf [Accessed 03 May 2019].