Bottom Line: Virtual career fairs and events, fully-remote recruiting, more personalized career paths, and greater insights into candidate experiences are quickly becoming the new normal in a post-COVID-19 world.
The COVID-19 pandemic is quickly changing how every organization is attracting, recruiting, and retaining employees on their virtual teams, making remote work the new normal. Recruiting systems, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), and talent management systems were designed for one-on-one personal interactions, not virtual ones. Legacy Human Resource Management (HRM) systems are already showing signs of not being able to scale and meet the challenges of the brave, new post-COVID-19 world. The majority of legacy systems are built for transaction scale and can’t see candidate potential. Closing the gaps between legacy talent management systems and new virtual event recruiting and AI-based talent management platforms are changing that by putting candidate potential at the center of their architectures.
Closing The Virtual Event Recruiting Gap Needs To Happen First
Many organizations during this time of year prioritize recruiting the best and brightest college seniors they can attract during in-person interviews on campus. That’s no longer an option today. College recruiters are resorting to individual Skype or Zoom sessions with candidates while attempting to keep track of interviews the best they can with Excel, Google Sheets, and e-mail. Recruiters trying to recruit for mid-level and senior positions are under increasing pressure from hiring managers to arrange interviews with the highest quality candidates possible.
Seeing an opportunity to help organizations find, engage, and recruit using online events, Eightfold.ai has created and launched Virtual Event Recruiting. Eightfold.ai is best-known for its Talent Intelligence Platform™, the first AI-powered solution and most effective way for companies to identify promising candidates, reach diversity hiring goals, retain top performers, and engage talent. Eightfold.ai’s recent webinar How To Hold Virtual Recruiting Events is worth checking out if you’re interested in how Virtual Event Recruiting is evolving..
What Does Success Look Like In Virtual Event Recruiting?
The table stakes for any Virtual Event Recruiting solution need include support for students just starting their careers, veterans, return-to-work mothers, and experienced professionals. For a solution to be effective, it also needs to enable companies and job seekers to connect, giving companies greater scale than is possible for physical recruiting events. Ideally, any virtual event recruiting system needs to provide the following:
- The ability to upload resume books and use AI to find the highest quality matches for open positions in real-time. Machine learning algorithms excel at pattern matching and can save recruiters thousands of hours of drudgery by immediately seeing the highest quality matches for open positions.
- Provide a planning center that also serves a company’s specific talent community and provide tools to grow it by tailoring events to their specific interests while seeking the best-qualified candidates for open positions. Creating, launching, and tracking recruiting campaigns from the same dashboard that tracks invitations, registrations, and open positions being filled gives recruiters the end-to-end visibility they need to succeed with a virtual event. It’s important to have Assessments included in every virtual event to measure candidates’ experiences and see what’s going well and which areas need to improve. The following is an example of what Eightfold’s planning center looks like:
- Rely on AI to match high-potential candidates with the best possible virtual events to increase opt-in and participation rates. For a virtual event recruiting solution to be effective, high-potential candidates need to be matched with positions they will most excel in. A first step to making this happen is using AI to understand every candidate’s strengths and inviting them to the virtual events that will help them the most in choosing the best position given their potential.
- Guide candidates to the positions that best match their existing capabilities and future potential. Instead of relying on keyword matching from resumes alone, virtual event recruiting applications need to suggest those positions high-potential candidates have the greatest potential to excel at. Using AI to combine all available data on a candidate, so their existing capabilities and future potential are taken into account is key to making more successful hires. Integrating job recommendations with virtual event recruiting is a must-have for any organization looking to add staff in 2020 and beyond.
- After the virtual event, all potential candidates for an open position need to be stacked-ranked so recruiters can prioritize who they contact. By providing personalization at scale to every candidate by providing them recommendations for the positions they are the strongest match for, recruiters will find following-up is easier to accomplish than cold-calling a candidate found on LinkedIn, for example. Stack ranking needs to include members of the existing talent community and organization is cultivating as well. An excellent example of how this could work is shown below:
Conclusion
University campuses need to consider partnering with Eightfold.ai to make it easier for their graduating students to find best available careers, perhaps across a much broader range of companies than ever visited any individual campus. And there is no reason this paradigm can’t be applied to other job fairs and recruiting events like Grace Hopper.
Improving event virtual recruiting needs to be the priority recruiters and HR professionals take action on first to stay competitive from a talent management standpoint. Organizations that will win the war for talent in this new remote, distributed workforce era are already looking at how to excel at virtual recruiting. Having a talent intelligence platform that can provide end-to-end visibility and personalization at scale is the future of talent management.