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Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the world of work – and talent acquisition and recruitment is no exception. In the infographic below, we explain the impact of this new technology on talent acquisition and our recommendations to HR to best prepare this shift.
In the competitive world of recruitment, companies are constantly looking for ways to streamline their HR processes and save time to be efficient. This is where cutting-edge AI-powered technologies such as ChatGPT or BARD can become invaluable. This blog post gives you 5 tips to help automate many of the tedious tasks involved in recruitment, allowing recruiters to focus on more strategic initiatives. Don't miss out our top 3 AI solutions that HR managers shoud use in 2024.
Writing job descriptions can sometimes be laborious, even more so when you want them to be different, convincing and attractive. AI (Artificial Intelligence) solutions such as ChatGPT or BARD can help you write more engaging, effective descriptions that highlight your company's culture and specific advantages. The benefits are twofold: attract more qualified candidates and improve the overall recruitment experience!
So how do you go about it? Provide the tool with all the information and instructions on the position you're recruiting for and ask it to write an impactful advert for you. Then make your choices from the suggested wording (ChatGPT, Bard) picking and choosing only the parts you like. In short, do your own cooking!
Scheduling interviews can be a real logistical headache, especially when you have to deal with the agendas of several candidates and interviewers. ChatGPT and BARD can simplify this process for you by automatically scheduling interviews according to individual availability and preferences. The advantage? Save time and frustration and ensure that interviews are conducted in a timely and well-organized manner.
How do you achieve this? Integrate ChatGPT and BARD into your interview management system and provide the availability of candidates and interviewers. Intelligent algorithms analyze this data to automatically suggest compatible time slots, simplifying the scheduling in an efficient and automated way.
Interacting with potential candidates can be a time-consuming task. Use AI to craft dynamic, personalized contact messages. Whether you're responding to inquiries or conducting preliminary interviews, ChatGPT or BARD's natural language capabilities improve communication, enabling you to connect more effectively with candidates and speed up the early phases of the recruitment process.
How do you get started? Integrate ChatGPT or BARD into your candidate communication platform. By providing contextual information, these AIs can automatically generate personalized messages, facilitating interactions and speeding up the initial stages of recruitment.
Preparing interview questions can be a time-intensive task. Generative AI enables you to speed up the process of creating questions and thus preparing for the interview. Your interview questions will be tailored to assess whether the candidate matches the company's values and expectations.
How do you do it? Provide ChatGPT or Google's BARD with key details about the position you are recruiting for and let them suggest a set of questions that could be asked during the interview to assess candidates' skills. In addition to the job description, don't hesitate to provide information about the company's culture. This will enable AI to generate questions that assess candidates' cultural fit.
A smooth onboarding experience is essential if new employees are to feel at home and integrate quickly into your company. By tailoring induction content to the role and experience of each new employee, you can significantly improve the quality of the employee experience right from the onboarding phase. A positive, welcoming atmosphere right from the start of their journey with your organization will remain a pleasant memory for them. And as the saying goes, "You only have to make one good impression".
So how do you go about it? Ask AI to help you generate personalized onboarding materials: welcome emails, training schedules, relevant company information etc.
In today’s remote-first world, online talent assessments have become a crucial part of the recruitment and hiring process. Companies often rely on these assessments to identify and select the most suitable candidates for open roles.
With the increased scrutiny placed on online assessments due to the rise of automated language modeling and artificial intelligence, it’s now more important than ever for companies to ensure their assessment results are valid and lead to accurate data-driven hiring decisions.
A study conducted by HirePro, a trusted recruitment automation and proctoring solution provider, found that “30% to 50% of candidates cheat during entry-level job assessments.” While this figure drops to 10% to 25% for lateral job assessments, companies must be proactive in curving cheating in their talent assessments. This is where online remote proctoring provides the most value to talent acquisition professionals.
