The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | July 2019

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Here is your July guide to the latest in recruitment trends, technology and industry insights! Each month, we highlight the biggest news affecting the industry and explain what to expect as new trends continue to emerge.

THE FUTURE OF INTERVIEWS: HOLOGRAMS

As VR and AR technology continues to evolve and market use expands beyond gaming and other consumer experiences, there have been interesting employer-focused use cases for tech (see the March edition of The Scoop, VR Training Environments). Fittingly, companies who make this technology have been extending their scope solidly into the enterprise space.

You undoubtedly remember a few years back when Google first launched its Glass offering. While consumer interest in the product seems to have receded, the tech company has been quietly focused on the enterprise space, recently launching Glass Enterprise Edition2. While the value proposition has mainly focused on employee training, there are opportunities for global multi-person real-time collaboration and candidate engagement that extend into spaces such as virtual events or video interviewing.  

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently upped the ante by taking the concept of boundless communication one step further — a hologram. In a recent demonstration, the tech company debuted a hologram of one of their executives delivering a presentation in her own voice … but in Japanese! The technology leverages mixed reality and neural text-to-speech.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20697976/microsoft-hololens-hologram-keynote-japanese-translation-microsoft-inspire

These advancements signal a move towards a society and way of connecting that have fewer bounds — extending the reach of your star employees and engagement with candidates and teams anywhere in the world and in multiple languages.

THE FUTURE OF CHATBOTS: OPEN SOURCE

First, if you’re still feeling overwhelmed by the glut of chatbot options, here’s a really good review of some key players. Solutions in this market have been expanding quickly: what was once a single-use tool has within a short period of time evolved to engagement at virtually any step in the process.  

While the breadth of uses has expanded, chatbots (particularly front-end bots) are often single-source systems working off proprietary information. 

Chatbots will need to share information across applications, platforms and systems to create collaborative, intelligent routing. Bot longevity will depend on moving away from closed (tree-logic) to open sources of data (data library). 

There is also a counter-perspective in favor of perfecting the single-use chatbot vs. a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none approach. As an example, a front-end bot may focus only on answering career site visitor questions and functioning as a guide through the site logic, but open source data could allow the bot to retrieve information from 3rd party locations, such as a review site or social handle. This single-use bot experience could lead to more holistic answers to candidate inquiries.  

https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/feature/Pushing-past-chatbot-challenges-will-secure-their-longevity

THE POWER OF UNCONVENTIONAL THINKERS

Excited about what you’ve read on The Scoop? We’re always looking for people who are just as interested in these topics as we are! Join TMP and help us shape the future of recruitment marketing.

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CREATING ROBUST USER PROFILES WITH ON- AND OFFLINE DATA

Over the past few years, the marketing sector has seen advancement in solutions seeking to engage with users whether they’re online or at a physical location. Launched in 2015, Google’s Beacon recently went through a substantive updated. Its proximity marketing extends user engagement beyond geo-targeted advertising, to provide greater behavioral insights such as frequency of visits, in-location activity, etc. 

While there are many players in the consumer behavior data space, Near’s Allspark — an interactive cloud-based AI platform that works across 44 countries to create anonymized, location-based profiles of users merged with information from phones, data partners, carriers and their customers — touts its privacy-first approach as its point of differentiation.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/near-raises-100m-for-an-ai-that-merges-online-and-offline-behavior-to-build-consumer-profiles/

THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC SHIFTS ON DIVERSITY HIRING

Demand (number of jobs opened) has slowed slightly compared to this time last year, but the labor market continues to be favorable to job seekers. A strong economy, bringing with it an influx of jobs across all sectors, often results in wage gains and lower unemployment for most groups that are often marginalized. This current economic boom has resulted in greater job gains for Hispanic and black women, +2.2% and +1.6%, respectively.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/business/economy/minority-women-hispanics-jobs.html

However, circumstantial gains tend to be precarious. Population and demographic factors, such as educational attainment and racial and ethnic minorities status, tend to result in greater increases in unemployment during economic downturns than other groups. During the last economic crisis, the employment rate for black women declined 9.4% from its peak, and 6% for Hispanic women.

https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/06/06/what-happens-when-the-good-times-end/

ROUNDING OUT THE SCOOP: PSYCH, SOCIAL, LABOR AND TECH

  • Growing concerns about facial recognition and bias: London’s police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition since 2016; the findings of their assessment revealed that the majority of people it flags for the police are not on a wanted list.

https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941

  • AI Regulation: Building on last month’s post, Artificial Intelligence Regulation and Legislation, we will continue to follow expanding legislation within the AI space: California’s bot disclosure law attempts to regulate the misuse of this technology on social networks by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell or influence.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/will-californias-new-bot-law-strengthen-democracy

  • Google’s Social Network: Google tries its hand at social networking again. Shoelace focuses on organizing local events and activities, allowing users to find, plan and RSVP. With many companies looking towards platforms like Eventbrite or Meetup to host local hiring events, this could be an interesting new option with links to advancements in Google’s maps tool.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691430/shoelace-google-area-120-event-organizing-new-york-beta

About Jahkedda Akbar Mitchell

Jahkedda has many years of experience providing strategic guidance, data, and insights on job-seeker trends in support of Radancy and its clients. She has also worked in-house on the candidate attraction team for a large fortune 500 company. Jahkedda has a passion for psychology and storytelling; understanding why we do what we do and how to change behaviors...only using her powers for good. Jahkedda is a member of Radancy Labs: a design thinking focused innovation lab.

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