With a year-on-year growth of 10.7% to a value of $11.7 billion (2014), the executive search and leadership consulting industry and the businesses it serves are facing a major challenge: they need to find good talent, faster. These two points, ‘hiring better quality talent’ and ‘hiring talent faster’, were also mentioned as the main recruitment concerns in a 2014 survey by TalentRISE.It was about time that the manual process of searching for talent was aided by Technology. Nowadays, Artificial intelligence (Al), big data and machine learning are changing the way recruitment works. For example, new tools called people aggregators are gathering a candidate’s internet presence in one place. They have various other features i.e. ranking of executives, predicting the likeliness of a candidate to switch jobs, finding dormant executives, and providing sophisticated filters. People aggregators such as TalentBin and Connectifier are gaining popularity in this space.Besides people aggregators, many other easy-to-use and innovative tools are being developed to help recruiters find new talent in a more effective manner. There are some that speed up the search process, some that help getting a better response rate, while some others help recruiters to network smarter.There is no shortage of apps, software tools and websites which help to simplify and streamline recruitment. In order to use the tools available to you to the fullest, you need to be up to speed with changing technology, fully understand how the tools function, and ensure that they correspond well with your existing executive search process.Of course technology alone cannot offer a complete solution. Human intelligence is always needed to add value-driven insights, judgement and precision.
