Remote hiring will help companies tap talent globally: Sarbojit Mallick, Co-founder, InstaHyre

As a recruiter, one always feels the weight of the company’s future on their shoulders. But hiring talent shouldn’t feel like one. Filling a position is a more cumbersome task than it appears and traditionally takes a whole lot of time and can do a lot of damage to a company’s bank balance. According to research, a bad hire can cost an employer between 15% to 21% of the employee’s salary, depending upon the industry and seniority of the employee. The market is full of job seekers and employers, thus a recruiter has to mine them and shape them to fit the company, and of course, the top three problems about that- cost, time and drop-offs, HR-tech platforms are helping in providing top-quality candidates with just one click. Financialexpress.com caught up with Sarbojit Mallick, Co-founder, InstaHyre to understand more about the HR-tech and work byInstaHyre. Excerpts:

Which industry will see the maximum number of hiring in the coming financial year?
My opinions for the hiring scenario for the next one year will be the hiring in the areas of data science, data analytics and tech roles related to mobile development,devops, backend infrastructure increasing in popularity as most of the companies develop and strengthen their technical architecture.Digital marketing roles will be in high demand as more companies put their money on communication to their users over the internet. Skills that will be in demand will be directly correlated to the business needs of the companies as they continue to increase their digital presence and expand.

Is virtual hiring here to stay for long? What tips do you want to give to HR Leaders to recruit a best fit virtually ?

Virtual hiring will be the norm for the next year with online assessments, interviews, and personalized messaging taking the limelight. The virtual hiring has stages like sourcing and shortlisting, interviewing, offers and onboarding will be completely virtual. HR leaders need to adapt to recruit the best. Sourcing needs a personalized approach than before as we have seen at Instahyre, applicants apply 73% more to a personalized job message with a clear vision statement and how they have grown and will tide over this pandemic.

Shortlisting has to be faster than the pre-COVID era, a job seeker will apply to an estimated 7 jobs on an average on Instahyre, and companies are wooing quality talent – so the shortlisting process needs to be fast to engage and build a quality talent pipeline. Video interviews usually happen when the timelines or timezones of the job seeker and the employer don’t match but now in the “new normal”, they are the norm.HR leaders should assess the cultural fit by understanding candidate preferences, what they want to do and what they are looking in the role -this is the sole reason of 34% of the attrition according to a survey conducted over the Instahyre platform with more than 10,000 job seekers. Cultural fit is of utmost importance as physical interaction with colleagues will be zero and all communication will be virtual.

Offers and onboarding – Offers can be provided over video calls to understand the reaction of the job seeker. Onboarding should be storytelling sessions by leaders, HR and business, and aligning the candidate to the vision of the company as well as the mission of the team she will be joining. Regular meetups with the candidates before joining date for team events, sessions on growth/funding raised/celebrations help to eliminate the chances of last-minute dropoff before joining.
How do you think HR leaders can better prepare themselves and the team for the next year?

Due to the pandemic and the hybrid working scenario, most teams will be remote. The competition to find talent will be very high. The following techniques will be the most effective:

Preparing a value proposition for each new hire similar to a sales pitch: As per Instahyre insights, we have seen pitching on the first email itself helps in a 340% increase in the final conversion. So, the HR leaders have to be extremely mindful about the same. Personalisation is the key. 

Introduction to the team and bonding: As physical interaction will be minimal, it should be complemented with virtual conferences and meetups with team members. HRs need to focus on providing the offline experience in the digital setup.

The motivation of the recruiters: Your team is the most important, and motivating them will help them get the best talent on board. The process of transfer of motivation is from the inside to the outside.

Leadership talks: HR leaders need to address the candidates to show them your vision, mission, and company in the next couple of years. Leadership needs to engage on a one to one level along with team leads to engage the prospective employees. Instahyre insights saw an increase in applications by 6x when companies have leadership talks, team introductions and relevant information on the Instahyre Brand Page.

What are the key trends HR professionals can expect in 2022?

Use of new-age tech for everything: Blockchain, gamification, chats, interviews, background verification will be automated.

Remote hiring 3.0: The norm is to assess candidates through video interviews and remote onboarding. We surveyed 29,890 candidates, where 87% reported that they want to have a better remote hiring experience with insight into the tech used, team members, the problem they will be solving, and the solution’s scale.

Global hiring: Remote hiring will help companies tap talent globally and this will help them increase their talent pool significantly. Instahyre saw companies like Uber, Amazon, GoJek, etc. and some of the largest silicon valley firms hiring remotely.HR professionals need to consider cultural differences, diversity, skills, and compliance to maximise global hiring benefits.

In your opinion, which is the most impactful innovation the company has implemented in the HR tech sphere? Please elaborate.

The most powerful innovation is intelligence in understanding candidates and finding out if they are suitable for a particular job. Reading, sorting and arranging resumes manually took away 70% of the recruiter time, resulting in poor candidate engagement. A typical recruiter spends more than 30 days finding and building her talent pool for a job. Hiring is tough. She uses job portals and external agencies, which increases her company’s hiring expenses by 10x without guaranteeing the candidate’s quality or cultural fit.

On the business front, this resulted in the loss of prospective candidates, business losses as a project could not complete on time, and employer branding suffered due to random mass emails. Instahyre innovated and developed a technology known as Instamatch using AI, ML and other technologies.

Instahyre is solving the cost of hire and time to hire for employers, even though there is enough demand and supply. Likewise, Instahyre is solving the problem of matching job-seekers with highly personalized job opportunities without spam.

The InstaMatch algorithm understands the company’s DNA, job and recruiter, which helps identify the correct set of candidates for each position. On the other hand, InstaMatch understands the DNA of each candidate – with all kinds of data points such as skills, previous work experience and duration, education, social media posts (such as Github contributions for developers and Twitter sentiment analysis for non-engineers) and finally the candidate’s career preferences.

Please throw some light on the revenue created by InstaHyre in the last financial year and how will this change in the coming times?

InstaHyre has been profitable since its inception. The revenue grew by 3x in the last year with a 5x increase in average revenue per account and a 7x increase in the number of companies using the platform. InstaHyre is targeting revenue growth of 3x in the next year with a target to cross the 100 crore ARR.