Predictive recruitment can make it easier by allowing recruiters to evaluate the capacity to succeed of employees, whether it is their capacity to accomplish a mission or their integration in the team and their understanding of the corporate culture. Workforce is often a key factor of business performance. Recruiters need to make sure they find the right employee for the job, which is sometimes an inexact science.
Predictive recruitment is about finding the perfect candidate through computerised statistics. This process allows recruiters to avoid bad surprises when they meet candidates.
Why Using Predictive Recruitment?
Some elements can affect the recruitment quality and therefore decrease the chances to find the right candidate for the job:
- Recruiter subjectivity
In most cases, recruiters base their selection on application material (CV, covering letter) before they meet candidates. However, recruiters are also humans and their objectivity can be altered during the selection phase (a candidate with the same hobby, from the same town or university for example).
- Pressure from the company
HR services can face a lot of pressure from companies when it comes to recruiting fast and under a limited budget, which can affect the recruitment quality.
- Legislative and societal evolutions
Recruiters need to take into consideration legislative and societal evolutions: avoiding any kind of discrimination or prejudices, while making sure candidates’ data stay secured and confidential.
Predictive recruitment represents a solution to avoid these risks. Using computerised techniques to evaluate the profile of each candidate allows a fast screening on perfectly objective criterias.
How To Use It?
Predictive recruitment requires:
- To find quality data on candidates: there is an upstream work of gathering data through new technologies (social networks, online tests, detailed forms, etc)
- To identify significant variables for the position to be filled (qualification, education level, skills, etc) which implies an identification of qualities and experiences needed for the job beforehand.
The main advantage for human resources is to gather enough information to anticipate the efficiency of a future employees (their ability to reach objectives, their progress margin or ability to fit in the team for example)
This is a prospective logic, which aims to find the perfect person for the job and therefore to allow the firm to be more efficient.
Advantages Of Predictive Recruitment
Using this process has some significant advantages for the company:
- To avoid standard profiles
By identifying the key elements of success for the mission, the recruiter can hire the person that best fits requirements and limit the risk of mistakes.
Which qualities the candidate needs to have for the mission? Away from standard profiles, predictive recruitment identifies the right capacities, experiences and characters. This way, atypical profiles emerge, perfectly adapted for the mission and objectives of the job.
- To guarantee a suited interview
Candidates maximize their chances to find a job by making an attractive CV, graphic and creative. However, when the interview comes, recruiters often realize that they are not the right fit. Sometimes, even candidates realize the job is not what they thought it would be. Predictive recruitment being based on objective criterias, the preselection guarantees that recruiters and candidates are matching the requirements of both sides.
- To avoid discriminations
This recruitment process does not take into consideration characteristics such as gender, age, race, sexual orientation or even union membership. The selected data is strictly related to professional aptitudes: skills, experiences, etc.
In theory, this process is a way to optimize recruitment with candidates that fit the job perfectly. However, this solution is not always adapted to every company.
The Limits
Predictive recruitment has some limits that can be reluctant to some human resources managers:
- Some factors can not be measured
Employees performance is not only based on their capacities, it also depends on their interactions with the team and the working atmosphere. Human beings are complex, therefore feelings and reactions between individuals can hardly be measured by statistics.
- Candidates misunderstanding
Candidates who have not been chosen may think they have been eliminated because of illegitimate reasons. Indeed, it is difficult to explain that only a statistic process has determined that they were not a good fit”¦
- Sensitive data management
In order to respect the Federal Privacy Law on data use and exploitation, human resources managers need to make sure the information gathered during the process of predictive recruitment is protected.
- An important investment
The continuous search for information and data analysis represents an important cost for a company. Even if return on investment can be high on a long-term period, this solution is more adapted to companies with a high workforce budget.
For those interested in predictive recruitment techniques but who do not want to invest a lot in it at first, intermediate ways exist. Identification of the key factors of success for each job and anticipation can be a start for a predictive human resources approach.
Do you use predictive recruitment techniques? Share your experience with us on the comment section!
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