Raj Das, Global Co-Founder & Indian CEO, Hirect

Raj Das is the Global Co-Founder & Indian CEO of Hirect which connects talents to startups without any middleman. At the company’s helm, Raj is responsible for overseeing end-to-end business operations, primarily the management of Product & Marketing in India. An IIT-Bombay alumnus, Raj brings a rich experience of 3-4 years in mobile internet space and has also mastered product management and user growth. Through Hirect, Raj strives to encourage youngsters to join startups and build wealth for the nation as well as for themselves. With the startup culture growing leaps and bounds, he aims to make Hirect the go-to hiring partner for startups and a household name that recruiters can connect with promising talents to unlock unmatched growth opportunities. Raj is also a cricket fan, music buff and loves to binge-watch movies and TV series in his downtime. 

 

The pandemic has made remote working a mainstream practice. While it has pushed organizations to go digital, the story of the HR domain is no different. Hiring strategies have now shifted from in-person to virtual interviews using video conferencing tools. Almost every sector is investing in these digital recruitment tools to enhance candidate experience while also ensuring cost optimization across the hiring process. 

Benefits of digital hiring 

There is a good reason why organizations are digitalizing hiring processes. Digital hiring connects employers to candidates directly which helps companies especially startups to reduce the dependency on recruiters/consultants and optimize their recruitment costs as well as time. Modern recruitment tools are not only limited to conducting interviews, but it also includes a slew of other critical factors that help employers make better hiring decisions. For instance, it enables them to host pre-employment aptitude, cognitive, domain, and psychometric assessments, predictive analytics for future skills, competency frameworks, and accompanied job-role mapping, unlike traditional hiring, which is entirely reliant on manual processes. It also helps employers to do due diligence about a candidate and record the assessments for future reference in the digital hiring process. 

Companies that are investing in modern recruitment tools 

According to a report, IT/ITES firms in India have spent $150-200 million to automate recruitment. Large organizations like IBM, Accenture, Tech Mahindra, and TCS, among others have taken hiring to another level. They are developing in-house tech platforms for digital campus recruitment, which involves application tracking, candidate search & match, talent acquisition analytics and AI assessment. 

On the other hand, companies like Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Capgemini, etc., have additional preferences. They not only look at buying recruitment platforms but also build such platforms, mainly for digital campus hiring, recruitment analytics and candidate bots. 

Use cases

The American multinational technology corporation Microsoft recently enhanced its video conferencing tool Microsoft Teams by integrating it with Phenom People, a global HR tech company, to accelerate the hiring process. This move helped facilitate better coordination between managers and talent acquisition teams, this resulting in better output. 

Similarly, the European financial services leader Societe Generale leveraged Hyreo’s candidate experience and automation platform and applied it to Oracle Cloud Infra to navigate candidates through the job application process seamlessly. This upgrade increased the recruiter’s productivity by 20% while also cutting down the hiring costs. Hyreo is the world’s first recruiting CRM with deep conversational AI and virtual hiring capabilities.

Modern advancements like AI, ML, bots and prescriptive analytics have helped various companies digitize talent fulfillment and external recruitment, thereby helping IT/ITES firms reduce revenue loss by 20-25% and enhance the candidate experience. 

A few key trends for companies to keep in mind

As per a study, 68% of mid-to-small IT/ITES companies with an employee strength of 5,000 lack robust demand management, application tracking system and Human Capital Management (HCM) tool. Companies must note that these elements are the foundation of digitizing their hiring mechanisms. Hence, investing in a strong record management system is essential to identify and absorb the best talents. 

AI-based advancements help organizations parse basic candidates into ATS and HCM tools. But with employers rushing to onboard candidates to quickly address demand-supply problems, the quality of candidate and employee data gets affected. Now, this can become a challenge for AI tools and create a negative impact on their decision-making capabilities. As a result, companies must focus on improving candidate data integrity to ensure accuracy to digital recruitment tools. 

Likewise, if you dig a little deeper, you will observe that these intelligent systems need unique identifiers – role, skill and level (RSL) of the candidate. Based on these parameters, these tools decipher insights, which involve projection & planning, demand translation, internal fulfillment, career & capability building, etc. Therefore, RSL plays a pivotal role across the hiring lifecycle. 

AI taking on an increasing role in Digital Hiring

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is penetrating several digital hiring solutions. These include advanced statistical modelling and big data analytics to assess current and future talent acquisition/talent management requirements. AI solutions are also aiding automatic interviewing systems and databanks. 

Another aspect that companies are focusing upon is diversity. Where digital hiring platforms come into the picture from this perspective is in identifying the most suitable candidates from several sourcing channels and connecting them with companies’ hiring managers. Such AI-based solutions are flexible as they are easily deployable on the cloud. 

What’s even better is their operability across arrange of mobile devices, and not just on computers or laptops. This increases the candidate experience and hiring efficiency. AI-based digital hiring systems are further reducing hiring and admin costs and costs pertaining to ‘unfit hires’. This is helping employers curb attrition rates and replacement costs

In closing 

Several creative digital hiring platforms have sprung up, with an ‘all-under-one-roof hiring solutions’ offering. This vast umbrella includes seamless synchronization of conventional / video resumes & interviewing, Application Tracking System (ATS), shortlisting, questionnaires, data analysis and sifting, salary closures and offer rollouts, and many other user-friendly and speedier systems.

A scattered, unconnected digital hiring system only leads to chaotic hiring. That’s why thousands of young Startups, and even several modern enterprises are switching to entirely new, all-integrated mobile-based hiring portals, which not only speed up things, but are also much more reliable in terms of quality fitment and reduced overall costs related to hiring. 

In a nutshell, HR tech is rapidly evolving by leveraging new-age technologies, and thus giving a better experience and desired output to talent acquisition teams and helping companies attract and absorb the best talents available in the market. 

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