Redefining the Role of a Recruiter in the Digital Era

Digital transformation is no longer associated solely with the tech department. Moving at a rapid pace, digitalisation has transformed all business sectors across industries. Automation, big data, analytics, and AI (artificial intelligence) are only some copious examples, of familiar tech terms used in today’s digital landscape.

The digital age has transformed fundamental principles of the way an organisation operates and conducts, manages human capital, and human resource department is not immune such revolutionary heights of change. Then how do recruiters redefine their role in adopting new approaches to recruit and build better human capital?

Leaders know that despite the ongoing digital transformation, human capital remains the most valuable asset to maintain organisation’s sustainability and growth. Therefore, in the digital era where automation is slowly taking over all sorts of mundane and administrative jobs, more and more companies are investing in training and continuous education to empower their workforce.

In order to stay competitive, managers realise that employee development is critical to manage business functions and prepare for future success. The role of recruiters today have transformed and evolved to become talent acquisition specialists, who know to harness potentials of the online and offline medium to reach out and fetch the best talent. Rather than merely filling vacant job positions, organisations require individuals with specific skillsets and expertise to ensure long-term business development.

In this case, recruiters hold greater responsibility to define current and upcoming needs of talent in the job market, in order to achieve organisation’s goals and objectives. Owing to which, recruiters today are urged to update their methods of talent search and embrace digital, to attract and target key talents through various platforms and social media channels.

While on one hand, advancements in technology have enabled for an easier and more comfortable way to reach out to wider audience and draw talent pools to your circle. However, quality talent always beats quantity. It does not matter if you have thousands of CVs coming to your Inbox for every job opening, but only a handful of them are actually worth your time and efforts.

Considering the tough competition in the job market, recruiters are required to sketch out a plan to fetch the right talent on board with the right skills, for the right job at the right time. Yet, as the old adage goes ‘don’t lose the moon while counting the stars.’ While you need to actively hunt down potential talents from external channels, you should be equally aware of internal staff career development opportunities as well. Don’t lose your top performers, but rather keep them engaged.

Internet has been a great game-changer in human capital management. To stay abreast of the current technological trends, recruiters should take proactive approaches on expanding the company brand reach through the medium of internet. Recruitment efforts today look beyond conventional job portals, to touch and penetrate social media as a means to target the passive lots. Mainstream social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have been playing an integral role towards bridging the skills gap, and facilitating seamless communication between employers and best candidates.

However, the world wide web (WWW) is not the only place where the best talents come together and can be found. Recruiters should not solely rely on their online sourcing strategy as a part of their recruitment efforts, but try networking as a medium to fetch best talent offline as well.

To attract potential talents, who are smart and intelligent and do not solely rely on Internet as a medium to find the dream job role they desire and aspire, recruiters should encourage more face-to-face interactions, meets, networking opportunities such as events and seek a room to discuss. Be it through college recruiting programs, campus visits, job fairs, or walk-in interviews, you can get the real experience of directly meeting some of the brilliant minds who are just in search of the best opportunity, while promoting and introducing your employer brand at the same time.

Next read: Why Should You Upgrade College Recruiting Programs?