The recruitment process has changed massively over the last few years, especially with the general nature of work changing, due to the pandemic and many other things. As a result, recruiters have been scratching their heads trying to figure out novel and innovative ways to recruit top talent.
Virtual Reality is being incorporated into many industries and is slowly being introduced in the recruitment industry as well. Sure, it’s in its infancy, and there’s a long way to go, but these small steps will help recruiters streamline the process and make recruiting a hundred times easier.
If you are a recruiter yourself, you must be aware of how difficult it is to keep up with the latest HR tech trends constantly. However, it comes with the job description, and if you wish to secure a good future for your company, you must be updated with how the landscape is changing.
Therefore, in this article, we will list a couple of ways VR is transforming the recruitment process. Keep on reading.
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VR and Recruiting: How Do They Pair?
Recruiting isn’t simply about finding candidates and hiring them. It is an elaborate process that requires innovation and creativity from the recruiter’s side, and most importantly, it requires a good experience on the part of the candidates. And how can you offer that? Through VR!
In this section, we will look at some of the best ways VR is improving recruitment.
1. Improve The Candidate Experience
As mentioned, the candidates must have a good impression of your company for you to have a successful recruiting campaign. That is because studies show that an overwhelming number of candidates are likely to share their negative experience with a company rather than a positive one. Thus, your company is responsible for ensuring that the candidates are equally happy with your recruiting processes. It should be a two-way street.
Use VR to make the process more comfortable for your candidates. Since the pandemic, remote work has become mainstream, and coming to offices is no longer an imperative. That is why you must give your candidates the same immersive experience as they would normally have in an office space. For instance, conduct a virtual office tour.
Your candidates will be able to have an engaging experience right from the comfort of their homes, and this will also create a strong impression about your company in their minds. The more comfortable they are with their experience, the more likely they will share it. This way, you can build the reputation of your company and attract top talent.
2. Learning and Training
Competition is becoming fiercer than ever before, which is why companies must ensure that the candidates they are recruiting are highly-skilled or, at least, have the potential to be. For that, on-job training is becoming critical. Employers must constantly evaluate candidates’ skill sets to understand if they fit the company correctly. But how can they do that easily?
Fortunately, VR has now provided employers with the necessary tools to understand how their candidates are performing. For instance, a utility company can use virtual reality to understand if a potential employee can manage high-voltage overhead transmission lines. VR in recruiting is a safe method to determine if a candidate has the required capabilities that the role demands.
Similarly, motion tracking can help employers simulate and improve candidates’ skill sets. Gone are the days when you could always watch your candidates to understand how they are performing. Now that there’s often an inevitable distance between the employer and the candidates, the company can use VR to determine candidates’ potential better.
3. Gamification
Every company is on the hunt for the best professionals, and if your company wishes to get there sooner, gamification can certainly help. It provides an engaging and entertaining twist to the whole recruitment process. For instance, create quizzes to test your candidates and assign scores to measure the performance of different candidates.
Not only gamification helps you, the recruiter, but it can also help candidates ease off, relax and look at it in a not-so-serious way. Gamification can help candidates enjoy the recruitment process and learn much about their capabilities instead of dreading the entire procedure.
Plus, you can use gamification to inform your candidates about your company’s ongoings. It will lead to better onboarding since when the candidates eventually join your company, they will already know how everything works. This way, they will be prepared from Day 1, and you can save yourself time.
4. Make Communication Better
With work shifting largely to the digital world, one of the most devastating ways the industry has been impacted is the lack of communication between candidates and employers that have emerged because of this. This leads to misunderstandings and false impressions, potentially missing out on candidates who could have turned your company around.
VR can help bridge the communication gap between candidates and employers. With VR, candidates can have the same immersive experience as they would have in an office, and they would be able to understand the instructions much better.
For instance, employers can create virtual rooms to invite candidates and put on their headsets to make it feel like they are right in front of the employers. There’s no denying that flawless communication makes a company successful. By using VR, candidates can learn more about the company and what the employees want and expect from them.
5. Improve Employer Branding
A big part of the recruitment process is ensuring that your company has a good reputation. And a great way to build on the reputation and image of your company is to work on your employer branding. VR can help with that. Companies can use virtual reality to showcase the innovative positioning they have.
This will make candidates want to work with your company and approach you instead of you always chasing them. For instance, back in 2017, KFC released a virtual reality game where the players had to fry chicken while the Colonel guided them. This helped candidates have a peek into how it is working with KFC and how they can also make Finger Lickin’ Good chicken!
6. Be More Inclusive
One of the great ways VR is transforming the recruitment process is by reducing bias. Intentionally or unintentionally, human bias tends to creep in when recruiting candidates, which has often limited a company’s growth. However, VR helps to eliminate that bias by leaving most of the assessment to be done by technological tools.
This ensures that human bias isn’t letting a company miss out on a candidate who could have been a good fit for the company. Moreover, it also makes the selection process more inclusive and diverse since VR helps to eliminate geographical barriers, too.
Employers no longer have to limit their talent pool to just a certain radius since VR now allows hiring candidates from any corner of the world.
7. Cost Cutting
Recruiting can be an expensive process, especially when looking for top professionals. However, VR can help companies cut down on the recruiting process by making everything virtual. Except for the software and tools cost, there’s not much else that employers have to bear. Whereas, in real-world recruiting, companies often have to spend a good amount of money on travel expenses and hotel accommodations.
Moreover, VR recruiting also saves money in the long run. It does so by making sure that your company is hiring candidates that are actually capable and is right for the role. This ensures that you will not lose the candidate halfway and start again from scratch, which would be a waste of money and resources.
Final Thoughts
Virtual Reality has made its way into many sectors, and it was only time before it established itself in the corporate world. It will only take several years for VR to become mainstream in recruiting, but so far, it has had successful results. Are you open to experimenting with such technology?