This article is a 2-part series. Here is the link to the first part. [Hiring in current scenario - Do you still rely on resumes?] In the last article, we saw how resumes are increasingly becoming ineffective to hire the right job-fits and culture-fits in the era of digital hiring and remote working. Now, we will discuss how we can overcome these challenges and identify the right-fits and high-potential.

Screen Mindfully : AI is currently used to reduce biases around name, age, gender, ethnicity, etc., in the recruitment process, might introduce bias without recruiters even being aware of it. This happens because AI recruiting tools analyze patterns. So, if you feed your company's last ten years' recruitment data to an AI-powered tool, it will automatically learn from the database. Amazon's AI recruitment system is a noteworthy example of this. Amazon had implemented its ahead-of-times internal tool to automate shortlisting of applicants for some open positions. They eventually found out that the tool was biased against female candidates as the previous ten years' data fed in had a pattern of bias against females. Now, this algorithm was not designed to understand or ignore it. Know the tools you implement to automate the hiring process. Be very conscious of the objective of hiring tools - automating can save time, but you should also implement tools that can make the process more unbiased, scientific, efficient, and smart.

Evaluate beyond functional skills. Look beyond pedigree, into potential.

According to LinkedIn's annual report, 45% of talent professionals say that 'bad hires' are typically due to poor soft skills, while only 11% find it's due to poor technical skills. Hard skills are useful to identify knowledge gaps or technical abilities that can be addressed during onboarding, staffing, or initial months of joining. Historically, soft skills are harder to quantify but are the future of hiring. According to Deloitte, most hard skills are expected to get obsolete in 5 years. However, soft skills are necessary to understand to build a future-proofed workforce. It is essential to understand a person's emotional, social, and cognitive map to understand how they will ultimately fit in the role and the organization. About 85% of skills relevant to a role* can not be expressed *in résumés, according to research by a company named PitchMe.

Résumés are not built to encompass the "micro-learning" processes of candidates Industry leader Josh Bersin says, "Soft skills are difficult to build, critical, and take extreme effort to obtain," while hard skills are "relatively easy to learn."*. Instead, the best candidates - those adjusting quickly to the changing workplace scenarios - are doing it in nonlinear ways that usually can't be represented on a traditional résumé.

Make relevant probes.

A recent study found that many hiring managers ask job candidates the same questions today as they did 20 years ago. Questions like "Where do you want to be in five years?" have little value in measuring the skill level required for success in their day-to-day work! Resumes give a glimpse of the qualifications of a person; but does that even reflect essential qualities required at a job. However, as the nature of roles has evolved so drastically over the last few years, the right starting point should be a map of functional skills (resume) along with cognitive, behavioral, and social traits - that can give you enough markers to make relevant probes in subsequent rounds. Unberry is a game-based assessment tool built on principles of neuroscience and psychology. It helps you get a map of candidates' social, behavioral, and cognitive traits - a better way to assess their fit for a role or a company. It can help you make more unbiased, objective, data-driven decisions while hiring; it reduces the dependencies on pedigree-based screening and also widens your sourcing pool.

Hiring the hidden gems.

While filling open positions, the most natural approach is to look for A-player candidates. These are the candidates having flawless résumés. Their resume clearly shows good pedigree, great experience, and pristine track record. Top-tier candidates know that they have muscle in the hiring process; they might be a part of multiple hiring processes and might be very particular with which offers they choose to accept. Hence, it would help if you looked beyond the obvious to fill your open positions. One way is to be open to more diverse profiles. A great set to look into can be "career shifters." Recruiters already realize that this set of unconventional candidates can prove to be better hires. They can get lost during screening in the pool of resumes. So be creative and accepting to recruiting diverse talent even when they do not check every requirement right at the start. Your goal should be finding people who can grow in tandem with your company and culture.

Keeping up with technology and data science.

As the future of work evolves, you'll need newer, science-based, and data-driven ways to understand and measure the unique competencies of your teams and organization. Before you get into assessing the candidates, a map of the soft skills linked to your organization's competencies can tell you what you should precisely look for. Such tools can also give you a greater understanding of where your employees and candidates fall in relation to said competencies in order to strengthen the teams internally within your organization.

Everyone deserves a shot.

Top leaders have seen that often the hungriest people make some of the best hires. People who've been denied opportunities in the past, legitimately or not, tend to work harder and treat others better than those who've had everything handed to them. The workplace traits to succeed in roles/organizations have also evolved, and now you must not miss on looking for candidates with traits like ambiguity tolerance; perseverance to sail through complex situations; lateral thinking to navigate through unforeseen circumstances, and high learning agility to pick up the new challenges. However, we should also know which of these traits are linked to a particular function or a role. For example, higher impulsivity, risk-taking ability, and complex problem-solving can be key traits of people in Trading roles. On similar notes, successful people in Customer Success roles tend to show higher levels of generosity.

Summary To summarise, gone are the days when hiring people would start at filtering them basis just their pedigree or functional skills. New-age hiring for the dynamic jobs of today needs to identify key workplace traits that help people succeed in a role. Recruiters are increasingly becoming conscious that each candidate is unique and has their own set of social, behavioral, and cognitive traits, which makes them suitable/unsuitable for a certain type of role. Lastly, the hiring landscape is becoming increasingly democratic; eventually, it'll be a candidate's market, where every person will be able to identify a role that can be a great fit for them based on their own unique traits. Hire the right fit with Unberry Unberry changes the dynamics of hiring by bringing a tech-first, unbiased, engaging way to assess people. It helps you identify their cognitive, social, and behavioral traits. Basis this information, you can identify the best fits for an open position or your company's culture. It's very well suited to identify and hire high-potential candidates for highly dynamic work streams like technology/engineering sector.