The war over how best to protect the US-Mexico border is severely impacting the nation’s cybersecurity and with the longest federal government shutdown in the history of this country underway, Our cyber defense capabilities have taken a massive blow.

While the short-term impact is severe, the long-term effects could prove even more catastrophic. According to several recent reports, with every passing day, we have started relying on something similar to ‘luck’ than ‘strategy or systems’ to keep our cyber ecosystem secure.

Several federal agencies including the Department of State, Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce and Department of Housing and Urban Development, The Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Park Service have lost funding due to the shutdown. According to Tom Gann, chief of public policy at security research firm McAfee, “Many of these agencies are on the hit-list for hackers, organizations that specialize in high-end security intrusions and nation-state actors.”

"Cybersecurity at these agencies and departments could be degraded because lower-level government employees who bear the brunt of the shutdown often are on the front lines of basic computer security monitoring work," Gann said. “A major part of cybersecurity work at these agencies is performed by contracted employees who are also not available, as they are not getting paid during the government shut down,” Gann said.

Former Federal Chief Information Security Officer, Gregory Touhill, said that during the closure, “skilled people qualified to respond to the alerts/alarms may not be in place or even available due to the shutdown.”

Another notable point is that during the shutdown, it will be easy for hackers to define what the United States considers to be its critical systems. They will be looking at detailed activities in our cybersecurity ecosystem.

By current estimates, roughly 800,000 federal workers are currently unavailable include:

Currently, several of NIST weblinks effectively lead you to a dead end.

There is a growing concern among government's cybersecurity professionals that hackers will indeed take advantage of the partial shutdown, tampering with sensitive government data or stealing citizen’s information. Cybersecurity is hard enough job with a full crew. It’s a battle just to keep up with emerging cyber threat. Working with less than half strength means that we are at significant risk; The impact on our nation’s security grows with each passing day. While there is no doubt that all the agencies and departments have a good plan in place to keep essential systems and functions running, but with bare-bones staff there is only so much that can be done.

“Cyber threats don’t operate on Washington’s political timetable, and they don’t stop because of a shutdown,”  Lisa Monaco, former assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, told Axios.

A new generation of workforce

Millennials & Generation Z tend to spend most of their free time using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Millennials spend so much time on them, in fact, that social media has become the most accessible tool to reach them. The graph below represents the use of social media

This modern workforce is well-acquainted with digital platforms and computers, are versatile and can easily accustom themselves to new technologies.

Slipping in your own personalized advertisements for potential jobs between the articles and posts they typically read is the perfect way to reach them, get their attention and gain their interest in applying to your job offer.

Reaching a larger audience

Facebook is a popular option for companies and advertisers to post their content based on profiles, interests and time of the day. 52% of employers now use social media networking sites as a part of the recruiting process.

It is advisable to set the frequency of your advertisement based on criteria that most match your needs and you can cast a wide and targeted reach, whatever position you are looking to fill.

For example, you can set certain parameters so that all software developers across Europe see your job ad at exactly 10 PM local time when they scroll through their news feed. This is only a fraction of what social media advertising can accomplish for you when it comes to narrowing down your candidate profiles.

Easy Background Checks

There is nothing new about checking your candidates’ social media profiles for more information. Interviewers usually check the professional version of social media i.e., LinkedIn of their candidates to see their professional recommendations, content they share, social circles etc. Social media can also be used to determine if the candidate is a perfect fit, not just for the job role but also the company culture. According to a survey of recruiters and hiring managers by Jobvite, cultural fit, is key for most employers.

It is very common that candidates don’t feel the need to disclose any personal information during an interview and like to keep things to themselves; social media can provide a great insight into who your candidates really are before they even step through the door.

What do employers look for in social profiles?

1. 51% say that they’re looking to see if the candidate will be a good fit with the corporate culture.
2. 45% are researching potential hires on social media to find out more about that candidate’s qualifications.
3. 44% of hiring managers want to see if a candidate is creative.

Source: careers.workopolis

In conclusion, connecting with a younger and more dynamic candidate base on social media and utilizing it effectively as a means of communication & recruitment is a good way to establish trust. Giving the responsibility of social media recruitment to a millennial team of recruiters and letting them interact with their like-minded generation of candidates can also be a great way to insert some friendliness into your recruitment pattern.

It shows that your company can adapt to new technologies and trends, giving the candidate a huge reason to consider working for you.

The major news in recruiting for the year 2017 was undeniably AI, and with its increasing adoption this trend is only expected to increase in 2018.

By working with tools like ATS, recruiters have used technology to make their jobs easier, faster, and better or in other words highly efficient. Employees are the company’s most important asset, which makes talent acquisition strategy the foundation for ongoing success.

AI is capable of considering a probable employee for a particular position by looking at candidate’s background and matching up with those workers by identifying certain qualifications, educational history, work experience and other factors that consider a candidate has the background to emulate the top performers at your organization.

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, it was found that 44% of businesses incorporate AI into their IT functions, and 19% use AI to predict their customers’ future purchases and present them with suitable offers. Businesses are also beginning to see the benefits of AI in recruitment. According to Ideal, 96% of senior HR professionals consider that AI can highly leverage talent acquisition and retention.

