Creating a recruitment technology roadmap is crucial to make smart hiring decisions. Let’s see how to pick the right sourcing and assessment technology for an efficient and well-organized recruitment process.

It’s becoming more important than ever for employers to know how to connect with talent and use technology to find, engage and communicate with job seekers. So how can forward-thinking companies increase their odds of being seen by as many qualified candidates as possible?

A recruitment technology roadmap is an organization-specific plan to find and hire new candidates. The roadmap defines where your talent acquisition team should be and the milestones along the way via hiring tools. It may include plans such as team expansion or adding new roles that didn’t previously exist. The roadmap should always have a time component as it lays out the hiring plans chronologically. We say “organization-specific” because each company has its own approaches to growth — what works well for one company may not work for another.

A recent study from research and advisory firm Gartner examines those shifts in the workforce landscape and lays out a road map for navigating the new one. The researchers identified three trends that are rendering traditional recruitment tactics obsolete.

First, the skills needed in many roles have an increasingly short shelf life, owing in part to more-frequent and disruptive technological breakthroughs. A 2019 survey of 3,500 managers found that only 29% of new hires have all the skills required for their current roles, let alone for future ones. The research finds that in key functions such as finance, IT, and sales, positions filled today will require up to 10 new skills within 18 months. It also documents rising uncertainty about what skills will be needed in current and future jobs as the surge in remote work sparks the redesign or automation of many tasks.

Second, the talent pools recruiters have routinely tapped are becoming outmoded. Highly gifted candidates can now be found outside traditional talent clusters, such as leading universities and technical colleges. More and more people are acquiring critical skills informally on the job—or even in their own basements. “Work lulls and layoffs have driven a boom in virtual learning, giving workers new autonomy in developing skills outside their day jobs,” the researchers write.

Finally, candidates are increasingly selective about whom they work for, so firms need a compelling “employment value proposition,” which might involve anything from competitive compensation and benefits to career-development opportunities and a reputation for stellar management. Talented candidates, particularly at high levels, are weighing opportunities differently. Factors such as meaningful work and proximity to family have taken on added importance during the pandemic. The freedom (often the imperative) to work remotely and to manage one’s own schedule has increased employees’ expectations that they can exert considerable control over the design of their jobs. Especially in a period of high unemployment, the researchers say, when people are reluctant to leave a secure position and take a chance on a new one, companies need to offer employee experiences that candidates truly value.

·         Establish objectives

Start by identifying your company’s business objectives and assessing the talent required to achieve them. What do you need from a talent sourcing standpoint? Where are the gaps and what needs to change? With these answers you can evaluate new technology against one important question: does the technology help generate the right candidates to meet your talent sourcing objectives?

·         Get creative

Your sourcing technology strategy can provide recruiters with freedom to think differently and leverage technology in innovative ways. For example, one company encouraged employees to use their own sourcing channels to refer friends. The process was gamified—essentially delivered as a competition— with bonuses and even candy for referrals. Recruiters received referral messages via Twitter and Facebook and each referring employee became a potential source of ready-to-be-leveraged leads

·         Hire for potential, not experience

When hiring managers place less emphasis on academic degrees, certifications, and formal experience, they will naturally look beyond traditional talent pools—the second course of action. Recruiters should target the “total skills market,” looking at in-house talent with adjacent skills, candidates whose skills are self-taught, and—especially with the ubiquity of remote work—people in different geographic locations. Recruiting outside high-priced talent clusters can reduce costs. It should also boost diversity, because nontraditional pools tend to contain more women and people of color than are found in the usual recruiting hot spots.