Linked in and checked out
Will social analytics replace job applications?The whole process of recruitment is being overhauled. Soon, you’ll no longer have to pick through CVs and read through a candidate’s personal achievements. Advances in technology will do the job for you – identifying potential employees who best suit your business and matching candidates with roles in which they’ll really thrive.
The reality is that a piece of paper with a list of jobs, GCSEs and A-levels gives you no real insight into who an applicant really is: you always have to dig deeper to find the person behind the CV.
Often recruiters ask themselves, ‘Will this person have those qualities I’m looking for? Will they be the right cultural fit for the business? Will they be committed to the company or are they likely to constantly be looking for other opportunities? And is what they’ve told me on their CV true?’ without getting any real answers.
These questions take us to the new superpower shaking up the HR industry: social analytics.
Analytics techniques
Specialised software allows companies to assess consumers’ digital footprints, on a consent basis. It analyses thousands of data points to bring back real-time, relevant scores and insights.
The software then uses advanced analytics techniques to derive meaning from this unstructured data, including Bayesian Belief Networks, natural language processing, machine learning and psycholinguistics.
The capabilities of social analytics are greater than they ever have been, giving insights into consumers like never before. For instance, in a competitive job market, recruiters receive high volumes of CVs and great candidates can often be overlooked.
But social analytics changes that. It enables the right candidates to shine through, which ultimately makes the recruitment process better for both company and candidate.
With consumers spending one in every six waking minutes on social media, the amount of data being created each day is growing exponentially. And it’s up to you to take advantage of the opportunity this presents.
This data can be leveraged to discover meaningful insights about potential candidates and enable you to make more informed recruitment decisions.
Utilising social analytics tools allows you to gain insight into prospective employees’ personality traits, such as extraversion and conscientiousness. These can then reveal if your candidate is outgoing, creative or organised.
Through incorporating personality scoring into your vetting processes, you can predict whether a candidate is likely to be open to travel, confident at networking, more suited to remote working and more.
For example, if your business needs someone that is incredibly precise and manages their time very well, hiring a person with a high conscientiousness score would be optimum.
Hiring staff this way can, we estimate, help organisations to reduce employee turnover by as much as 38% and reduce absenteeism by 23%.
Smarter decisions
Companies who embrace this new technology have the ability to access previously untapped data and create unique insights through comprehensive real-time analysis.
It’s already being used each and every day to make smarter recruitment decisions and the capabilities of data analytics are growing each and every day to the point that this will become an integral part of recruitment.
From a due diligence perspective, these insights also provide fraud detection and ID verification which enables employers to identify those CV inconsistencies.
I predict that, in a few years time, the entire recruitment process will be mostly automated, whittling down applications to a small shortlist of ideal candidates.
Further on, we anticipate that technological capabilities will enable fully automated decision making to help find the right person for the right role, the first time around.
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