Everyone is searching for the right job, and every business is looking for the right employee. The quest seems never-ending, and no one seems happy, at least for long!
The ramification of constantly shifting socio-economic conditions is leading to the ongoing phenomenon of The Great Resignation. More and more people are waking up in the morning and dreading going to their job, even if it is virtual.
Do we need a change?
While the answer is not straightforward, one crucial change in society is that we have started valuing emotional wellness more than ever in our modern history.
The need to lead a happy and fulfilling life is not just a prerequisite for the people of first-world countries but also for the citizens of developing nations, which is the key contributor to global workforce needs.
Improved quality of life and better access to education, healthcare, and financial benefits in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Latin America have caused a shift in expectations even for relatively younger job seekers. Job satisfaction and security rank as high as the salary to be the critical factors in selecting a job.
Most regions have a significant talent crunch, resulting in highly competitive talent acquisition practices. Even in one of the most developed economies in SEA, Singapore, according to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), there were 242 job vacancies per 100 unemployed persons in March 2022.
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This gap keeps increasing each quarter as more employers are now willing to hire in the new normal of COVID-19 resilience.
Several challenges exist in the current recruitment process, and solution providers are fragmented. A typical recruitment funnel starts with sourcing candidates, screening applications, and interviewing and selecting candidates whose credentials and references get checked before offering the job.
Most employers have adopted the funnel framework to determine the best candidate and not someone who will successfully fit and enrich the team.
Sourcing
Consider a modern-day employer who has a vacancy. The company either writes the job description knowing the attributes of a suitable candidate or copies from one of the templates representing the often popular yet unrealistic industry standards. There is always a risk of using non-inclusive language that creates gender and racial biases right at the beginning.
Now to reach out to qualified candidates, the employer must do the following:
- Post on the career page
- Post on social media – Meta and LinkedIn
- Post on various job sites
- Contact headhunters
- Post on specialised platforms like AngelList, Glassdoor, etc.
- Reach out to internal employees for referrals or internal applications
Except for the career site and employee referrals, all other methods are intermediaries between the employer and the job seekers. The recruiter more often has to pay to avail of services that will help them reach the most suitable talents.
In this endeavour, these platforms apply the methods of microtargeting and behavioural targeting to identify qualified candidates, thus restricting access to the broader demographics to apply for the job.
Screening
If the employer is lucky or has spent enough money and time, there are now choices to make from a considerable pool of applications. These resumes may or may not be pre-screened, so the recruitment team must spend significant hours scouring these applications and finding the desired candidates who are qualified for the interview.
Alternatively, hiring techs like applicant tracking systems can help the employer have a more organised approach, and machine learning technique-based predictive tools can recommend the best fit.
Although everything comes at a cost, it will stretch the hiring budget to the limits to implement these technologies. There are also pitfalls of a steeper learning curve and synchronising multiple solution providers to build a seamless process flow.
Interviewing
This is the trickiest step of all. Due to the lack of a standard approach, a candidate’s experience gets negatively impacted if the interview process is lengthy and unorganised.
Will you rent a car from a company that checks your driving license and asks you to take a driving test? The answer is no. So, despite having adequate qualifications and experience, if a candidate feels challenged during the interview process, a social media outcry might impact employer branding, an acute concern in a tight job market.
Artificial intelligence-based advanced assessment platforms collect and analyse data and even implement innovative assessment approaches to standardise the process and save time. However, the model’s ability to set thresholds, auto-reject candidates, and reward others, has often lacked independent validation.
Selection
In the final moment of negotiation, both the employers and the applicant want to establish favourable terms, leading to an offer that often gets predicted by the employer to increase the chance of acceptance by the candidate.
Also Read: Ethical implications of using AI in hiring
However, a large organisation seldom goes beyond the benchmark of previous offers or perceived market standards, widening the racial salary gaps based on gender and race. Smaller enterprises generally lack salary benchmark information and are under pressure to increase offer acceptance chances and not to lose the candidate to the competitors.
They either make very high salary offers to entice the candidate or can have a restricted offer due to a lack of budget. High salary disparity within a small employee base can spark early discontent and attrition.
Do we have a solution?
We expect the businesses would have identified solutions and adapted to address the problem by now, but unfortunately, the recruitment process has changed very little in the last 75 years.
Now one may debate that the process has evolved over the period. With the advent of the internet and technological progress, many heavy-lifting steps and decision-making have been outsourced to specialised platforms or automated to improve efficiency and accuracy.
Today’s large-scale recruitment processes are sourcing candidates through multiple platforms, machine learning algorithms facilitate candidate assessment and selection decisions, and process management software reduce hiring cost and improve quality.
However, on average, it still takes several weeks or even months for most organisations to recruit. A study by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team shows that it takes more than 40 days for candidates to get hired in most job functions.
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Implementation of advanced hiring tech that improves process efficiency does not fit into the budget of most startups and SMEs, leading to a large job market that is still unorganised and inefficient. Probably it is time not to improve the efficiency of the current process but to change it completely.
How can web3 solve this problem?
As the Web3 foundations are getting laid, it is evident that the decentralised web will transform the recruitment process. The technology providers will have the Web3 infrastructure to implement solutions that will change the recruitment process forever.
Think about a global candidate pool whose credentials like education, past experiences, and skills-sets are pre-verified and genuine. These credentials are automatically updated, removing the challenges of multiple versions and outdated resumes.
The tech platforms in the current era are trying to monopolise the market and commoditize data. In contrast, web3 service providers can only charge for the tech infrastructure and cannot manipulate the process for their profitability.
For example, Decentralised Apps (DApp) powered by decentralised computing techniques, blockchain, and other distributed ledger systems can operate autonomously without any human intervention or ownership.
The fundamental characteristic of Web3 is to build a safer and more trusted internet where individuals can control their digital identity. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) gives individuals complete control of their data so that no sensitive data gets stored in the centralised database that can be stolen or manipulated.
Credentials or identity proofs are integral to human life, from passports to educational certificates. An absence of credentials can deprive someone of access to healthcare, employment, and even citizenship.
It is not different when a job seeker is looking for a job —transfer and verification of proofs of candidates’ identity, education, past employment, and skills take a considerable amount of time. Although most employers rely on third-party tech or services to perform this task on their behalf, there are significant risks of delay, inaccuracy, and data breaches during this process.
Web3 can provide a verifiable credential ecosystem where a holder of a credential (a candidate with an education certificate) can share a zero-knowledge proof presentation to a verifier (an employer seeking proof of the candidate) without sharing the original credential.
The cryptographically verifiable data can be tamper-evident and prove the authorship if the employer trusts the issuer (the university issuing educational certificates). So, without sharing the actual degree certificates, the job seeker can prove to be a degree holder from a trusted university and qualified for a particular job opportunity.
There will be a large pool of verified candidates if there are more and more trusted issuers of verifiable credentials, such as universities, employers, and organisations.
A time might come when an employer can skip several iterations of screening and background checks by directly offering a job interview to a candidate.
The technology can create a global passwordless standard where individuals can own their data and get seamless access to financial, educational, employment, and travel services by instantly and securely authenticating their identity.
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