Here's how AI can help:

1. In Posting Jobs: AI can use programmatic advertising technique which gives the user the ability to place highly targeted ads in front of the targeted audience based on their browsing history, online activity, and cookies. Cookies can be used to track candidates who visit career pages, allowing us to compile records of what other pages they’re browsing and what type of jobs they're looking for.
2. Sourcing candidates: AI, in the form of machine learning, sources, and qualifies candidates online in resume databases such as CareerBuilder, Indeed and Monster for recruiters to follow-up with. The process often uses Sentiment analysis which comprises of the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, subjective information. It can also help recruiters in creating job descriptions with keywords that attract a more diverse candidate pool.
3. Resume screening: Manually screening resumes is a fairly tedious task, however, by using the machine learning ability AI screening can be automated by learning what existing employees’ skills and qualifications are. By assigning certain rules and triggers, conversations related to specific hiring or job queries and receive instant answers can be automated.
4. Messaging and data collection: Chatbots that use natural language processing to collect data from candidates, in form of screening questions, chat responses, answer FAQs about the job, and schedule an interview. Information from a candidate collected by the chatbots is then fed into a job portal/s or sent directly to a human recruiter to follow up with the candidate. This process reduces the need to respond to emails, phone calls, and text messages without compromising on candidate experience.

AI technology is capable of changing many things. However, it still is not equipped enough to remove complete human interaction. AI can help bypass back-end and repetitive processes, ultimately assisting recruiters in finding the right talent. The technology is here but it is not all-encompassing; conducting face-to-face interviews may still promise a satisfactory match than otherwise. While AI can assist in many parts of the recruitment process, the human involvement remains imperative.

In the very near future, most recruitment models will involve AI. AI is already transforming every business vertical; in medicine, AI is taking the role of a clinical assistant to help physicians make faster and reliable diagnoses. Companies like General Electric & Siemens are using AI for monitoring machine fleets and factories.

Artificial Intelligence is also rapidly evolving in the Staffing industry and is bound to change the game of recruitment. Jobinvote CEO, Dan Finnigan said, “If recruiters and companies can learn to pair themselves with a specific AI, they can train it to understand a particular corporate mission and culture, so that recruiters feel like they leverage these chatbots and other similar technology as extensions of their teams, not as replacements for them”. In the words of Cyberpunk author, William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed.”

Cloud is now a basic business requirement; every business in some way or another is harnessing the power of cloud to succeed. Some may choose in-house infrastructure or a private cloud environment, while others prefer public cloud offerings. The fact still remains that companies are relying more on their cloud vendors now more than ever for providing the best services at reasonable rates. However, all too often, that’s not always what’s delivered.

Here are some points to keep in mind while you deal with a cloud vendor in order to get the best deal for your corporate assistance.

1. Review Vendor’s Uptime and Downtime Statistic

Uptime statistics define the time that a cloud service is accessible to its users, those who have subscribed for the cloud provider’s services. Companies often claim that they rarely have outages or they are better in uptime statistics. Don’t let these claims go unchecked. A lot of cloud providers fail to deliver a good uptime, in other words, are not giving to the customer three nines (99.9%) of availability. 99.9% uptime means 9 hours of unscheduled downtime per year which does not count the scheduled downtime that the companies organize for maintenance purposes. Along with availability, it is equally important to have a good response time warranty, i.e., how fast the system is operating when it is up and running. It is of utmost importance to get detailed statistics before signing up with a vendor.

2. Get specifics on Support Levels

Cloud vendors pretty much offer more or less the same support levels with few alterations with names like ‘standard’, ‘essential’, and ‘ultimate’ packages. These packages often do not give detailed information as to how much support each level guarantees. Always remember to ask your vendor a full description of these support levels and specific examples and whether these situations would be covered in the support or not. It is advisable to get the guarantee in the form of an agreement to serve as a record if at all required in the future.

3. Find a point of contact

In case of an issue, you must have a designated point of contact with the vendor, who can resolve it. Many companies try to get past this by introducing a ticketing system. ‘Tell us your problem, and we’ll get back to you when we have a fix’, is an example of a pop-up message and is very common in the industry. A Designated POC would be an ideal alternative to such a message in order to address the issue at hand immediately and to make sure the right people are working to resolve it.

4. Avoid Vendor lock-in and know your Separation Agreements

Cloud vendors may try to get an initial long-term contract with lock-in periods varying from months to years and often levy early termination charges. While choosing a cloud provider it is important to evaluate the Separation Agreements in place. While separation maybe the last thing that comes to mind while choosing a vendor, it is still one of the most important things to consider. It may also be crucial to inquire whether the vendor has the capability to retain your data even after your contract has ended with them, in order to avoid any possible data breaches.

5. Check the Service Level Agreements

SLA is the commitment on availability levels and performance of services offered. There are no specific standards to an SLA and thus it varies from provider to provider. Higher the price of the service, better the performance guaranteed, and this is usually negotiable. It is important to go through the verbiage of an SLA to clearly define vendors accountability and service assurances and choose the best plan according to your requirement with matrices that offer discounts on billing and other penalties if it is breached.

Stay Updated

Last but not least, once you have finalized a provider, do not stop looking for better alternatives. Be up to date with the market and what other providers are offering. If your service doesn’t match with the current market trend, be sure to ask your provider for an updated service and also, for them to inform you about changes in terms and conditions, if any, while your service is still intact with them.

Getting the right cloud vendor is essential for a company’s overall growth. Keeping these checks in mind while evaluating your options will not only help you to find the right cloud vendor but also let you manage your company’s operations unhindered and with peace.