Prithvi Shergill plays the role of Chief Business Officer at KPISoft Technologies, accountable for leadership and growth of its People Practices and Platform product line. His professional mission is to enable collective and individual growth, using evidence-based insight and digital technologies, that enrich the experience of the workforce in the workplace. The Business he anchors serves users with research, applied design and platform offerings, developed and delivered to co-create the experience of practices that recruit, learn, perform, assess and manage careers to be distinctive. It offers an ecosystem of HR technology products that shape the digital transformation journey under the Tomorrow brand architecture. In his last enterprise assignment, he was the the Chief Human Resource Officer and Senior Corporate Vice-President, Organization Effectiveness at HCL Technologies.

Prithvi Shergill in an exclusive interaction with SCIKEY shares his thoughts on talent acquisition challenges and he is deploying latest technology building recommendation engines with augmented analytics to engage, enable and empower decision-makers in talent acquisition.

With your years of experience in recruitment hiring, what do you think is the industry’s current biggest significant challenges/concerns in talent acquisition engagement?

Firstly, the biggest issue is the nature of talent that the companies are looking for in terms of quality and skill. With the pace and scale of skill evolution in flight; finding people with the right set of skills at the right time, right cost and in the right place is a significant challenge. These reflect concern with quality in terms of reach. If at least 60-70% of job seekers are already active in the market, then the challenge is finding the passive job seekers who may have better skills, faster with lower investment in recruiting cost. In parallel, there is need to ensure that the investment made in acquiring talent should deliver at least 3X the value in terms of impact from the candidate – making the need to optimise how recruitment and hiring critical.

Next , another challenge is attracting the right talent. Brand recognition and brand recall plays a vital role here since candidates in most markets are keen to join companies that have a reputation aligned to their beliefs in the talent market. To attract quality people, companies need to position the work, the workforce and the workplace that candidates will experience as high quality. Ensuring you take the right message, using the right media, at the right time, with the right cost is evolving as we now need to look for skills in a multi generational workforce – each with their own drivers and value proposition that they respond to.

Lastly, candidate experience possibly is the differentiator between applying and then joining, if selected. Enterprises need to look at candidates the same way as the hospitality industry needs to look at clients – as guests whose experience starts from when they make a booking for a room or ticket, to when they check-in, how we hear the front desk staff speak, how well the hotel or airline staff respond to your queries concerns.

Similarly, the experience on applying on the career site, to scheduling time for an interview, to how a recruiter answers the candidate’s questions, to how the hiring manager explains the job, to the value proposition and compensation meeting their needs is what cumulates to candidate experience.

It’s this end to end experience that an organization can create as only when the candidate feels valued and is treated as an Employee of Choice, will he or she choose to your company as an Employer of Choice.

How do you not let candidates drop out from the process?

Choosing to work with a particular company is a choice for the candidate. The key is for the candidate to believe you are the Employer of Choice because you treat him as the Employee of Choice! Ensuring the candidate sees beliefs with the enterprise as aligned, the intentions to offer a distinctive experience authentic, the promise of the value proposition as attractive and actions that are aligned to these commitments becomes key to ensuring a person selected become as joiner. The proposition promised needs to be seen as real from the time of offer and to date of onboarding for the candidate so it is essential to stay connected with them – either virtually or in real time to always understand their mindset and address emergent questions or concerns which may raise doubt for them to join. Demand is more than the supply of quality people in the talent market – so the need to understand the drivers, communicate clearly and consistently and persuade them to act on the promise they make to join ensures that renege rates stay low. My advice is

What is the latest hiring technology that you have adopted to cater to the challenges seen – and what are the challenges with regard to deploying the latest technological advancements?

Every business today is a technology business – and hiring is no different. To address challenges with productivity and quality, it can be mitigated by using technology to make recruiting smarter from forecasting to fulfilment. Using algorithms, pattern recognition, natural language processing and statistical modelling, we are seeing significant savings in time and cost in sourcing, screening, assessment, scheduling, interviewing, onboarding, deploying and communication.

We see:
– deconstruction of role descriptions
– classification of unstructured resume data to structured definition of skills
– auto sourcing from public databases
– matching and prioritisation of resumes to roles 
– bot and video for assessments and interviews 
– digital learning
– automated scheduling for interviews
– statistical prediction of best hires 
– recommendation engines that prescribe decisions to select and staff and more, all leading to better performance and yield!

Most technology deployed today are transactional workflow systems – while the need is for better decision support. We are building recommendation engines with augmented analytics to engage, enable and empower decision makers in talent acquisition. Making information and insight available, accessible and affordable is what will democratise decision related to recruiting and hiring. The challenge with introduction of technology is that sponsors tend to see change management as only communication and training. We have seen that there is a need to enhance awareness; advocacy; assimilation, accountability to enhance adoption. Outcome assurance directly increases passion, proficiency, performance and productivity for users – and this requires people to adopt new ways of working.

One key message to the HR fraternity that needs attention or should be considered today and tomorrow for building a productive workforce.

The key message is that what has brought you to here in maturity of talent acquisition will not take you to attract and hire the talent you need.

You must change the way you are recruiting and hiring as if you keep recruiting people the same way you have been doing in the past, you will get same people you have been getting. Tomorrow you will need talent that will help you grow in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world. Most people in the HR profession are challenged with having the courage and capability needed to contribute to drive change in this context. Fear that their operational jobs will become redundant restricts them from shifting gear to deliver advisory value. HR practices need to be disrupted – so it is time to step up and drive the journey from talking about transformation to real re-formation!

About SCIKEY:

SCIKEY Talent Commerce Platform is a Managed Talent Marketplace that enables employers globally, to build manage productive teams. With its online platform powered by AI platform-enabled services, Intelligent Automation and patented “SCIKEY MindMatch” algorithm; it simplifies how businesses contract or employ the best quality talent anywhere, while focusing on leveraging the talent mindset (psyche) as their prime competitive advantage.

SCIKEY’s mission is to provide the best cost, plenty of choices unmatched convenience to the employers across the globe, in employing or contracting the best quality talent On Premise, Offshore as well as in a Remote engagement.