A Chief Technology Officer’s Perspective On Futureproofing Tech Hiring

SHL’s Digital Transformation Journey

In 2019, SHL initiated a digital transformation that allowed our 40-year-old company to re-invent its products and proposition. Our motivation behind this transformation was the ability to provide seamless experiences, accelerated through technology innovation, and actionable insights for our clients.

As Chief Technology Officer, I knew that this would require my team to embrace new skills, product development, re-factoring, and re-platforming. We needed to transform our way of working as well as our engineering capability to innovate and accelerate our time to market.

When we started our journey, we explored what technologies and skills would enable us to achieve our goals, and reviewed our internal capability to deliver this outcome. We initiated a major recruitment drive to scale our effort and introduce new skills into the organization.

Our Challenges and How We Overcame ThemOur Challenges and How We Overcame Them

The journey was not without its challenges. Bringing talent in the organization is not easy. It’s about having the right mixture of potential as well as expertise to strike the right balance for the company. The two greatest challenges we faced were:

• Ensuring the right fit with the culture and the ability to embrace a cross-functional mindset.
• The selection process was not quick enough to engage and identify potential talent and was impacting our most senior talent as they needed to review and meet a lot of people before being able to make an offer.

I knew we had to change our approach and automate our tech hiring!
 

When we started our journey, we explored what technologies and skills would enable us to achieve our goals, and reviewed our internal capability to deliver this outcome.

 
So, we embraced the use of SHL’s Tech Hiring Solution to engage, identify, recruit, and onboard our engineering talent. 

• Our video interview product enabled us to meet potential candidates remotely;
  
  
• Our code-sharing solution enabled us to pair up and work through different scenarios;
  
  
• Our automated AI-enabled coding skill assessments helped us to determine the level of skillset of the potential candidates before having to schedule virtual interviews and impact our senior talent in the selection process;
  
  
• And our cognitive and behavioral assessments helped us determine fit to our organization and teams.

This new recruiting framework came with many benefits:

• It freed up technical resources to focus on their day jobs.
  
  
• It imposed a high-quality standardization of selection and delivered a seamless candidate experience.
  
  
• The most striking benefit was the reduction in the time to hire, which created huge gains in both efficiency and the likelihood of recruitment success.
  
  
• The ability to increase diversity in our hiring process – and there is more to be said on this topic…

Our automated AI-enabled coding skill assessments helped us to determine the level of skillset of the potential candidates before having to schedule virtual interviews.

We Cannot Forget about the Importance of Diversity

The ability to identify the right mixture of talent to have in the organization is critical. Diversity increases tech adoption and success significantly as it allows the company to grow a larger lens and framework that reaches more people with its products and service. Additionally, diversity fills the gaps in thought processes and prevents groupthink.

Automation has been a real differentiator that has enabled us to bring in talent from different pools. It applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically score and find the right candidate. When done correctly, AI-enabled automation can remove some of the natural bias that exists in the hiring process, and grow a more diverse team in your company.

A Promising Technological Future

We know, from firsthand experience, that the tech hiring landscape is a challenging one. Strong demand for technical staff and the need to continuously hire and fill open positions is a common challenge.

The transformation at SHL gave us invaluable insight to make a significant difference in building world-class products and solutions through our product and engineering teams.

Learn more about our Tech Hiring Solutions here!