Proctoring is the practice of monitoring candidates during an assessment. Its role during the testing process is to ensure the fairness and security of the assessment, prevent cheating, and ensure all test takers follow the given rules and guidelines. There are three main formats in which proctoring is utilized:
Online talent assessments offer numerous advantages, such as flexibility and accessibility, but they also pose specific challenges that can compromise the accuracy and validity of results. Some of the key challenges include:
Online proctoring plays a pivotal role in addressing the challenges associated with talent assessment platforms. By incorporating online proctoring measures, companies can enhance the credibility of their candidate evaluation process. Here are some key benefits of proctoring:
Proctoring is an essential part of our talent assessment platform. Our goal is to ensure the fairness and reliability of your talent acquisition process. That’s why we have partnered with HirePro, a leading remote proctoring provider, to bring you automated proctoring solutions across our talent assessment portfolio.
As technology continues to evolve, you can be sure we’re continuously improving our proctoring methods to safeguard the integrity of our assessment and strengthen the confidence in your candidate evaluation process.
Learn more about how Pearson TalentLens uses proctoring to deliver valid results.
The impact of making a ‘bad hire’ can have a resounding effect on businesses performance and profitability. At a time of year when businesses are implementing and forward planning their talent decisions, understanding what makes a ‘bad hire’ and how you can avoid this route is essential.
Research shows that ‘up to 20 percent of new hires’ leave within the ‘first 45 days of their new role.’ (HR News) A ‘bad hire’ could be the result of a mismatch between job role and skill set, values that do not align between company environment / expectation vs personal values, or team fit.
There are also business factors that can lead to organisations making a negative hiring decision. Poor onboarding processes, lack of face-to-face interviews, and pressure to make quick hiring decisions due to time and budget demand. A bad hire is costly, estimated at three times higher than the salary paid, plus the impact a bad hire can have on team morale and performance.
34% of HR professionals cited psychometrics as an effective way to improve recruitment processes, by gaining insight into personality, aptitude, and behaviours required for their roles. Role assessment by Pearson provides a range of renowned assessment tools including the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal that can provide a granular view of each candidates' job fit and how they rank against other applicants who are being considered for the same position.
Avoid outdated proxies and look at recruiting based on skill-set - the competencies and skills essential to your role as opposed to credentials. This gives you a wider talent pool to choose from and helps you avoid overlooking valuable candidates.
With skill-gaps having a significant impact on future business development, upskilling internal members of staff will help to protect your business. Identifying areas of concern and developing staff into new roles could help improve employee retention and avoid the possibility of making a ‘bad hire’ by mismatching skills and role requirements.
A bad hire is a costly mistake to make for any organisation, but by planning for your recruitment needs and investing in tools such as psychometrics and hiring solutions you can gain the insight needed to avoid this mistake and strengthen your business for the year ahead.
What is the Pragmatist Learning Style and how can it help shape L&D plans?
Almost 50% of workplace skills will change within five years, putting learning and development high on the growth and furture of work agenda. But how people learn depends on multiple variables. From cognitive receptiveness to information, emotive state of mind, personal preference, motivation and also an aptitude for engaging with new information or learning materials.
Today’s employees want something more from work – they want an opportunity to evolve and grow – and this is where understanding an individuals learning style can really help employees. Focussing on their individual goals, looking ahead to new roles – and in the long-term for organisations driving talent retention.
We often assess learning styles by using learning cycle model’s like David Kolb’s learning cycle or to better understand individual proficiency for learning. Understanding one’s learning styles is more complicated than an immediate decision on whether someone is an aesthetic learner or a visual learner. Especially, when you consider that a learner may go through the learning cycle, often reverting between multiple learning styles before settling on a specific learning preference. But the insight gained can assist in shaping learning and development plans for employees for the future. Below we take a look at one of the four key learning styles – the pragmatist learning style.
The Honey and Mumford Learning Style Questionnaire has four types of learning style: Activists, Reflectors, Theorists, and Pragmatics. Like all learning styles in the LSQ, the Pragmatist Learning Style is unique in many ways.
