Candidate journeys have changed tremendously in a mostly remote working world. While leveraging technology has become more pervasive, it’s dual role in boosting candidate experience and accelerating a recruiter’s productivity has played an important role in fostering long lasting relationships with prospective employees.

To help understand the shifts, on Day 2 of People Matters TechHR SEA, an expert panel of leaders in the people and work space focused on the new face of candidate journeys. The panel was chaired by Rachel Fitton, Global Talent Acquisition Leader and featured Kartik Krishnamurthy VP APAC at Paradox, Josh Zywien, Chief Marketing Officer at Paradox and Zuzana Chomistekova, Head of recruitment at AirAsia.

What’s changing?

While hiring activity declined in the early months of the pandemic, economies are now slowly starting to open up across many countries – even as the next wave of COVID19 continues to disrupt work life in some countries.  Recruiters today are expected to navigate a volume of new applications and also deal with changed expectations of candidates over the years.

Companies are also changing how they engage with the candidates in terms of their brand value - by showing how they’ve stood by their employees during the COVID19 crisis.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the discussion:

1)     Think like a candidate

When reflecting on how recruitment has changed over the past year, Kartik Krishnamurthy, VP APAC at Paradox said that there’s a need to think from a candidates’ perspective on the changing scenario. Our job is to always “think like a candidate” or “think like an employee.” We have to take on their unique perspectives and anticipate their questions in order to support them with what they need, when they need it. This is especially true during times of uncertainty because this is when we’re needed most,” he noted. Companies realized that engagement is critical to attract the right candidates and they’ve increasingly opted for that route.

2)     Leverage technology to automate communication

Given the important presence of social media in today’s communications, Zuzana noted there’s a need to ensure that you automate communication that can provide regular updates. “If a candidate is not happy, it can easily blow up on social media, she noted.” Ensuring a line of communication with candidates can open up the recruiter’s time to focus on more critical tasks.

3)      Optimize process to avoid bias

 “We need to think about where humans come into the recruiting process and where machines pay an efficient role, because there’s a need to overcome bias.” said Josh Zywien, Chief Marketing Officer at Paradox. Technology can play a crucial role in encoding information in a way that could help recruiters focus on the most important aspect of a prospective candidate.

4)     Reject with empathy

“When candidates are not the right fit, let them know,” said one of the panellists. Often, there is no feedback that works its way back to candidates due to the volume of application, but that can change with the help of technology.  Zuzana noted that today’s technologies are also capable of letting recruiter’s know whether a prospective candidate fits other roles – that they may not have applied for. It opens up new possibilities to engage with candidates who otherwise may not have considered the option.

5)     Target candidate personas

When thinking about a specific cohort of individuals – whether that is fresh graduates or experienced professionals, recruiters can focus on targeting candidate personas that take into account micro experiences of different personas.

Finding the right balance between building a personal and human connection and an efficient and robust technology system that can accelerate a recruiter’s productivity continues to play an important role in today’s world of work. And there is no one size fits all approach – companies need to leverage data and analytics to help improve their processes over and over again.