Artificial Intelligence and Talent Acquisition

How AI is Transforming the Recruitment Process in 2024

The talent market is more competitive than ever. Organisations are finding it more challenging to get the best candidates for the role, and prospective employees find the hiring process more arduous than it was years before. The difficulties in the talent acquisition process are due to several factors, including the lasting effects of the pandemic, younger generations entering the market, and more significant global shifts in recruitment from law changes, among others.

Despite these challenges, the recruitment industry has only recently moved away from established ways of working, as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are beginning to enter the game. While artificial intelligence and machine learning may still be new for many people, more and more organisations are investing in artificial intelligence systems and other digital tools to stay ahead of the market and leverage the tools to streamline their operations.

It is no wonder that AI is beginning to reshape the talent acquisition landscape. HR teams must be aware of many challenges when integrating AI into their recruitment strategy.

Download Now: World of Work Trends 2024

How can AI be used in talent acquisition?

Some of the areas where AI is transforming the talent acquisition process or will soon be implemented in talent acquisition strategies include:

Candidate Sourcing: HR teams can utilise AI tools to search through online job boards, professional networking sites, and social media platforms to identify potential candidates based on specified criteria. These tools can assess candidates’ online profiles and professional backgrounds to identify potential candidates.
Resume Screening and Candidate Matching: AI-powered applicant tracking systems (ATS) and talent acquisition software (TAS) can analyse resumes and job descriptions to identify relevant skills, experiences, and qualifications. By leveraging natural language processing algorithms, ATS platforms match candidates to job requirements, enabling recruiters to focus on the most suitable applicants.
Candidate Assessment and Screening: AI assessment tools are starting to administer psychometric tests, cognitive assessments, and job simulations to evaluate candidates’ competencies, personality traits, and job fit. These assessments give the recruiter objective insights into candidates’ abilities and suitability for specific roles, helping them identify top performers more effectively.
Predictive Analytics: AI analytics can analyse historical recruitment data and performance metrics to identify patterns, trends, and predictors of successful hires. By leveraging predictive analytics, a hiring manager can potentially forecast talent needs, optimise sourcing strategies, and make data-driven decisions to improve hiring outcomes.
Reporting: AI tools can generate reports about candidates for internal senior leadership and legal teams. Those reports can analyse the success of recruiting campaigns to a broader team, streamlining the talent acquisition process.

Read Now: Winning the Battles for Talent

Benefits of Implementing AI in the Talent Recruitment Process

The benefits that can come to an organisation that decides to implement AI in its talent acquisition process include the following:

Improvement in the Time Needed to Hire New Employees: Using AI tools for recruitment can expedite the recruitment process, shortening time-to-fill positions and ensuring that critical roles are filled promptly, minimising productivity losses and revenue impact.
Data-Driven Decision Making: AI analytics tools offer hiring managers valuable insights into recruitment trends, candidate behaviours, and performance metrics, enabling them to make informed decisions, optimise recruitment strategies, and forecast future talent needs.
Efficiency: AI can streamline time-consuming tasks for a talent acquisition team, such as resume screening, candidate sourcing, and initial assessments, significantly reducing the time and effort required to identify suitable candidates.
Competitive Advantage: By embracing AI in the recruiting process, organisations can gain a competitive edge in attracting and retaining top talent, stay ahead of competitors, and position themselves as innovative employers in the marketplace.
Enhanced Candidate Quality: AI-driven algorithms can identify candidates whose qualifications match job requirements, leading to higher-quality candidate pools and improved hiring outcomes.

The Challenges of Implementing AI Tools in the Recruitment Process

Implementing AI in talent acquisition is challenging, especially as the technology is still relatively new. Some of these challenges include:

Ethical Considerations: AI raises ethical dilemmas related to using candidate data, algorithmic decision-making, and the potential impact on employment opportunities and socio-economic disparities. Organisations must navigate ethical considerations, uphold principles of fairness and integrity, and prioritise ethical AI practices to build trust and credibility in their recruitment processes.
Overreliance on Technology: While AI streamlines recruitment processes and enhances efficiency, an overreliance on technology may need more attention to human judgment, intuition, and empathy in assessing candidate suitability and cultural fit. Hiring managers and recruitment teams must balance technological innovation and human-centred decision-making to achieve optimal recruitment outcomes.
Candidate Bias: Despite efforts to mitigate bias, AI algorithms may inadvertently perpetuate or even exacerbate biases in the data used for training the models. AI systems may inadvertently discriminate against certain demographic groups without careful monitoring and intervention, leading to fairness concerns and potential legal repercussions.
Data Privacy and Security: AI recruitment platforms rely on vast amounts of candidate data, raising concerns about privacy and security. Organisations must ensure compliance with data protection regulations, implement robust security measures, and establish transparent data handling practices to safeguard candidate information from unauthorised access or misuse.

Final Thoughts

The possibilities of utilising AI tools and leveraging them for the talent acquisition process can help hiring managers streamline recruitment processes, enhance candidate experiences, and make more informed decisions, ultimately driving organisational success and competitiveness in the talent marketplace. However, organisations need to balance the benefits of AI with ethical considerations, transparency, and human-centred principles to ensure fair, inclusive, and responsible recruitment practices.

Best Practice | Stay Interviews at BAT

By Top Employers Institute

In this blog post, we will discussing how BAT improve their workplace culture and retention strategy by gaining employee insights through stay itnerviews.

What are Stay Interviews

While it is traditional for organisations to have exit interviews, many companies realise there is a need to conduct stay interviews. Stay interviews are a proactive and structured approach to engage with current employees and gain insight into their job satisfaction, career aspirations, and overall experience within the company. Where exit interviews are reactive, stay interviews are a proactive approach to assessing the needs of employees while they are still within the organisation.

How BAT established stay interviews:

In the APMEA West region (Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia and Pakistan), BAT recently established stay interviews with their employees to help with retention and focus on customised, individualised, and purposeful interventions for employees instead of a ‘one size fits all’ strategy.

The primary objectives of stay interviews include:

Identifying factors that contribute to employee retention.
Understanding individual motivations and needs.
Addressing potential concerns or dissatisfaction before they lead to turnover.
Aligning employees’ goals with the company’s objectives.
Tailoring retention strategies to foster a more positive and fulfilling work environment.

Why the stay interview practice was needed

BAT sees stay interviews as necessary for their organisation’s talent management strategy. The interviews provide a proactive and insightful approach to employee retention, allowing the organisation to understand their existing workforce’s unique needs, motivations, and concerns.

By engaging in open and candid conversations with employees about their experiences, career aspirations, and overall job satisfaction, BAT can identify potential issues and opportunities for improvement before those issues escalate into reasons for departure. Stay interviews not only demonstrate their commitment to employee wellbeing and growth but also enable the customisation of retention strategies that resonate with each employee.

BAT’s main focus was a targeted approach, mainly focusing on their key talents, employees sitting in critical roles, and women; this was in line with the turnover trends and likely personas to leave the organisation, as the organisation had observed in the last few years.

Their strategy and subsequent practice were born out of numerous brainstorming sessions in the HR team aimed at curbing attrition rates within BAT’s APMEA West region. Over the past three years, this region has witnessed an upward trend in attrition, mirroring prevailing patterns across diverse industries and markets.

To effectively tackle this challenge, BAT developed and deployed a proactive measure to understand employee sentiments – what it would take to leave the organisation and what they appreciate in the organisation so that BAT could focus on elevating and building on those initiatives.

How stay inteviews were implemented:

BAT conducted external research to see what cutting-edge practices were available externally in the era of “great attrition” to foster employee retention and engagement and found that stay interviews were highlighted by many other researchers and top-tier businesses globally. They broke down the process into four steps.

Step 1: For BAT, building complete awareness of the stay interviews concept for their HR teams across the region was critical, including upskilling sessions to explain the practice and how to conduct meaningful and targeted stay interview sessions for different personas.

Step 2: The second step was a region-wide upskilling session for all their line managers run by the Area Talent Team to ensure the same messaging and level of understanding was provided for all line managers conducting the stay interviews with their direct reports.

Step 3: The third step was to share the standardised stay interview templates, questions with all line managers, and online self-learning tools for additional content.

Step 4: The fourth step was to gather all the stay interview information and to begin a complete analysis to ensure consistency of findings. This analysis was done by the to commence by the Area Talent Team.

Stay interviews results:

Stay interviews allowed BAT to take a deep dive into what drives employee corporate purpose and contributes to fostering the best workplace to develop and build their careers. Overwhelmingly, the organisation saw that there were three main reasons employees chose to stay with BAT:

Challenging work that allows them to grow both personally and professionally.
A feeling of camaraderie and support, providing employees with a like-minded circle to work within.
Learning opportunities provided by BAT to finesse functional mastery and leadership skills to deal with constant change and speed.

