With the 2022 campus placement season witnessing offers rolled out faster than the speed of light, here’s how technology is helping to find the hidden needles in the haystack of campus recruitment drives

According to experts, virtual hiring has always been present across industries, even before the pandemic, at least in the early stages. Conducting remote evaluations before arriving at campuses, and phone screening and video-conferencing before face-to-face interviews were strategies already adopted by recruiters in the pre-lockdown period. Managers felt more confident about hiring after meeting the candidates in person. Since then, the perspective has significantly shifted. Over the past two years, the recruitment landscape has transitioned from fragmented digital approaches to an entirely virtual one. 

Businesses today look for solutions in the digital space to address their ever-increasing talent requirements as they need talent pools to be bigger than ever before. This brings into the ambit of recruitment a pertinent question: Can technology aid in identifying quality talent from these vast talent pools? With the dawn of the digital era came the mass adoption of recruitment technology to address exactly this concern and, why not? The magnitude and operational complexity of recruiting from colleges in the Indian environment called for specific technologies to optimise the full recruitment cycle. Digitisation has many benefits that once recognised, offer endless opportunities. Here are some of the ways technology is assisting businesses in finding the needle in the haystack with respect to  campus recruitment:

Compacting operations

There is more to finding the ideal candidates for a firm than it may seem.  Previously, campus hiring required extensive operations and event planning, involving the travel of large teams of hiring managers to institutions across the country. Due to the number of activities and logistics involved, it required months of planning and coordination. There was also excessive work that went into selecting the best universities and connecting with them. Following that was the exhaustive procedure of scheduling campus drives, interview appointments, and so on. Technology assists organisations in taking care of operation-heavy processes, expanding their talent reach and shortening hiring cycles; seamless recruiting from several sources will facilitate specialised hiring by providing detailed information on college performance and candidate outcomes.

Opening doors to new possibilities

The adoption of technology allows recruiters to conduct the hiring process efficiently even in high volumes. Due to the absence of geographic boundaries, university recruiters now have access to a global talent pool, and candidates’ career prospects have significantly brightened. If organisations invest in recruitment software to automate scheduling and other hiring processes, the recruiter will have more time to coordinate with teams to learn about the vacant positions with better insights, attract a more streamlined and appropriate candidate pool, create engaging relationships with potential candidates, have a more efficient interview system in place, organise data-driven hiring, and so on, ultimately improving the overall efficiency.

More room for quality assessments

In terms of volume, campus placements might prove to be overwhelming. Instead of manually sifting through hundreds of profiles, a screening tool or software enables companies to provide work requirements for a specific role. As a result, the tool only permits individuals with the necessary skills to get through. This stage is crucial for forming a talent pool made up of the cream of the crop. A screening tool can also regulate the quality of talent that passes through the interview rounds. This guarantees that the talent that employers look for in a role are benchmarked.

Evolving processes for evolving candidates

With a new generation of digitally-native Gen Z, the workforce ecosystem is witnessing a colossal transformation. For at least their formative years, this new generation of working youth has grown up surrounded by technology. Gen Z employees would not want to work in an organisation that requires long hours of manual effort for operations that can be automated because they are used to automating even daily tasks. If the hiring process lasts more than a week and requires candidates to go through tedious paperwork and participate in many phone calls and email threads, they are likely to leave and go to a company with a faster and more candidate-friendly hiring process.

While we discuss the innumerable benefits and the potential of recruitment technology, it is also crucial to note that it does not mean fully eliminating the human touch. At the end of the day, building relationships with candidates is equally important for driving and managing technology as well as humanising the entire process.

The article has been written S Pasupathi, Chief Operating Officer, HirePro