This method can drive down time-to-hire by more than half.
By Jillian Phelan
Only a few years ago, talent acquisition was a bear market for HR. A pandemic that pushed many workers into early retirement and led to many others to focus on caring for loved ones or to simply sit on the employment sidelines created leverage for labor and left hiring pros to scratch and claw for a smaller pool of high-quality available talent.
That balance is shifting. According to one new report from isolved, more than two-thirds (65%) of surveyed HR leaders believe the power is moving back into the hands of employers. However, among those same survey respondents, 62% also say their industry is facing a self-inflicted talent crisis and that outdated hiring practices are the culprit.
Hiring has remained virtually unchanged in most industries for decades, and when it has evolved, change has happened at a snail’s pace. The fallout is that many HR departments aren’t equipped to attract, sort through, and lock down the best talent. Hiring professionals have become overwhelmed by a newly AI-powered application process, and many of the best candidates are snapped up by more efficient hiring departments or overlooked amid thousands of seemingly perfect resume submissions. Even the most seasoned HR leaders have to think about hiring differently in today’s market.
HR Leaders Need Better Tools for Talent Acquisition
As the isolved report notes, “The perceived ‘talent shortage’ often stems not from a lack of qualified people, but from unclear job requirements, inflated expectations, and candidate experiences that feel confusing or unwelcoming.” In other words, the root of the hiring problem isn’t the candidates themselves, but rather the process of finding and vetting those candidates.
It’s time to modernize hiring practices and find new tools to more reliably and efficiently connect with high-quality prospects. With artificial intelligence having democratized and supercharged the job-hunting process, more candidates are flooding HR departments with an exponentially larger volume of applications. AI gives everyone the power to build a resume, write a cover letter, and tweak any materials to suit a particular industry or position almost instantly. What has leveled the playing field for workers has exploded its scale for hiring professionals. Haystack needles are now easier to track down than qualified, well-suited candidates.
At least, that’s the case when it comes to traditional means. What HR leaders are learning is that the best way to tackle the issue is by matching the advancing tech of applicants. Hiring leaders can now leverage AI tools to automate many of the administrative functions that once took up a great deal of time and energy, while also accelerating and sharpening the process even as the piles of resumes stack higher than ever before.
Skills-Based Hiring Leads to Better Outcomes for HR Teams
Speaking of the resume, it’s just about time to write the epitaph for that lumbering dinosaur. A record of where a job applicant has worked, for how long, what rank or level they reached at that company, and even certain accomplishments within their role there often have very little to do with that candidate’s potential with another organization. Resumes are data summaries, but they are not predictive.
And because resumes and cover letters can also now be optimized by AI for a job description or particular company, hiring teams can’t fully trust the picture essentially painted by a bot. Talent acquisition then becomes a process of culling through homogenized, often-similar resumes in which nobody truly stands out.
Instead, more HR leaders are turning to another modern tool: skills-based hiring. Rather than collecting endless AI-driven candidate work summaries, hiring professionals can learn how prospects process information, measure emotional intelligence, and factor in cultural fit through science-based talent assessments administered early in the interview process. These assessments more accurately measure a candidate’s aptitude for job success, even when they lack a traditional educational or professional background, and there’s much less risk a candidate will use AI to tamper with results. Hiring teams can surface candidates with the strongest scores in relevant areas early on and move them to the next phase of the interview process with confidence.
Skills-based hiring has a proven track record of improving outcomes for both employers and job candidates, including cutting down time-to-hire by more than half, which long predates the AI-driven transformation happening in hiring today. As hiring leaders seek ways to overcome the “self-inflicted talent crisis,” skills-based hiring will quickly become industry best practice.
The Human Element of HR Remains Vital
Modern tools are often needed for modern problems, and hiring is no exception. But it’s important to recognize that all the central processing units, data servers, and artificial intelligence in the world aren’t enough to bridge the talent gap. The most important element of human resources remains humans.
The computing power and speed of AI has great value to human resources departments, but only in the hands of capable hiring pros who understand its necessary inputs and can interpret its outputs. At the end of the day, hiring is at least as much about relationships and reading human behavior as it is about data. Artificial intelligence can handle only one of those tasks.
Skills-based hiring and AI-powered data processing are the instruments of the modern hiring professional. The resume paradigm is dead. It’s time for HR leaders to embrace evidence-based, science-backed tools and tactics to search for, select, and sign the high-quality talent that is best suited for their organizations.
Jillian Phelan is chief people officer for Criteria Corp.