Final Thoughts: BAT’s stay interviews, a new way to listen to their employees.

Understanding employee experiences is critical to helping an organisation thrive and keeping valuable talent. If you want to read more about BAT’s practice and get a complete insight into the approach, challenges and learnings.

Access it now via the Top Employers Programme if you are certified, or learn how to became an employer of choice.

“We strongly believe in the power of sharing and inspiring each other and others”

Benchmarking and sharing best practices are essential for all Top Employers to keep evolving and improving their HR strategies. At Luminus, we strongly believe in the power of sharing and inspiring each other and others — it’s a fundamental part of who we are as a company. It should therefore come as no surprise that “All together” is one of our corporate values.

How do you share successful practices and processes (with other Top Employers)?

At Luminus, we encourage our employees in sharing their knowledge and innovative solutions as well inside as outside the organisation.

In June, we had the opportunity to host a Top Employers sharing session in-house on the importance of SDG’s in employer branding.

Bringing together a group of HR specialists to reflect on the war for talent and how integrating SDG’s can help to attract the “right” employees, was a true enriching experience.

We inspired other top employes on our successful Generation Zero campaigns. Our employer brand for young professionals in which we focus on attracting those who want to contribute actively to our companies purpose : building a CO2-neutral energy future together.

An ambition which resonates to many young graduates in various disciplines, all determined to make a difference : young graduates, young IT talents and young tech talents.

How does the Top Employer seal help us in attracting young professionals?

The Top Employer seal plays a vital role in attracting young professionals to our company. It serves as confirmation and reassurance that we have processes and leadership in place to support their professional growth, while also prioritizing their work-life balance and health & safety.

Our HR strategy, vision, policies & processes keep evolving thanks to TE insights & benchmarking.

As an open-minded, positive and caring company, we foster a supportive and inclusive environment where everyone’s contributions are valued and respected. We want our employees to feel “at home” so they can be the best version of themselves. However, Top Employer results & benchmarking insights showed us that there was still room for improvement in the area of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I).

In response, we’ve made DE&I a dedicated HR focus for 2023, defining a DE&I vision, gaining insights from our employees and other companies and implementing processes to objectively evaluate and continuously optimize our DE&I strategy, initiatives and actions.

Our Luminus HR baseline is clear : we do what matters, we catch the moment & we challenge ourselves. TE has been a valuable partner over the past 11 years in supporting our team in achieving this continuous and challenging mission.

Case Study | JTI’s Candidate Survey

Do your candidates value your status as a Top Employer?

By Top Employers Institute

JTI is a certified global Top Employer with 46 000 employees present in more than 130 countries. Since achieving their certification, they have consistently included their certification status in job adverts, career pages and other recruitment channels.

After nine years of implementing best practices, the company sought recruitment data to answer a question related to employer branding. Their question was: How important is it for our candidates that we’re a certified Top Employer?

In 2019 JTI selected Talenthub, a technology platform that integrates with existing HR systems, to collect real-time candidate feedback during the recruitment process. With their technical help, JTI captured accurate feedback from candidates while allowing them to reach out directly to follow up on provided feedback and improve the process where needed.

Download the Case Study to discover how:

They set up a digital survey on their career page and Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) system for candidates who applied at JTI.
JTI verified the impact of the candidate’s journey at all stages and found trends that enabled them to understand the behaviour of their applicants.
JTI implemented a new initiative to track and benchmark their candidate’s application process against other companies to optimise their process.

Our HR priorities are all about accelerating the impact of our talent.

What are your key HR priorities for 2023 and why?

Our HR priorities revolve around maximizing the potential of our talent and fostering a culture of high performance by focusing on:

Driving our cultural transformation through a leader development & culture program “Engage – Shape – Perform”
Empowering and supporting all our people to take ownership of their careers, enabling them to reach their full potential
Shaping a caring environment, in which wellbeing & employee experience at scale is key
Implementing future ways of working (digital – data analytics – virtual assistant & automation)
Embedding Diversity, Equity and inclusion further into everything we do

Which trends do you think will be central in the world of HR in 2023 and beyond?

Important trends in HR that we are taking into account in our strategies are the:

Move from intuition & bias to evidence based working through data analytics
Switch from job based to skill based working
Hybrid working and new office concepts
Focus on selfcare – more focus on preventive action over curative

How has being a Top Employer helped your employer brand?

