If you went to a tech-forward HR conference this year, you probably heard words like artificial intelligence, programmatic, predictive, algorithmic, and robots. If you made a drinking game out of it, there would’ve been a ton of hospital admissions for alcohol poisoning just on the first day of these events.
(We don’t recommend a drinking game based on these terms, by the way.)
Talent acquisition vendors are looking for more than a bunch of buzzwords. They want solutions to a big problem that’s difficult to solve: People are generally not great at telling whether someone is going to be a good hire. At least, not without some intelligence on their side to help them figure it out.
So companies as big as Indeed or as agile as Entelo and Restless Bandit are doing really interesting things. Here’s what you should be on the lookout for in 2017.
Better Decision-making
Cloud computing has given innovators in this space a cheap way to crunch a lot of numbers. And we’re beginning to see several of those solutions live side by side in the recruiting process to better guide finalist and hiring decisions, enhance diversity efforts, and give more certainty that the people being hired are truly well qualified.
New Avenues for Discovery
Mining open databases is nothing new, and sourcing tools have been trying to outdo one another in this space over the last half-decade. Now, many of the same search-and-rank algorithms have been turned onto new sources: talent communities, ATSs, and employee directories.
Data Access Uncertainty
The big question on everyone’s mind is what’s going to happen with LinkedIn’s data spigot now that the company has been acquired by Microsoft? It’s not like it was exactly Niagara Falls before, but companies that have built-in access to the social network should be looking at serious alternatives — and for some, that might be incredibly difficult.
If you’re interested in market trends in talent acquisition, make sure to sign up to get notified when our newest report, the 2017 Talent Acquisition Brandscape Report™, is released. It should be out next month and will go into even greater detail on brand and market presence, market sizing, and trends that every vendor, investor, or close follower of the industry should know.
