What Will the Future of Employment Look Like

What Will the Future of Employment Look Like

The job market has been gradually changing for quite a few years now. Recently, analytics have been published that reveal just which positions will be most wanted and which will start to die off, all to prepare potential new recruiters for the times ahead.

However, one aspect of the change in the market that doesn’t get much coverage is the actual recruitment process. There is quite a lot to be said about it, and we’re here to shed light on some new information. Because when the recruitment process changes, we will have to think about how our CVs and experiences will play into it.

What Is Changing Exactly?

We frequently see headlines that talk about the way millennials have altered the playing field when it comes to work. They’ve come with their own sets of skills, and an emphasis on working smarter rather than harder. Already, there are numerous cases of startups employing people based on the skills they show during a test or a trial period, rather than taking their CV as absolute authority.

The change comes in the way companies assess the skills of applicants, and how they automate the process to make it easier to sift through hundreds of CVs. But what does that mean for the employment process?

T-Shaped Skills

Self-taught skills have gained significant traction thanks to the Internet. Many people expand their qualifications for certain positions, so you will be able to see a graduated elementary school teacher with a penchant for programming, for example. And nowadays, companies have already started praising that as readiness to take initiative.

Long gone are the days where you would hire an applicant with nothing less than ten or fifteen years of experience in their job. Now, this linear progression is seen as a drawback, and it’s preferred to nurture T-shaped skill learning instead. It visually represents the expertise in one specific niche (the vertical line in the T), and moderate knowledge in other skills the company could find useful (the horizontal line in the T). Employers will begin looking for applicants who can bring much more to the table for the company.

Games as Assessment?

In an amazing story that went global quite fast, Unilever has decided to shift their recruitment process. In fear of overlooking potentially great candidates whose applications get buried in the piles of others they receive every day, the company decided to employ an AI.

Its job would not be to simply sift through CVs, however. It is to collect data from neuroscience games that aim to test the applicants’ skills. The results from those games are then compared to the job position requirements, and other potential candidates.

Automating the process in this way may seem a little impersonal, but Unilever’s experiment has proven that algorithms make much better predictions on a how well a candidate will perform after being hired.

Chatbots

Echoborg is one more example of how AI will be able to affect the employment process in the future. Combining the entertainment purpose and his will to improve machine learning through interactions with humans, Phil Hall was involved with the Echoborg project. It gives people the opportunity to debate with AI.

Just like the Echoborg Hall has created, an automated HR representative will perhaps be able to have conversations with potential applicants, and based on specific metrics, decide if they’re a good cut for the company. Even though today chatbots are still just solving simpler issues in customer service, who knows what they can evolve into?

Predictive Analysis

More recently, there’s been a buzz about certain metrics and analytics being used in HR as well. While this movement is still in its nascence, different pieces of software are already being developed to gather data on possible employee flight risks, skill gaps, and even how well candidates fit in the company’s vision and mission.

The future of employment could entail software that would objectively and algorithmically choose the best possible candidate. However, a human supervisor will always be needed, and there are no plans to change that any time soon.

The Takeaway

We are easy to dismiss the automated future of the employment process, simply because we are afraid it will become cold and impersonal. When actually, automation opens up a whole world of possibilities for potential candidates. It gives us more agency when applying for a job position – from expanding our skill sets, through testing what really matters for that specific position, and ultimately, to how well we could fit in with a certain company.

That being said, such a future of recruitment is still far away. While some headway is being made with advanced chatbots and algorithmic screening in certain places, there’s more work to be done. But until then, we can put our ear to the ground and prepare to finally give up endless form filling and CV updating.