The Top Employer certification helps to benchmark our company against other top employers and provides useful insights into areas we can still develop or innovate further. It is of course also an important employer branding tool, which can differentiate us from competitors. Many candidates are very well aware of it, and as the labour market is candidate driven, it is really supportive for our brand and for attracting the right candidates.

The tips are often small but have a big impact.

How do you make use of the Top Employers Community?

Since being certified by Top Employers we have been building relationships, not only with the Top Employers Institute, but also with other certified Top Employers. There is a network of organisations willing to share, help one another to progress and learn from each other. I have been brought into contact, via Top Employers, with organisations with more extensive expertise on employee well-being, which has led to virtual workshops on mental health.

How do you share successful practices and processes (with other Top Employers)?

I had the opportunity to be a guest speaker twice, to share my expertise on Talent Acquisition and D&I. Whether I’m on stage or in the audience, after a Connect & Share session I am always inspired and eager to implement what I learn at PageGroup.

How has the Top Employers community contributed to your development?

Being amongst other Top Employers gives me a sense of pride in my work at PageGroup. Reflecting on the practices of other Top Employers helps me to reflect on PageGroup and act upon what we could improve. The tips are often small but have a big impact.

Transforming talent acquisition through the Top Employers Certification Programme

85% of Top Employer organisations agree that the Top Employers Institute Certification creates value for their business, whether it be for their branding, alignment, and benchmarking of HR practices, or connecting with other leaders in HR. When it comes to branding, Top Employers know that the experience of going through a candidate selection process tells a lot more about the organisation than the brand messaging.

At Top Employers Institute, we are always keen to demonstrate the best ways to leverage value from our Certification Programme. Independent and externally verified workforce research, conducted globally among our Top Employers, shows that 85% agree that certification creates value for their business.

It is the branding potential that certification brings with it that is one of the most appreciated benefits. 92% of our Top Employers say they make use of the Certification Seal to attract and/or engage talent.

So how can Top Employers make the most of the opportunity that certification creates in this area?

Recruitment: certification makes a big difference

A great employer brand lies at the heart of any Top Employer’s HR strategy. When it comes to getting the best on board, 70% of those surveyed say they have used the Certification Seal to drive their recruitment process.

Employer branding can only ever be as good as the impression it makes on potential employees. On this, the results are encouraging. 74% of Top Employers agree that the certification process has improved their positioning as an employer of choice.

It is easy to see the positive impression that certification makes on external candidates. The noticeable benefits, according to our Top Employers, include:

Enhanced awareness among candidates, with references to the Certification Seal made in interviews.
Recognition of the value of certification among partners, such as universities or employment agencies.
More interest in posted roles, with more clicks and applications made through company careers pages.
A decrease in both the time taken to fill roles and an increase in quality of applicants.

One Top Employer sums it up well by telling us that the Certification Seal showed potential candidates clearly that “this company is among the best employers in the world”.

High levels of trust between candidate and potential employer lie at the heart of the value that the Certification Seal brings. As one of our Top Employers told us: “For me … most important is that an external candidate [feels that they] can rely on the certificate.”

Onboarding and Induction: Reinforcing the bond of trust

A top talent acquisition strategy, crucially, requires this trust to continue well beyond the initial recruitment process. After hiring comes the equally important task of onboarding and induction. A recent survey of 1000 full-time employees for People Management magazine revealed that:

43% admitted to having changed their minds on at least one occasion after accepting a job offer.
37% put this down to poor or no follow-up, or other bad experiences after the job offer had been made.

Engagement and Retention: Creating a virtuous circle

The greater branding opportunities for Top Employers from certification through recruitment, onboarding and induction also go on to produce a virtuous circle among existing employees. The independent research conducted for us showed that the use of the Certification Seal helped organisations to:

Actively involve current employees as talent brand ambassadors for external candidates
Increase the engagement of existing employees made aware of the achievement of certification.
Decrease turnover, with employees feeling safe and reassured to work for a certified Top Employer.

Talent acquisition: make it easier with Top Employers institute Certification

Top Employers Institute has guidelines and support for certified best in clasee employers who want to leverage their talent acquisition strategy further. This includes everything from how to promote the Certification Seal as effectively as possible on the web site, email signatures or social media, through to how best to display them in job ads. Get in touch today for free and become an employer of choice.