by Mita Brahma

Recruitment teams in HR have been using online job portals like Monster, Naukri and Careerbuilder for a while now. They have increasingly been exploring networks like LinkedIn and YouTube for a greater understanding about the candidate’s personality. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, blog posts and shared online comments give valuable information to the company about a candidate much before a face-to-face meeting or a Skype/ Facetime call. Company websites, online financial reports, and Glassdoor reviews similarly prepare an employee for the organisation, by giving relevant information before an interview or meeting. 

All this information results in speedier and more effective access for the organisation to candidates who are a better fit for the position. Candidates too with the increased level of information, show interest only in roles and organisations they are most suited for. The processing of applications takes far less time on both sides, with this kind of filtering beforehand.

Most job portals have applications to help with the job-fit process, as well as tracking regarding the assessment and selection process. Companies may also be able to tag resources who are competent and suitable to the organisation, but not available immediately, to access later for possible future vacancies.

However, just moving some of the recruitment positions and processes online, having filtering and tracking processes in place, still does not ensure that candidates who respond are a good fit for the position. Companies need to monitor the communication traffic for their target employee segments, and learn to wade through social connections of referral paths, to reach at their target candidates. One way that is emerging is to form online "talent communities". 

Companies may build their own talent communities. In addition, they can reach out to niche talent communities like UpWork, Zartis or the Indian firm Tadpoles. These platforms have sprung up to showcase the expectations and aspirations of the modern digital worker, who are not happy just being part of online resume banks like the old job portals were.

Both talent communities and job portals are present on various smart devices as well. Companies have to be present on job portals, niche talent communities, maintain their own career website. They may use one platform more than the other, depending on the positions that they are trying to fulfil, and the kind of target segment they are trying to reach out to.

It is clear whatever platform they use, companies have to be better at scouting and engaging potential employees. While online communities can be accessed easily, it is a two-way street. Potential employees have to be engaged online, and a regular, inclusive communication program should be on.

 Apart from reaching out to the right candidates, HR finds assessment processes have got complex too. With digital workplaces demanding skills that are not yet part of formal curriculum, HR cannot depend much on the candidate’s previous academic record. It has been found that high CGPAs in college do not necessarily mean a great worker, and nor do the usual assessments predict performance(1). 

What HR would like to do is to find proven competence required for the job, and to also ensure that the candidate would be ready to pick up on new skills, as the role and demands of the organisation keep changing. This is easier said than done.

To find the best person out of available candidates, if not the right person, assessments need to be redesigned for the digital age worker. 

The best way to predict a person’s fit to doing a job well, is to do just that: to give a sample of the work to be done, and to checkout the performance. This exercise is not a perfect predictor either, and nor can it be done for all types of jobs. However "work sample tests" need to be designed, requiring similar cognitive and creative abilities as the tasks in a given role. The assessment must be capable of being administered remotely as necessary.

Organisations that manages to have an internally validated repertoire of assessments will certainly have a competitive advantage over time. Google is known to give its interviewers standard guides of interview questions based on years of number crunching of finding out the best predictors from in-house data. However, assessments predicting success for one organisation do not translate into success for another. Organisations would have to do their own number crunching on what would work for them, and this would have to be a continuous improvement process.

Of course that is easier said than done. One place companies could look at for best practices in online assessments is the massive online open course offerings like Coursera, Udacity and edX. They have not only reinvented education but also changed online assessments to improve candidate engagement, and speed and efficacy of assessment. For online large scale assessments, HR could use some of the features found in these organisations. For example, why not have more online and transparent peer-to-peer assessments, by current employees, as in the MOOCs? Why not weave some of these practices of online education communities, into the selection process within corporates? 

(1) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00983503#page-1 accessed June 1st, 2016.