Today’s labor market is predominantly candidate-driven. The increasing number of platforms available for candidates to search for their desired jobs, as well as the rise of flexible working options, has led to job-seekers becoming much more demanding.

This greater availability of jobs means that companies and recruiters have to work harder to locate, attract, hire, and retain top talent.

According to McKinsey, almost 40 percent of American employers say they cannot find people with the skills they need, even for entry-level jobs. Hiring the wrong candidates for a job role can have costly business impacts, in terms of both money and efficiency.

To overcome the challenges brought by a highly competitive recruitment landscape, organizations are forced to innovate. Forward-thinking businesses must embrace technological solutions in their quest to attract top candidates that fit effortlessly into the company culture.

Here are a couple of the most innovative ways in which the HR and recruitment landscape is innovating:

Game-based psychometric assessments

Resumes, interviews and reference checks only show recruiters a small fragment of the picture – the part a candidate wants you to see.

Psychometric assessments, on the other hand, reveal a much bigger picture. Using proven methods, they can make an accurate prediction of whether a candidate is likely to succeed at your company.

While measuring behavioral traits in the recruitment process is by no means a fresh strategy, the gamification of such tests is becoming a popular tool among the most innovative of recruiters.

The reason behind bringing the games from the den into the boardroom? The idea is that unlike a survey-based skills assessment where candidates may second-guess what the employer wants and answer accordingly, a game will garner more authentic results.

This offers businesses a powerful, factual, objective and unbiased ability to evaluate candidates’ fit for the position.

Many large organizations are leveraging the gamification of skill-assessment. According to a 2017 Deloitte report, 29 percent of global business leaders surveyed reported the use of games and simulations in hiring.

Unilever, for example, is using such software to assess applicants before moving them to the next stage of interviews and tests. By adding 20 minutes of game-based assessments into its hiring process, the company hopes to attract more millennial candidates.

“We know that people increasingly live their lives online and our recruitment process must reflect that. This new process will be faster, simpler and more flexible allowing graduates to fit applying around their lives,” explained Leena Nair, Chief HR officer of Unilever.

Avoiding unconscious bias

A wealth of research shows that the hiring process is often biased and unfair. Unconscious racism, ageism, and sexism play a significant role in the on-boarding of candidates. These unconscious biases lead to a problematic effect on our judgment, causing recruiters to make decisions in favor of one person or group – usually, those who are similar to us.

Without the right processes in place, bias can snowball into discriminating practices, totally undermining diversity initiatives.

Fortunately, there are a rising number of tools to help companies reduce bias in the hiring process. These include apps which hide candidate names and photos, tools that enable companies to hire based on performance rather than resume keywords and pre-conceived assumptions, and software which allows you to perform a language analysis of job descriptions to uncover gendered phrases and spot biases.

The digital transformation of HR has opened new opportunities for businesses, of all industries, to implement smarter hiring strategies. Technological solutions allow recruiters to make fair, informed decisions based on powerful insights.

Simply put, if you’re not already harnessing the power of technology, you risk losing out on the best candidates. Here are three solutions to help you smarten up your hiring processes:

Revelian

People are the heart of an organization, each unique with a blend of skills, passions, methods, and motivations. But finding the right combination of ingredients to add to your company’s mixing bowl is not always an easy task.

To garner measurable, data-driven insights into human behavior, Revelian offers businesses of all industries interactive psychometric solutions which have been developed, reviewed, and interpreted by experienced psychologists.

From this data, your business is empowered with the knowledge to help grow your business in many areas including:

• Identifying whom to hire.
• Which employees to nurture and to promote.
• How to create a stronger and more collaborative team.
• How to effectively manage your employees.
• How to reduce the risk of safety-compromizing incidents in the workplace.

Among the company’s extensive range of offerings are psychometric assessments, designed to measure how well-suited a candidate is for your company. Through gamified cognitive ability assessments, candidates can take part in a variety of scenarios to measure performance on skills such as mental agility, attention, and problem-solving.

Culture and employee engagement are integral parts of a business’s success. In fact, a Gallup survey of 1.4 million employees found organizations with high levels of employee engagement experience 21 percent greater productivity and 37 percent lower absenteeism.

With this in mind, Revelian has developed a range of rigorous tests to help measure person-team, person-organization, and person-job fit. With this data, your business can determine whether a candidate would fit well within your company culture.

With this cloud-based HR solution, you can be sure to develop a stronger, more sustainable and more successful business.

Pymetrics

Like Revelian, this US-based company uses a game-based approach to recruitment. Rather than focusing on a more traditional approach to hiring such as grades and self-reported questionnaires, Pymetrics focuses on the cognitive and emotional abilities of candidates.

Candidates are presented with a range of neuroscience games which assess things like memory, emotion detection, risk-taking, fairness, and focus.

Based on the gaming results of existing employees, trait data is analyzed, and trends are identified. From this, the software builds custom algorithms representing success.

The candidate’s results are then analyzed with algorithms that compare their skills with those of existing employees, identifying which career tracks may be best for candidates.

“Neuroscience has revolutionised our understanding of the brain,” the company’s website explains. “We apply this to helping people find their optimal career path, and help companies find ideal candidates.”

What makes this company particularly notable, is their quest to make recruitment fairer. The solutions algorithm results are analyzed and tweaked to ensure they are not giving an advantage to applicants of any gender, race or educational background.

With this solution, businesses can be connected with incredible talent which is often overlooked due to what they look like, how old they may be, or their educational background.

Textio

Unconscious bias is a concerning problem in the recruitment process, with many decisions being swayed by unintentional bias in age, race, and sex.

This problem can begin even before a candidate sends in their resume or attends an interview. In fact, it can begin at the very moment a job advertisement is posted.

Textio is a web-based application used by big named companies such as Twitter, Johnson & Johnson, and Expedia. It helps employers identify which words in job postings and recruitment emails attract the best and most diverse pool of applicants.

Much like a spelling and grammar checker, the tool uses machine learning to flag up words and phrases that are gender-biased.

“On average, hiring teams with a 90+ Textio Score recruit a talent pool that is 24 percent more qualified with 12 percent more diversity — and they do it 17 percent faster,” according to the company’s website.

Johnson & Johnson is an example of a company that has managed to create a far fairer and smarter recruitment process with this digital HR solution. According to the Textio website, the company is now writing job posts that are consistently drawing 9 percent more women into their applicant pool. This is a whopping 90,000 more women in their pipeline every single year!

*Some of the companies featured in this article are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia