How recruitment platforms are set to drive the expansion and growth of SME sector in India

As one of the world’s fastest growing economies in the recent decade, India owes its successful and sustained growth largely to the robustness and strength of the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) sector. 

India’s SME sector accounts for 45 percent of industrial output, and 40 percent of the total exports in India, generating employment for 60 million people and creating 1.3 million new jobs annually.

The SME sector has also emerged as a key factor to urbanise rural India and bring entire generations of professionals into the workforce.

Given the scale of the SME sector, it is no surprise that talent acquisition and recruiting remains one of the most complex and inefficient processes.

At the same time, the last decade has seen the emergence of startups using technology to simplify recruitment. With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, using these new solutions is simple and quick. 

Discovering and hiring the right talent still remains the single-most important factor determining the success of businesses, and SMEs are no different. In situations where SMEs may not have dedicated HR teams or budgets to hire recruitment agencies, recruitment platforms provide a cost-effective solution to hiring at scale.

Here are some benefits of recruiting platforms which outperform traditional recruiting.

Sourcing

With online recruitment platforms, there is no limit to the reach or size of audience that a company can aim to reach. Most online platforms build large pipelines of active candidates from multiple sources (online, offline) and allow companies the flexibility of searching and filtering these candidates based on specific criteria (salary bracket, years of experience, location...etc.).

With access to lakhs of potential hires, companies can be very focussed on targeting the candidates who are most likely to fit their given role. 

Evaluation and matching 

While CVs remain important in organised industries, many in the unorganised workforce rely on direct interviews or referrals to evaluate and match applicants. Since skills and experience are essentially claimed information, initial shortlisting requires a lot more effort to identify and match the right candidates. 

Machine learning algorithms can transform your shortlist from 100 good candidates to 10 great ones based on learning from millions of data points.

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Soft skills

Over the past decade, people have become increasingly comfortable with video and this is soon becoming a simple way to assess simple communication skills. We can use video to optimally pre-assess a candidate’s presentation and communication skills.

We simply ask them to record a short 60 second video describing their backgrounds and achievements. This way, recruiters do not need to wait until the first interview to judge soft skills.

Role specific screening questions

Every role has specific tasks and requirements that derive from a candidate's past work experience. Specifics matter especially when it comes to more specific industries or functions. To simplify the process for recruiters, many recruiting platforms have introduced simple ways to screen candidates.

We can use a mix of online questions and chat-based interfaces to gather the exact information we need at the right time.

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Assessments 

It is common practice for companies to request candidates to perform specific assignments or assessments to ensure they are practically capable of solving real-life challenges. However, creating large banks of questions requires time and subject matter expertise, which may be challenging for SMEs.

Recruitment platforms could provide these services. Candidate assessment results are a significant part of the evaluation as they provide the proof of the claimed skills being accurate or not.

Finally, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, virtual hiring is the new normal. It is more important than ever to understand all important aspects of a candidate in time for the first video interview. Virtual interviewing has its positives, but a major drawback is the inability to truly express oneself.

Therefore, it is critical to spend the time interviewing only the most relevant and qualified candidates (based on the mentioned parameters) and conducting a more pointed and detail oriented session.

SMEs can benefit just like the big players do from intelligent talent recruitment platforms. Ultimately, it is about solving challenges related to efficiency and scalability. Machine learning technologies provide us with solutions that companies of any size can benefit from.

As India’s SME sector continues to grow and attract the best talent, recruitment platforms will hopefully help continue to contribute to the recovery of India’s economy post-COVID.