Simon Oldham, President of QJumpers, talks through key trends for 2019 in recruiting HR technologies.

Three key things in 2019 will be Artificial Intelligence, the continuation of technology that’s already started but the evolution will carry on and will become more prevalent. The other one is going to be the technology involving augmented and virtual reality. And then data analytics. It’s been around for a long time, but it’s at the point now where it can really start to get useful. We can make use of that information in our recruiting and HR practices going forward.

How Will AI Transform Recruiting and Hiring in 2019?

AI in recruiting is going to evolve further and it’s going to become more commonplace in recruitment technologies. Companies are already working on it, QJumpers has already got a good stack, but what it will be able to do is automatically rank. candidates based on their application. It will read the job advertisement, then read the resume of the applicant. It will be able to use natural language processing to find what is required of a job and then what the person actually has and give a percentage rank of how well they match that job. So you will be moving away from needing to have screening questions, which would be awesome.

How will Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Technology Affect Hiring and Human Resources?

Virtual reality and augmented reality are going to become tools, which we will use a lot more in a couple of different places. We can use it first of all as the employee attraction. Because finding people is so hard that you’ve got to work really hard on a attracting them to your career site or your job application process. You could use augmented reality or virtual reality to give people a tour of your company. Go and meet the CEO. Go and meet the team. Show them where they are going to be sitting in the job so they can get a good idea of the kind of people they’ll be working with and the environment that they’ll be based in. And then they can decide for themselves, is this company a good fit for me? And if you can get a good fit, they’ll stay longer, retention is higher. And retention key in this kind of market where unemployment’s so low.

How Will Data Analytics Change the Process of Evaluating Potential Candidates?

With the amount of data we are collecting already and and now with AI being able to actually use it in a meaningful way. We’re going to have a better opportunity to actually measure and assess what people can do and how well they are doing it. And this is really a stepping stone, it’s opening the door for managers to have conversations with their teams about what they want to do. They can see that they’re really good in this area or they have an interest in this area. So you can help them with their career progression which in the same time helps with employee engagement and once again this magic with employee retention.

Being able to retain people, develop them through the organization. This is really key for now in 2019 and I don’t know how long more into the future but with global kind of war for talent, especially and highly skilled roles We need to be doing so much more in retaining our staff, exciting our staff, engaging our staff. And these data analytics gives us the chance to know what’s happening. Know what they’re good at Know what they’re excited, and use it to do exactly that. Retain the key people.