Many people think that the HR department only handles recruiting and administration tasks. Sure, hiring & firing employees or processing payrolls cannot miss from the department’s responsibilities. However, in today’s fast-paced business environment, the human resources teams need to step up their game and adapt to the new challenges. That means coming up with something extra.

My vision of HR nowadays

In my opinion, as an entrepreneur with more than ten years in the markets, HR relies on three central pillars. Apart from recruiting and admin, there’s also the employee nurturing process, which is equally important.

Let me tell you more about each of these three pillars.

Recruiting

Finding the right fit for your needs

An HR team needs to identify current and future trends while making recruiting more exciting and rewarding for prospective employees. Unfortunately, many recruiters still hunt for the best people in their respective activity domains when they should look for potential employees who fit the company’s culture.

If you recruit people who blend in with the team and embrace your company’s values, they will most likely perform a lot better than someone who does not adapt to your way of doing things.

Hard skills vs. soft skills

Every individual possesses two different categories of skills: hard and soft. It’s the recruiters’ job to find the perfect candidates with the right mix of hard and soft skills for each position.

Hard skills are related to specific technical knowledge and training that recommend a candidate for an open position, while soft skills are personality traits. Knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite or WordPress falls into the hard skills category. Leadership, teamwork, and creativity are all soft skills.

Administration

A company cannot perform well if it’s managed poorly. From an HR perspective, everything must be in place, from processes to procedures and documentation.

The HR admin sector includes processing payrolls, updating company policies, maintaining employee and business records, and many different tasks.

Nurturing

The onboarding part of the entire process is essential, as your HR team must help employees accommodate their new jobs. Sometimes, this can last from a couple of days to several weeks or even months.

Additionally, recruiters need to continuously build their relationships with employees to nurture their development for mutual success. Communication is critical here: the more knowledgeable employees are about your business, the better work they’ll do.

Also, work towards growing their engagement while also focusing on their needs and problems. Constant assessment will help people adhere faster to all the company’s values and organizational culture.

The HR department should be a bridge between employees and management. Through it, the management must have clear feedback regarding the company’s strengths and weaknesses.

We live in a highly competitive business environment, and the power of your company’s organizational culture can make all the difference. Finding an edge for yourself becomes mandatory if you plan to grow.

In the few words below, I will tell you about a solution I plan to implement in my company’s HR department: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A.I – the future in HR is here

90% of Fortune 500 companies use AI in recruiting

The process of recruiting and nurturing the best people with the right skills for your business could turn out to be time-consuming, frustrating, and very challenging.

That’s why big names such as Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, or Intel use Artificial Intelligence tools and resources to hire the best candidates. 90% of Fortune 500 companies employ applicant tracking systems (ATS) to get the job done.

After learning more about ATS, I’m impressed would be an understatement, and I’m sure that more and more small and medium business enterprises will start using them.

Take a look at the graph below to see how widespread ATS currently is.

What’s an ATS?

An ATS is a software application that helps HR employees recruit qualified candidates by filtering, organizing, and streamlining job applications.

Companies already using ATS are reporting tremendous productivity increases every month. At the same time, the hiring time has shortened— you can see more similar stats in the graph I’m attaching below:

So how does the ATS tool get to such incredible results?

ATS programs automate almost everything in the recruiting process, including:

Job Posting

Posting open positions to numerous free and paid job sites such as the company’s social networks, job portals, corporate employment sites, or social media pages helps organizations gain a wide range of applicants.

Resume screening

Resume screening refers to the process of matching candidates with job requirements based on individual skills and qualifications: work experience, education, knowledge, personality traits, and competencies.

ATS systems automatically filter applicants and list the best candidates for a specific job opening. Then, recruiters decide whether to call the candidate for the next interview or to reject the application.

Matching

Interview planning and evaluation

ATS software connects to the recruiter’s email system and allows them to set up appointments with candidates without constantly exchanging emails or phone calls. Additionally, interviewers receive structured feedback forms so that evaluation becomes a lot more straightforward.

HR departments can also use the power of AI to uncover potential suitable employees in the company’s database, boosting increases by 20% in hire retention and reducing by 50% the number of interviews for the same number of hires.

ATS and recruiting – because time is money

Due to the competitiveness in the talent market, highly qualified people are only available for a short time. Simultaneously, an opening for a corporate position receives 250 applications on average, and 88% of these resumes are unqualified.

These processes demand a high volume of resources while wasting recruiters 25% of their time for resume screening only.

With the automation of artificial intelligence, HR departments also ensure they remove bias from the hiring process, making it faster and more beneficial for all sides involved.

According to studies, ATS systems can provide your HR team with the following advantages:

• Hire faster: on average, it can take up to 40 days to fill a position. Without the HR team’s manual screening time and automating interviewing and matching, this time gets cut to more than half.
• Get qualified talent from the existing database: recruiters get back to qualified candidates faster due to complex and efficient selection algorithms.
• Hire the right talent: AI-powered resume screening software reduces the chance of hiring less qualified people, considering your desired hard & soft skills.
• Save more money: Organizations don’t need to spend their resources on resume screening or other automatable parts of recruiting thanks to ATS.

My conclusions regarding AI in business

I’m determined to start using AI in my recruiting system, and my suggestion for you is to consider doing it as well.

A faster and more efficient hiring process for reduced costs – we all want these benefits, don’t we? The alternative would be to say no to the current big thing and failing to understand what you could be missing.

You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn!