Bridging India’s Skill Gap with AI powered Hiring Technology

With a strengthening global economy, companies and employers are more optimistic about onboarding talent. But, the advent of newer technologies and emerging skill needs are leaving employers with unfulfilled roles, creating a gap between the supply and demand for talent. This is affecting the productivity, efficiency, and growth of organizations.

To deal with the talent gap, employers need to adapt data-driven recruiting strategies to find candidates who fit best. Data opens new avenues for talent acquisition and makes it easier for companies to select potential candidates. This data is the driving force behind streamlining and optimizing the hiring process.

AI-driven hiring tools empower organizations to find the best candidate for any job by collecting and analyzing large amounts of data from more candidate sources. They also enable recruiters to quickly identify the most-qualified candidates and speed up the hiring process. AI-powered hiring platforms help recruiting managers hire better. Let’s take a look at how.

Look Beyond the Resume

Look Beyond the ResumeAs companies battle with talent shortages, they need to employ new initiatives right from the initial steps of recruitment. Companies need to look beyond resumes and professional experience requirements posted, and instead to other skills and potential that a candidate may possess. Candidates may have a lot more potential than the technical skills and data mentioned in their resumes. Hiring managers often overlook the exact potential of a candidate because they are more focused on exact matches between listed skills and predicted needs for the job position. More attention to potential-based hiring is a great way to manage the talent gap.  Using predictive analysis, AI-powered hiring tools collect data from employees from social media and other sites and use it against position requirements to identify the right candidates for the role. Digging through this data expands the pool of candidates for companies.

Skilling and Re-skilling 

Mitigating the talent shortage might require organizations to shift their focus from just recruiting to training, up-skilling, and re-skilling employees to match a job position’s needs. Recruiting professionals should look internally for candidates who might be interested in transitioning to a new role.  Hiring technology can help companies identify current employees who have the potential to excel in new roles by gathering data on employees who have adjacent skills that indicate success. Once identified, the company can offer them required training to reskill and help them succeed in a new role. This is a great pathway to close the talent gap inside the organization.

Hunt for Passive Candidates 

Passive candidates are those who aren’t actively looking to change companies. Companies cannot afford to ignore passive candidates while they hunt for new recruits. In fact, going after passive candidates significantly widens the talent pool of candidates.

AI-fueled hiring technology helps businesses find these passive candidates by collecting and analyzing online candidate data and then predicting the interest of those candidates in switching jobs. This helps recruiters prioritize them and opens up space for more potential hires.

Amplify Talent Sources

Fishing from the same talent pool repeatedly will soon dry up the sources. Unfortunately, companies are chasing the same limited talent pools for hiring. Companies need to expand the boundaries of talent sources to better explore newer candidates possessing the latest skills. Hiring technology facilitates this expansion by searching sources such as social networks, portfolio sites, professional communities, resume databases, and job boards to find potential candidates. Traditionally, hiring managers have focused on submitted resumes or applications and sometimes on a social network platform like LinkedIn to search for candidates. AI-powered hiring tools allow them to quickly and easily search and collect more sources, broadening the talent data pool. This provides companies with many options to choose from, a task that would be time-consuming and labor-intensive to accomplish manually.  The talent shortage is a real threat to organizations. It can halt business. Companies seeking to overcome this shortage need to adopt AI-powered hiring tools for better talent acquisition. They are essential for staying ahead in the market.

by Ashutosh Garg, CEO and Co-Founder at Eightfold.ai