Jessica Miller-Merrell, president and CEO of Xceptional HR, made an insightful point concerning the nature of recruiting in “Innovative Staffing Practices: A Look Back at Recruiting & Our Love Affair with Technology.”
“Recruiting has its roots in processes and workflow management…Technology has been revolutionary in increasing the effectiveness of processing, particularly the recruiting industry. Technology and recruitment is a match made in heaven. They are soul mates, and I really can’t imagine an effective recruitment department driven by hiring and workplace analytics without the technology to justify our success and business needs.”
Jessica, in the end of the article, emphasizes the valuable role traditional practices like collaboration and relationship recruiting will play in the future of recruiting—regardless of technological developments.
Recruitment technology is here to stay (and so is the love affair). The tools now available are becoming more specialized, and there are plenty of choices in different domains: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS); Video-based Job Boards; Neurocognitive Testers; and Hiring Marketplaces.
While reviewing companies within these distinct categories, we’ll keep one question in mind: How will these tech solutions influence or augment essential, and long-established, recruitment strategies and methods?
Applicant Tracking Systems
Greenhouse breaks down their services into three clear-cut categories: Finding Talent; Interviewing; Decision Making. Since sourcing is marketing, they’ve created an integrated dashboard to cover each component of your campaign.
One of the strengths behind this system is the priority it places on effective communication. One way to ensure collaboration during the recruitment process is to share referrals on a transparent sourcing framework. Moreover, their visual feedback overview helps each team member keep track of comments and ideas—suggesting other topics to cover with regard to the prospective candidates. In a broader sense, Greenhouse aims to demystify the entire process from sourcing to hiring. Their main focus is to streamline the process with tips and solid frameworks for interview structure, feedback, follow-up, planning, and team organization.
Like many other competitive systems, iCIMS is another tool for finding the right candidates, standardizing interview aims, automating communications, and providing workflow management for step-by-step actions throughout the entire sourcing and hiring process. They also do much more than that: onboarding, performance management, surveys, and even offboarding. A strong upside to this SaaS ATS is its ability to extend your companies’ reach across varied social media platforms.
Leveraging social communities—while at the same time accessing candidate profiles to monitor any updates or changes—presents some strategic payoffs for recruiters. Paying attention to changes candidates make in their profiles helps you see how they’re growing (this is particularly useful for revisiting previous candidates in your pipeline). Having a social media presence also means you have another opportunity to market your brand.
iCIMS takes branding one step farther with their mobile-optimized career portals:
“Capable of supporting distinct workflows, branded Career Portals allow you to create specialized recruitment campaigns for internal employees, university hiring, and hourly recruitment. Easy-to-use online applications provide applicants with an efficient, positive candidate experience from any device.”
Neurocognitive Testers
Science-based approaches are on the rise. Turning hiring into a science may seem farfetched to some, but the data is in. A company like ProphecySciences utilizes neuroscience, games, biometrics, and machine learning to find patterns, and make predictions, about candidates—ultimately bringing together highly productive and creative teams. How does it work?
The incorporation of game attributes to business processes has a surprisingly wide range of uses. Games are valuable because they reflect engagement levels and problem-solving skills. For ProphecySciences, cognitive games and machine learning predict performance; provide insights on group IQ dynamics; and demonstrate useful evaluations of management and leadership skills.
Building productive and collaborative teams is difficult, but the company promises their data will lead to actionable insights. If you want to know more details on how their 30-min test works—and you live in the San Francisco Bay Area—take the test yourself.
Hiring Marketplaces
Right now GroupTalent is helping startups find and work with top tier developers— but they have their eyes set on larger companies too. Their philosophy is talent comes first and their system caters to jobseekers with an algorithm that matches them to rewarding projects. The process to generate an outstanding pool of prospective candidates is rigorous—only 20% of the applicants to the marketplace are accepted—but this ensures that each person has the necessary skill sets to perform well in demanding tech positions.
Right now they serve four major cities: San Francisco, L.A., Boston, and New York (but don’t worry, they’re going to be expanding to others very soon).
Surprisingly, they do a lot of the work for recruiters in four easy steps: 1. “We Source & Interview”; 2. “We Provide Candidate Bios”; 3. “Candidates Get Pitched”; 4. “You Get Introduced.” The advantages are clear for both parties: companies don’t have to strain their resources to acquire great talent, and jobseekers can “try out” at companies—working hard for potential full-time pitches.
Video-Based Job Boards
This brand new video-based recruitment portal is simultaneously humanizing job searches and the recruitment process. The portal is free for candidates—allowing them to create three minute “MeVie” videos that supplement CVs:
“This is your chance to sell yourself in support of your CV to stand out from the crowd providing employers with the ability to see the real you. It is also your chance to learn more about employers, read their job descriptions and have the opportunity to watch their recruitment videos.”
It’s not free for recruiters, but the benefits are worth contemplating:
“If you are a recruiter, Hello My Name Is...aims to save your employer time and cost in helping you manage your recruitment campaigns more efficiently. Hello My Name Is...enables you to view applicants more thoroughly and helps create more accurate short lists by gaining a “behind the CV” insight into job-seekers’ personalities as well as communication and interpersonal skills.”
Expect to see more people valuing video interview screening; the process saves time, money, energy, and it provides candidate insight potential well beyond CVs and cover letters.
Conclusion
Technology doesn’t require traditional recruitment practices to take a back seat—or fade out of existence. Highly specialized software like Greenhouse provides templates, tips, and instructional frameworks to improve the structure, and pacing, of the process as a whole. Competition in this space is white-hot, so make sure you do your research before investing in recruiting software in the domain that suits you best. Think about how it will improve your collaboration and communication on all fronts.