Good tech a recruiter’s ‘secret weapon’

While Australia’s recent Jobs and Skills Summit sparked several long-term initiatives for addressing the nation’s skills shortage, recruiters can see the immediate benefits of embracing technology to match people and jobs more efficiently and effectively.

The Australian labour market is currently operating at close to full capacity, with the unemployment rate at its lowest level in almost 50 years. While low unemployment underpins greater prosperity, it also brings a range of challenges.

Across the country, businesses are struggling to find employees. There is only one unemployed person per job vacancy, compared to three unemployed people per vacancy before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite this demand for workers, there are currently 840,000 people in Australia designated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as underemployed – people who want to work more hours, if given the opportunity.

The Jobs and Skills Summit brought together more than 140 employer, union, community and government representatives to address the challenges around labour and skills. It addressed a number of factors, from the nation’s reduced migrant intake and visa delays to changing employee expectations in flexibility and work/life balance.

At the same time, the Victorian government has committed to providing free university degrees for nurses and midwives to help address an acute shortage. Students entering nursing courses in Victoria in 2023 and 2024 will receive a scholarship of $16,500 to cover the cost of their degree.

Another challenge impacting the skills shortage is that the booming recruitment industry is struggling to keep pace with the demand to fill places. Overreliance on picking up the telephone, along with other manual processes, means many recruiters are unable to easily scale their operations to meet demand, leaving places unfilled.

The ‘‘personal touch’’ need not be sacrificed when embracing technology, says Blake Thomson, co-founder and CEO of the Entire OnHire software platform. Mobile-centric recruitment platforms allow recruiters and workers to communicate more effectively. With good data stored in a centralised hub, a recruiter can confidently allocate jobs to the perfect candidate based on any number of complex requirements.

Entire OnHire is a cloud-based, all-in-one staffing software designed to integrate recruitment, scheduling, compliance, payroll and invoicing in one user-friendly system, which helps recruiters improve efficiency.

Fill rates across the recruitment sector, one of the industry’s most important key performance indicators, have fallen significantly during the pandemic. Whereas a high-performing recruitment agency would have previously filled between 60 and 85 per cent of open jobs, Thomson says that today most agencies sit below 50 per cent, which is leaving the available workforce under-utilised.

A major misconception in the recruitment industry is that technology is attempting to replace people. Instead, Thomson says recruiters should view technology solutions as a secret weapon that frees them up to spend more time focusing on the personal touch. By decreasing the time crunch, recruiters, in turn, will increase the likelihood of fitting the right candidate to the job.

‘‘When recruiters are only picking up the phone to ask people to fill a shift, they are attempting to cram a lot of critical information into that phone call or text message,’’ he says. ‘‘This all takes time, while also increasing the chances of miscommunication and error.

‘‘Using a mobile app to convey the details of the job improves both speed and accuracy, meaning that the phone conversation can focus on the personal touch while still letting recruiters make more calls each hour, which means that more jobs are filled and more people can get to work.’’

Behind the scenes, these platforms can do a better job of automatically matching people and jobs according to their qualifications and preferences. This allows recruiters to quickly find and contact the best person for the job, especially in industries where businesses can have very specific requirements in terms of skills and training.

As a younger, tech-savvy generation enters the workforce, they are becoming more comfortable with the convenience of using mobile apps. Healthcare is leading the way, Thomson notes, as recruiters attempt to meet the demand to fill nursing shifts. The sector is a good example of the fact that individual employers and workplaces are increasingly demanding specific skill sets – from medical qualifications and certifications to competency with specific software. This also creates extra challenges in terms of compliance and potential liability when it comes to providing qualified workers.

Healthcare providers expect this kind of personalised service from recruiters, without concern for the fact that this places a considerable extra workload on recruiters who aren’t leveraging technology to meet this challenge.

‘‘Some recruiters might rely on four or five different tools to determine the right fit for a shift, forcing them to start over when they think they’ve found the perfect person but then realise they’ve failed to meet one certification or criterion,’’ Thomson says. ‘‘Combining all of this into one holistic platform, which allows for every factor when finding the best person for the job, ensures that recruiters can get more done in their day, which means that more Australians get to work and fewer jobs go begging."