The pragmatist learning style is very forward-thinking in the sense that they actively encourage new trends, trying things out and from a philosophical standpoint, the pragmatist is often at the forefront of new ideas and concepts. This helps lead to new ways of thinking, ideas and processes within an organisation, but also generally from a social-economical standpoint.
The pragmatist learner learns best when in collaborative problem-solving situations. This may for example be internal discussions or conversations surrounding a business problem where the pragmatist learner can see multiple perspectives and take away useful insights to consider.
In most business cases, the pragmatist learner learns best from workshops, team huddles and conferences. They find documentation such as case studies and literature on the subject matter useful post-meeting to deliberate a concept or perspective. They use this time to fuel their learning by contemplating the concept and how this can be applied in the business environment.
Additionally, the pragmatist's learning style benefits from solving problems. Naturally, being keen to take on board new ideas, perspectives etc. the pragmatist learning style often enjoys tackling business problems as this provides them with the perfect opportunity to employ new learnings in real-world working environments. This innate desire to test out things makes them a great advert for testing and learning.
Pragmatists tend to be practical and realistic, over theoretically led. Hence, when shaping learning and development plans it is important to remember that a pragmatist learners learning can stagnate if the learning is all theory and there is no model or process they can test or learn from. They are not the learners to conceptualise without some grounding in previous learning/model/idea etc. But by identifying a clear benefit from the learning opportunity pragmastic learners can decipher what information is valuable and apply this to personalise and business opportuntiies.
Interestingly, guidance is a key area. For example, a pragmatist learner may benefit from practice or guidance from instructions/experienced personnel who can show them the way. For many Gen Z learners mentors are reportingly having a positiv impact. According to research, '93% of mentees believe their mentoring relationship was useful’ (MentorcliQ). Identifying learning styles can help L&D teams drill down into what works for the individual and could help in establishing strong relationships with other learners.
In business, it can be beneficial to test your talents' proficiency for learning and the styles from which they most benefit. It’s important to have a varied pool of varied learning styles within each team and throughout each business function. This way, different types of learning, action and development can take place, catering for an improved learning and working environment. In doing so, individual team members can help improve each other and foster more collaboration on projects and tasks. Additionally, each learning style poses various forms of cognitive thinking that can benefit the business. From abstract reasoning to critical thinking, the more variety in the learning styles within the organisation, the more opportunity for various thinking types to emerge and benefit the solving of business probledxms both short and long term.
TalentLens has vast experience in administering the Honey and Mumford Learning Questionnaire to businesses and local governments throughout the UK.
We have worked with Global 100 companies and small businesses to improve their screening of candidates and team member learning styles.
With the development of remote and hybrid working, the behavioural skills of candidates have become very important. Companies are looking for employees with adaptability, those able to demonstrate autonomy and agility - soft skills that are not always easy to assess. This is why recruiters are choosing to use a number of tests, including test of personality. We explore what are the advantages of this type of test for the company and the candidate? How to use it in the recruitment process?
A personality test is a test whose objective, through a series of questions, is to analyse the personality of an individual. Frequently used as a recruitment test, it more precisely evaluates the dominant traits of a person's character, their behavioural profile in the professional environment, and, sometimes, their motivations and values.
All our tests are reliable and comply with ethical rules. Each of them meets specific psychometric criteria, guarantees of their reliability: fidelity, validity, discriminating power. These professional tests can be used by psychologists, and human resources professionals; and some require training to be administered. They come in different formats: statements to classify, quiz, questionnaire.
In the context of recruitment, the personality test has many advantages, both for the company and for the candidate.
Personality tests allow you to go beyond the written application and discover personality traits that do not appear on the CV, before or after an interview. Through these types of tools, the evaluation of the personality of a candidate is refined. For example, you could check if an aspect of the personality would not be appropriate for the role, or on an area which you have doubts.
