From obsolete to imperative. Why recruiters are the most important people on payroll

The Importance of Recruiters

The way people find new job opportunities, engage with potential employers and make decisions about their professional futures is dramatically different than it was even a decade ago. As recently as the early 2000s, it was common to limit our search to our own community, a local job board, or friends and family.

But today, with the rise of immense digital connectedness and remote work trends, both in the context of global talent shortages, candidates have more options to consider than ever before.

For employers, this means sourcing the best talent can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. And that’s why the role of recruiter has evolved from highly administrative to business imperative.

Recruiters & the greatest resource

When it comes to the bottom line, there’s no greater impact on a business than hiring the right people for the job. Steve Crabtree of Gallup echoes this conviction, stating that untapped human capital is the next great global resource.

So how do organizations compete? By warmly engaging with candidates during the recruitment process, and mitigating the biases that have historically screened many of them out. And recruiters are the strategic business partners responsible for finding, vetting, and hiring those candidates.

Engaging with candidates

No one likes to feel ignored — especially not when they’re job hunting. That’s why companies using chatbots are 3X more likely to improve the candidate experience. 

Recruiters must be creative, analytical, and have great communication skills — including the ability to engage with candidates who are more than likely in talks with multiple other companies. With more than half of hiring conversations happening online, and outside traditional business hours, conversational AI gives recruiters the ability to engage with candidates continuously, closing the applicant black hole with automated text updates, and enabling candidates to show their skills on their own time - even when recruiters are offline. 

Tools like Hirevue’s Hiring Assistant make the hiring process easy and engaging for candidates, elevating their experience and keeping your hiring pipeline full.

Mitigating bias

Traditionally, recruiters relied heavily on gut feelings and manual processes — limiting their ability to find innovative leaders. As a result, many talented candidates were unfairly screened out of the hiring process due to biases in the application, interview, and evaluation processes. 

But with recent advances in technology, recruiters now have the tools to tap into large pools of qualified talent and hire the people who were formerly overlooked. 

Today’s recruiters are leveraging technology — with tools like skills-based assessments — to discover qualifications that really matter.

The new recruiting: An inbound strategy

In a company-driven job market, recruiters have leverage during the job search process and can rely heavily on getting interested candidates through job boards. But outbound recruitment methods (like sending cold emails or LinkedIn messages) are much less effective in a candidate-driven market.

Modern job candidates take a consumer-like mentality to their job search. Now in the driver’s seat, many are demanding a faster, easier, more fair hiring experience. They decide when they are ready to look for a new job, then look for employers that match their values — much in the same way customers search for a service.

A recruiter’s ability to not just source, but to attract the best talent to meet current and future hiring demands is integral in driving overall business success in today’s hiring climate.

As a result, organizations that empower their recruiters to adopt this same consumer-like approach to candidates will win the war for talent. With 70% of the global workforce comprised of passive talent who aren’t actively searching for a job, recruiters must create a value-driven experience so they have a steady stream of applicants when the time is right.

Inbound recruiting is an ongoing process that engages both active and passive candidates early in the decision-making cycle, giving them the tools and resources they need to make informed decisions, and engaging them from start to finish.

Recruiting is mission critical

In a world where organizations are outsourcing tedious tasks to technology, human abilities like strategic decision-making, creative problem-solving, and communicating across teams have become even more valuable. And recruiters are the link between human capital and organizational success.

At HireVue, we give recruiters an end-to-end hiring experience platform, so you can scale a faster, fairer, and more efficient hiring process. Looking to level up your hiring practices? Check out The Recruiter’s Guide to Hiring When Hiring is Hard.