Automated campus recruitment: The gear to more futuristic and empathy-driven hiring
In the post-pandemic world, empathy, when clubbed with an automated campus recruitment platform can bring in more culture-friendly freshers, and greater ROI to an enterprise.
The world is rethinking its phenomena each day. Modern enterprises are more automated than before and more people-centric than before. Then, our question is simple: Why should campus recruitment take a back seat? In the new normal, getting accustomed to virtual campus placements isn’t an option, it is a need. If you’re not prioritising your candidate experience and putting all your energy into asking for students’ resumes on WhatsApp, you’re missing out on a slew of other more outcome-driven practices in campus hiring. For example: infusing empathy, conveying culture, greater sensitisation, and initiating a dialogue with your candidates. All of this is only possible with greater effort, which requires time. Time can be saved only when we create more space for automation to take over. It is a cycle that can bring greater talent to you.
In the 2022 State of Workplace Empathy report, more than 2/3rd of employees believed that their employers view people with mental health issues as “weak” or “burden”. Moreover, as many as 59% of employees fear reaching out to a manager or HR about a mental health issue, and the fact that this could negatively affect their job security. Hence, when you ingrain empathy in recruitment, you establish its value from the get-go.
Here, we dissect how can digital campus recruitment help recruiters accelerate empathetic hiring among freshers, thereby fostering more future-first and humanised workspaces.
What is empathy and its importance in recruitment?
Empathy is simply the ability to comprehend someone else’s situation and give them a peaceful ear. It is putting oneself into the shoes of others and creating room for healthy dialogue, or maybe just being a patient listener. — You don’t have to get emotionally engrossed to be empathetic. It is the cognizance of a mere fact that each person, especially freshers, might have things on their plate that we won’t be aware of. All a recruiter can do is be conscious of this fact and take a more kind approach towards hiring.
But all that jazz is good, can it really be controlled or monitored? Sort of. By choosing who to hire, and most importantly: How to hire.
In his book Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer pretty well stated, “We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
Saumya Tiwari, Assistant Manager-People and Talent at a UK-based global advisory company stated, “Anything manual of course takes a lot of time and is not sustainable. Something as simple as sending an automated response once the application is submitted, or an intimation if a candidate is not selected, can ensure that they are not left hanging. This automatically unburdens them professionally while they might have a few other things to deal with.”
Why is there a need to strengthen candidate experience and the role of empathy in it?
The people-first approach is not just about taking care of the people working for you, but also about valuing the candidates who are interested in working with you. Bolstering applicant experience comes at a prime perch for various reasons. Some being:
- Empathy is a boomerang. The more you give it, the more it comes back to you. And for recruiters, it culminates in better employer brand building.
- Empathy can help you get talent that is more aligned with your company’s culture. The more you initiate engagement campaigns, the better your communication with candidates.
- Even if a candidate is not selected after the first few procedures but the recruiter has been supportive throughout, it contributes to better word of mouth.
- When you take a people-first approach, you establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry.
According to the Global Empathy Index of 2016, “Empathy, we found, is correlated with ethics, and any ethical failure can prove costly. Empathy, which is about understanding our emotional impact on others and making change, as a result, is more important to a successful business than it has ever been, correlating to growth, productivity, and earnings per employee.”
Empathy + Automated Campus Recruitments = Best-in-class Talent
While the two are not interdependent, they are easier to inculcate when they are together. Empathy, when clubbed with an automated campus hiring system, can be a catalyst for a future-first workplace.
Workflow automation begets workflow compassion. Tiwari further mentioned, “Automation has created a much-needed paradigm shift in the way we approach campus recruitment. And that shift has really proven to be more efficient and effective. I would have more time to interact with my prospects once they clear the interview. It helps me understand where they are in their lives and help them in the further stages of their application.”
- Empathy mapping is not just limited to being a marketing tactic. It brings in more customers through its very nature. Forbes corroborates this and how. In its article on “Is there ROI in Empathy”, it underpins, “When business leaders build cultural empathy within the context of their values, strategy, and processes, they will better attract, engage and retain employees, while also building more valuable relationships with customers and external communities.”
How is Superset different from any other regular automation platform?
Imagine a tree with an adversely damaged trunk. There are chances that it might survive and the bark recovers. But the chances of it not surviving are higher. That is what the placement industry has always been like. Visualise the tree’s crown as the industries and the roots as the freshers.
- A trunk is where the two of them grow towards and emerge from. Our product aspires to be the trunk. The trunk connects enterprises to the talent that it deserves.
- We understand the gravity of placements. They have a metamorphic nature. Right talent can make or break a company. The right first job can make or break a fresher’s future.
- When it comes to empathy, we believe that when there is saved cost, money, and effort, a company is more likely to put its energy into more fruitful activities that steer the communication wheel in the right direction. And when the communication is right, it spawns more people-first hiring procedures.
- Superset allows you to connect to as many as 24,000 campuses and a massive pool of more than 1 million candidates. We are not a placement consultancy and our product will help you stand out among companies that are still going the manual way for campus placements.
Easier said than done? Nope.
Here’s how a recruiter can inculcate empathy throughout campus recruitment:
- Show that you do care, and break the norms of the age-old HR interviews. A fresher needs it more than an established person. They are at the most nascent stage of their lives, unaware of what lies ahead. Throughout my hiring process at Superset, whenever the HR manager contacted me and could sense the subduedness in my voice, the first question she asked was, “Are you okay?”. Something as little as this can go a long way.
- Be patient with your candidates. When it comes to freshers, placements are life-altering for them. They are indeed more stressed about any intervention or disturbance than you. Superset has nearly zero-scope of obtrusions with its immaculate Virtual Interview Rooms technology. This is just like how a placement drive would be conducted in an institute, but the catch is that it’s all virtual!
- Practice honesty. Transparency and clear intimation can ensure that neither the candidate is in a haze of information nor you as a recruiter. When recruitment is digitised through Superset, nothing can be concealed, throughout the stages of campus hiring.
- Convey culture so that you benchmark candidates. Initiating campaigns that allow you to create a dialogue with the candidates and establish your ground can help nurture a better opinion of you. Superset is tailor-made for you. Our product makes the process of creating a campaign and getting maximum students to attend them easier. It is not only flexible but engineered to cater to each customer differently.
Recruitment has power. Something unheard. Something we don’t talk about. And anything which has power is known to destroy and liberate at the same time. With freshers, things are all the more fragile. A campus recruitment drive is their first exposure to the world of work. It can affect their confidence, their mental health, and their understanding of hiring in general. More than that, it can be a fresher’s rabbit hole. In a virtual world, a campus hiring automation platform can be an impetus for greater brand building for the enterprise, and of course, allows a more empathetic hiring experience to bloom. And let’s not forget, automation is supposed to be used BY you, and NOT in place of you.
Click here to learn more about Superset, India’s largest campus digitisation platform.
Author: Aparna Bhalla