Another advantage of having a personality test is to eliminate cognitive biases, which makes recruitment more objective. It avoids recruiting based on simple intuition, which can be misleading. Finally, thanks to standardised tests, candidates are evaluated fairly.
If the personality test provides information that helps to objectify the job interview, it also helps to identify the personality profiles that best match the position.
By identifying the profile that best corresponds to the open role, this type of test reduces the risk of recruitment errors, and the cost they imply for the company. If you are looking for a specific personality type, tests before the interview will save time during the candidate screening stage. You can then complete follow the tests with a discussion on the results, particularly focusing on certain dominant traits of the candidate's personality.
Taking a personality test also has certain advantages for the individual applying. Indeed, the report allows him to get to know himself better, even to discover character traits that he did not suspect. Sometimes the result is stunning for a candidate, as it can accurately reflect their personality and confirms what the person already knows. Knowing themselves well allows the candidate to work on how to present themselves and, if they join the company, to pay attention to their “weaknesses”.
Recruiters can use the personality test in two ways:
Organizations using assessments for recruitment should follow best practice guidelines set out by responsible bodies such as the British Psychological Society. Candidates should be informed of the nature of the test, how their results will be used and who will have access, and how long their results will be retained for. Any tests should also be delivered by an appropriate professional with the relevant training for the test being offered.
Test results should be kept confidential within the company but passed on to the candidate. In practice, they are generally communicated during a feedback interview and are accompanied by a report containing a personality assessment. A tool for dialogue between the candidate and the recruiter, the personality test also represents an aid to assessment and recruitment. Thus, if the company decides to retain a candidate despite certain weak points regarding the position sought, it can inform future onboarding and coaching plans.
With the right strategy and tools, you'll empower your talent acquisition teams to make the right hiring decisions. Want to see how Pearson TalentLens can work within your hiring process? Learn more about our talent assessment library.
Future-proofing recruitment strategies with psychometric insights.
There’s no avoiding the pace at which jobs are evolving, and along with them the skills required to succeed. Recently, LinkedIn highlighted the top 25 fastest-growing job titles from Data Science Manager to Machine Learning Engineer. Many roles didn’t exist ten years ago, others have developed as technology has advanced.
Add to this mix - the development of AI and digital technology, changes in the economic and global climate, new generations taking up positions in the workplace and shifts in work-life priorities - and we have a talent market that is continually being shaped and moulded by these factors into something new.
Organizations are looking for ways to navigate this evolving talent market and identify candidates who have the right skill sets, abilities and shared values for their business. Research indicates that “just over half (52%) of talent leaders in the UK are using analytics or technology to support their hiring and workforce planning decisions,” making psychometric assessments an ideal way to help recruitment/hiring managers, select top talent, develop current employees and evolve employees into future roles.
Psychometric tests for recruitment are the key to matching the very best candidates to the most suitable positions. They are used to measure a range of crucial skills which can aid the recruitment process, such as:
Interviews assess a candidate’s suitability for a role up to a certain point, but psychometric tests can assist in determining other crucial factors. These include how well that individual will fit into the existing team, their development within a certain role and their specific preferences and personality traits. Psychometric testing supports the recruitment process by offering specific information about an individual’s fit for a certain role.
There are numerous reasons why psychometric testing can be of benefit to the recruitment industry, including:
When it comes to hiring, it is crucial to achieve a good balance between sufficient ability and the type of personality that is best suited to and compatible with an organisation.
Psychometric testing offers a deep insight into the personality, behaviours, motivations and aspirations of an individual, enabling the recruiter to see if these factors are as closely aligned with the environment, company and role as the candidate’s ability and CV. Psychometric tests enable recruiters to gain a fully rounded insight into a candidate, offering an effective evaluation and thorough understanding of skills, ability and personality.
Insights into aptitude, skills, personality, and motivation are essential to select the very best candidates and to develop and guide your workforce throughout their career at your organisation. Reliable and scientifically proven, our solutions support you in your daily work to get the clearest possible picture of a person’s current and future potential.
