Why are we still having challenges in recruiting?
“In the year 2015 the landscape of talent acquisition is a war zone littered with wasted money, broken dreams, and endless frustration. It’s not pretty, and the casualties are mounting by the minute.”
~Dr. Charles Handler, a thought leader, analyst and practitioner in talent assessment and human capital space.
Recruiting high-tech employees is a challenge with so many fast growing companies competing for similar talent. When it comes to recruiting, employers are constantly looking for more effective and efficient ways of hiring using social networks for sourcing candidates and online tools for interviewing them.
While successful enterprises are incorporating increasing amounts of technology into their core business processes, the adoption of technology in the talent management space is still quite sparse. According to a recent Deloitte report, more than 90% of large enterprises in the U.S. have ways to model and predict budget, financial results, and expenses but less than 4% of those have any visibility into their workforce.
This problem is not the lack of interest or expertise but is a lack of quality data to perform any meaningful analysis. Existing tools used for recruitment are too fragmented or they are simply not designed for generating metrics or data analysis.
Attracting Candidates
Classic job postings that were successful in the years 1990 – 2010 are no longer effective. Candidates are looking for a more interactive, transparent and socially connected experience when applying for jobs. Impersonal job listings modeled after print media advertisements are definitely out of tune with the rest of the Internet-based services that we have come to except and value. Companies that fail to invest in time and resources to engage directly with candidates and market their brand and culture often find it difficult, if not impossible, to attract the right talent. Glassdoor does an awesome job at presenting candidates career-related visuals, CEO approvals and recommendations to candidates. Resumator is a startup company that helps organizations to create a branded career page that is accessible from any device. The reality today is that the sourcing challenge is no longer finding candidates; it is about attracting candidates.
Engaging Candidates
Technology has added another dimension to the area of talent acquisition. An always-connected lifestyle is so commonplace that we hardly mention it anymore, nor can we imagine any other way of life. Technology is revolutionizing the way we connect in our personal lives and has made it possible for us to engage with people on multiple levels. However, the experience is still fragmented for candidates and hiring manager alike. Existing consumer tools cannot easily allow us to separate work life and personal life. Enterprise tools do not have the flexibility or ubiquity that we need to stay engaged with candidates.
Social Recruiting
While LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are still the mainstream social networks used for recruiting, GitHub or StackOverflow are the places to look for top IT talent. Poachable.co targets passive candidates by tempting them with matched job listings. For candidates, JobFusion is a startup that crawls the user’s social network to find jobs in companies where their friends work. “Hackathons” and coding challenges offer another way of engaging directly with the top talent. Research from social recruiting platform Jobvite indicates that the vast majority of recruiters (94%) either uses or plans to use social media for recruiting. Meanwhile, research firm Aberdeen Group says that 73% of 18 to 34-year-olds found their last job through a social network.
Hiring Right
While attracting candidates is a sourcing challenge, making the right hire remains the most impactful process. A recent study published by Personnel Psychology (3) puts top performers producing four times more while being paid less than 20% more than the average workers. Just as important as hiring top performers is to productivity, bad hiring decisions are expensive and tend to have an adverse effect on the existing team including top performers. The difference between an “A player” and an “A-plus player” is the difference between a million in revenue and a billion in revenue, said Paul English, Co-founder of Kayak. The online interview platform EasyHire.me makes it easy to hire the right tech talent by arming the hiring managers with live video, online code editor, and a databank of questions, packaged together to provide a one-screen interview experience.
Recruitment Workflows
What is stopping us from following a data-driven approach to recruitment? The short answer is fragmentation of data across tools making it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze and improve.
Let’s look at a possible set of tools that a company uses for recruitment:
- Glassdoor to create a company profile
- Resumator to create a career website
- ZipRecruiter to post the job listing to multiple websites
- Careerify to manage employee referrals
- Greenhouse.io to manage the recruitment workflow
- EasyHire.me for scheduling and conducting interview
- Checkr for background check
- Workday to manage onboarding and other HR workflows
While there are products and services that aim to provide a unified workflow for managing recruitment and talent management, the current talent acquisition landscape is a war zone, fragmented and frustrating to employers and candidates alike. There is tremendous opportunity for platforms that try not to address every aspect of talent management but instead allow easy integration of services; and for services to address specific needs efficiently while offering APIs to integrate easily.
Conclusion
Given the current trends in cloud computing, the established value in building services around talent management and recruiting, it is possible in the very near future for us to expect a more data-driven approach to recruitment. It would turn the trend and cause companies to invest significantly more on technology around workforce as well as talent acquisition and management.
