Your inbox is overflowing. Your voicemail holds countless messages and is likely telling callers, “This mailbox is full.” Your text messages are piling up. All from tech vendors clamoring for your attention. Some have even gotten through to your boss who is now asking, “Do you know about…?” (That’s perhaps the most irritating of all.) You know technology is rapidly evolving and your FOMO on applications your team can leverage to engage prospects, match candidates, improve the quality of candidate experience, reduce time to fill or help with countless other priorities is rising. How do you filter from the industry chaos which ones deserve your attention?
If you really want to properly evaluate and select the best recruiting technology for your needs, follow the lead of the most experienced TA leaders who are increasingly stepping back to recalibrate their priorities. A deliberate and intentional process to prioritization is key to honing in on the best solutions to your recruiting challenges.
Your prioritization process
Evaluating priorities was a big topic of discussion at our recent Recruiting Innovation and Automation Meeting. In general CXR members fell into three different approaches (or some combination of the three):
- Collaboration: Talking to different stakeholders and developing a ranked list of priorities to meet current challenges.
- Discussion and weighting: Group discussions on challenges and agreement on the relative importance of each.
- Top-down direction: A more old-school approach where the person in charge sets the priorities and the rest of the team takes action.
One of our members shared an example of the discussion and weighting approach. The entire talent acquisition team spent a day together to map every user’s story for the next few years. Dollar amounts and resources were assigned to each of the tasks or milestones on that map. Once the journeys were set, purposeful small teams were created with representation from each key area of TA. They wanted people from different TA segments to learn about and appreciate differing priorities.
The small groups were each given a fictional budget and directed to pick the user journeys that would have the largest impact on talent acquisition. Once that determination was met, budgets were cut and groups had to re-evaluate their priorities in light of diminishing resources. At the end of the day, all groups came together to define the final road map and leadership knew it carried input from the full range of TA disciplines.
Another approach was a combination of collaboration and top-down direction. TA Leaders from each discipline met to determine strategic priorities. Once communicated across all of TA, each segment is expected to use that list as the “north star” with investments and priorities following that lead.
Regardless of the approach, we argue that a few key factors should be always be taken into consideration:
- Cost/resources
- Impact on the overall business
- ROI
- Needs of the stakeholder most affected (typically the hiring manager, recruiter or candidate)
An exercise in setting recruiting technology priorities
After the discussion around prioritization approaches, we challenged small groups at the meeting to set their own priorities with the following challenges:
- Every candidate invited to a face-to-face interview can self-schedule.
- Candidates can determine preferred method of communication – text, email, etc. All content available in optimised mobile format.
- Pre-boarding including communication with hiring manager and his/her team is automated, configurable for job family, level, division and online.
- ALL candidates surveyed within 48 hours after being dispositioned and analysis distributed near on [monthly] basis at recruiter level.
- All recruiter searches augmented with machine language matching tools.
- Tools to augment Recruitment Marketing campaigns integrated into Technology stack.
- Online assessment tools for pivotal positions are integrated into Recruiter dashboard
- Asynchronous video interviewing capability piloted along with online assessments to rank prospects in real time.
- Tool predicting which of identified qualified candidates are most likely to [be interested, be selected, etc]
The results
All five groups selected two challenges as their top priorities:
- Every candidate invited to a face-to-face interview can self-schedule.
- All recruiter searches augmented with machine language matching tools.
Most of the operations and technology experts in attendance also selected the need for a tool predicting which of identified qualified candidates are most likely to [be interested, be selected, etc]. Other identified needs were
- Candidates can determine preferred method of communication – text, email, etc. All content available in optimised mobile format.
- Pre-boarding including communication with hiring manager and his/her team is automated, configurable for job family, level, division and online.
- Asynchronous video interviewing capability piloted along with online assessments to rank prospects in real time.
Not selected by any of the members:
- ALL candidates surveyed within 48 hours after being dispositioned and analysis distributed near on [monthly] basis at recruiter level.
- Tools to augment Recruitment Marketing campaigns integrated into Technology stack.
- Online assessment tools for pivotal positions are integrated into Recruiter dashboard
Articulating your vision
In the end, every Talent Acquisition leader in attendance could take away insights that were in alignment with their current priorities as well as a few that were not on their plate but clearly priorities for other employers and, thus, bear watching. What an outside observer might note is that TA leaders typically have 5, 10 or more years experience assessing, building and integrating their recruiting technology. More and more of them are beginning to articulate their vision of how recruiting ought to be accomplished instead of accepting a vendor’s view of the way it should be.
Establishing and aligning your priorities is the first step to diminishing the tech stack noise in the room.
