What will hiring look like in 2020?

We are at an age where humans can chat with machines and robots. The eternal fear that robots might replace humans is omnipresent. This fear is natural. It is the innate resistance to change. However, new technology is nothing but constant change. That’s why the workforce today has to find the perfect blend of how to use new technology as a tool to enhance efficiency and productivity. This involves companies and hiring managers figuring out which work deserves to be automated and the one that needs to be done by humans and to use technology to help employees bring out their strengths.

Human beings and technology are no longer two separate entities but just distinct. We are facing an Industrial Revolution 4.0 where everything complex and monotonous gets automated. Innovations are driven by consumer focus today. Integration, Customization and Automation determine the success of today’s businesses. We are seeing this transformation in every function of a business and so it can only be said that we are also on the verge of a Human Resources 3.0. What will the HR 3.0 bring to the hiring process in the next few years?

To understand this, it is important to look at how HR, especially hiring, has evolved over the years. HR 1.0 brought about the modern HR that focussed on labour and personnel relations and HR 2.0 centred on the strategic role of human resources (which was the Dave Ulrich’s model) with business partners. HR 3.0 is only left with one thing and that is empowering people to do the right thing rather than doing things right.

Therefore hiring will gain great importance in the near future.When we look at the hiring process over the years, the cut-and-dried method was: apply for jobs through a portal, give multiple tests and hope that your results and resume impresses the recruiters. Today the resume is slowly disappearing or rather it is transforming. By 2020, half the jobs of today would have disappeared and been replaced with new ones. Forbes magazine has predicted that more than 50% of the workforce will be millennials added to that will be a hugely diverse workforce. And so hiring will transform to accommodate this new workforce and skills.

Let’s look at what’s in store for hiring in 2020:

• Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is slowly taking over many functions and it will play a huge role in the hiring process. In the coming years, Recruiters will add more value and quality to their hiring by using chatbots to understand candidates’ personality and identify the right candidates and so the job of sourcing will effectively transform into a more important task in the hiring process. The filtering of candidates itself will be done from a lesser and select pool of candidates.

AI will also automate the various administrative, monotonous tasks like the joining, onboarding and exiting processes. Hiring managers will then be focused on finding the perfect person with the desired skill-set. AI and data analytics will also help match the skills of the candidate to the required skills for a job.

• Augmented and Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AV) and Virtual Reality (VR) will be used in a big way for hiring. The existence of traditional interviews in 2020 is certainly under question as we are already witnessing VR interviews taking place. For instance the British financial institution, Llyods Banking Group, conduct VR interviews for the graduate recruitment hiring. This makes the whole hiring process a delightful experience as opposed to the tedious ones and this definitely saves a whole lot of time. We will only have to wait and see what will be the future of interviews.

VR and AR will be used to create interactive and creative job advertisements. It will also be used to give candidates a real experience of their future workplace. You will be able to take a tour of your future office in Canada while sitting in Singapore. Complete candidate assessments that happen prior to selection will also be done with VR.

• Diverse and changing workforce

In 2020, the workplace will witness all kinds of people– people of different age, race, ethnicity; freelancers and contract-based employees and even the term “employee” is set to get a whole new definition. It will a huge task for Hiring managers as they will have to invest their time in choosing and managing all these people. Managing not only involves thinking about your own company interests but also the professional goals of your employees. The HR of a company will also have to decide what’s best for their company–full-time employees or hiring select expertise for particular projects.

• Data Analytics

The tool that is used in modern digital advertising where it studies and examines your preferences, profile and decisions to show what you would like will also be used for recruitment. Data Analytics is used to predict just about anything. Candidate information will be treated as Big Data so that recruiters can match the candidate’s exact skills to a job. This information will also be used to predict how long a candidate is likely to stay in your organization, what are their motivations and reasons why they might stay or leave. All this will only improve the quality and accuracy of hiring.

• Candidate Hiring Experience

 

Having looked at how technology will help recruiters increase the quality per hire, the candidate hiring experience will become more important than ever. In 2020, recruiters will be dealing with tech savvy candidates and intense competition. Information will be available everywhere and so employers should give equal importance to their hiring experience. Candidates will not prefer lengthy, complicated and unorganized interview processes. At the same time employer branding will become important as candidates will evaluate the company before the company evaluates them. What they will look for is a progressive and healthy culture and work environment which will empower them than their organization.

The hiring process that was seen a decade ago is no longer seen today. In the coming years, it will take a whole new purpose and shape. In 2020, hiring will be done with the sole purpose of investing in the right candidate. There are already companies that take candidates on a contract of three months and pay them to leave after its completion if they feel they don’t belong there. But one thing that leaves its strong presence in all this is technology. Technology will integrate various tools and tasks of hiring so as to select the right candidate for the right job.