Tech, diversity and visas – major impacts on the recruiting sector

August 21st, 2018 | Industry News

The recruitment industry is impacted by many factors, but none has been so significant as technology. Recruitment management software fulfils a variety of needs today: search tool, process management system and database.

The best recruitment CRM is now proactive in the various search and management processes that an effective recruiter undertakes. For example a recruitment consultancy can interrogate a CV in a variety of ways, as well as looking at a candidate’s former employment roles and even their social media trail to help establish if a candidate is a good cultural fit for an employer as well as being well qualified to fulfil the role. Companies are using recruitment database software to create the parameters for background research into candidates – in fact CareerBuilder claims that 70% of employers will investigate a potential employee’s social media presence before offering them employment. That sounds pretty high to us, it might be true of certain industries (the tech industry itself is renowned for data mining its employment talent) but it’s certainly true that a good percentage of UK employers have realised that a candidate profile that doesn’t include their social media presence is likely to be failing in due diligence.

The converse is also true – it’s been calculated that nearly three quarters of the UK workforce is ‘passive’, in other words, not actively seeking employment but ready to explore a new role if the chance came up. Recruiters are becoming adept at using recruiting software to discover and engage with these passive candidates who might be ideal for their client, even though they aren’t apparently on the ‘job market’.

Women, security, recruitment

A recent report into the security industry reveals that just 11% of cybersecurity professionals are female. Sexism and discrimination are seen to be rife, and another study into women in cybersecurity showed that 51% of women and 15% of men felt they had experienced discrimination in the workplace. Many technical industries are struggling to fill positions and online recruitment software can be a benefit. Sophisticated web based recruitment software allows candidates to apply for jobs, confident that they won’t be identifiable through gender or other ‘discriminated against’ characteristics and the ability to strip identifiers from CVs so as to de-prioritise male candidates is an important feature of recruitment agency software.

Recruiting software and Gulf state priorities

Much agency recruiting work is done for the UAE and other Gulf states, so Oman’s recent visa ban on ten sectors including aviation, engineering and information systems technology is bound to have an impact on recruitment agencies. What does it mean more generally? Gulf States generally are looking to improve the number of nationals in senior technical positions, because they wish to reduce their dependency on expatriate expertise. Effective recruitment software that has been focused on finding those candidates with technical expertise should be able to change direction and focus instead on the areas in which such states are currently recruiting, which is largely in teaching and consulting positions designed to help boost national competence.