Recruitment innovations

October 31st, 2017 | Industry News

The decline in job applications in the past year has been a clear response to uncertainty over Brexit and a clear desire to hold onto employment. For 2018 this suggests that successful recruitment consultancies will need to be:

1. Technologically adept – for example online recruitment software will need to make better use of real-time activity. Programmatic advertising (which uses algorithms to buy advertising space in real-time) requires applicant tracking software that can both recognise the best candidates and redirect less attractive ones to other vacancies without dropping them from the recruitment pipeline.
2. Brand driven – in a candidate led market, brands need to be highly attractive to the applicant and that’s not just the client brand, recruitment agency brands also need to be clearly differentiated and appealing to individuals who want to be confident about their recruiting platform.
3. Communicative – the old system of only contacting candidates when a job is on offer and only speaking to clients when they have vacancies is dead. There is no such thing as pipeline information, instead webs of knowledge link candidates to clients to agencies and regular communication in all directions not only keeps a recruitment database current but ensures agencies can plan ahead for horizon events such as changes in legislation, business practice or even likely changes to organisational culture as major players move on, or up.

EU legislation affecting every HR database

In May 2018 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force across Europe, including the UK, where the new Data Protection Bill is almost identical to the EU legislation, despite the Brexit vote.

Every HR and recruitment database will be affected by the new legislation as both candidate data and client information are affected. New requirements mean that the collection, use, storage and disposal of data are all changing and any failure to manage information requires notification to the supervisory authority within 72 hours and can lead to fines of up to £7.9 million or 2% of turnover.

Steps every recruiter should take:

• Ensure staff are educated about the implications of the Data Protection bill.
• Check that your recruitment software database is Data Protection Bill compliant or if necessary, upgrade to cloud recruitment software from a supplier you can rely on to deliver compliance and keep updating the system so it remains on top of legislation, regardless of how Brexit pans out.
• Talk to external suppliers – clients and partners need to be harmonising their systems to meet the bill’s requirements so there isn’t a domino effect from their failure to stay on top of legislative changes.
• Be cautious about data acquisition – as an example, different consents will be needed for different activity stages of the recruitment process. This means that ‘explicit consent’ – a client or customer being given an option to agree or disagree to the collection and use of personal data – must be repeatedly sought. To avoid recruitment processes grinding to a halt, recruitment software solutions need to be flexible and capable of rapid and clear updating.