HR is at a crossroads, as technology can help accomplish most of the traditional responsibilities faster, cheaper, and better than before. Amber Lloyd, Global Leader of HCM Strategy & Customer Engagement at Infor on how organizations can benefit from the advancement in recruiting technology
Now more than ever, we are seeing massive financial investments in technologies that are changing the way we think about recruiting. Yet, due to the degree in which the C-Suite understands the value of hiring as part of their overall business strategy, we continue to see huge variations when it comes to how recruiting functions operate and their level of maturity.
The recruiting function is considered a back-office service for hiring managers. However, when managers cannot fill these positions as quickly as needed, recruiting takes the heat for sub-par time to fill metrics. As organizations continue to evolve and meet the demands of the marketplace, we can expect to see shifts in talent acquisition, and ultimately, the candidate experience.
For example, a recruiting department at a mid-size company will likely have multiple technology partnerships or solutions consisting of posting boards, behavioral assessments, applicant tracking, reporting technologies, Artificial Intelligence, scheduling tools, etc. Not only does this create challenges for the recruiting team, but also for the candidate experience. Recruitment and technology teams are left to cobble together business processes that span applications and develop technical integrations to feed data and mitigate redundant data entry.
**With the massive investment in new and evolving technologies, the responsibility of designing an optimal candidate journey, building integrations between the technologies and the management of multiple technologies fall on recruiters**. Throughout the relatively short history of applicant tracking and now candidate relationship managementOpens a new window , we have seen the pendulum swing between large technology providers that provide full-suite functionality and smaller organizations who deliver more robust, engaging and innovative technologies.Â
**In the last few years, we have seen the pendulum swing towards small niche players delivering strong user experiences, with sophisticated AI to drive best of breed products in the talent acquisition space**. With these innovations and new technology comes the challenge of reinventing candidate and hiring manager journey, piecing together various technologies to hire the right talent.
Recruiters have often been compared to sales teams, searching for the right prospect, presenting the right opportunity, and nurturing the relationship to bring the right folks into the opportunity. Today’s market requires more of recruiters, it requires them to work closely with marketing to develop a consistent customer/candidate brand, technology experts who understand how to integrate solutions for an optimal user experience, business process experts who comprehend the importance of transitioning candidates into productive hires with strong onboarding experiences, talent management leaders who can help cultivate internal talent to source internally, and compensation experts who understand how to create meaningful offerings.
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In most cases, recruiting will not be responsible for driving these overall cross-functional programs; however, we will be more successful if we learn to collaborate across organizational silos. This means conducting focus groups, asking candidates and hiring managers for their input, visiting the corporate career site as well as competitor career sites, and asking other organizations who have implemented these tools.
**For the candidate, employee and hiring manager journeys to evolve, there must be a shift in how organizations think about recruiting**. The organizations who do a good job of this consider the employer brand, the candidate experience and the new hire journey as part of the overall organizational responsibility, not just the recruiter’s responsibility.
The more organizations can collectively take accountability for the hiring practice, the more they will benefit from the advancements in recruiting technology. This means non-HR folks should take notice of the factors that drive hiring practices. It also means looking at the candidate journey from beginning to end and creating seamless business processes as well as technical integrations that piece together the full hiring process.