The talent acquisition technology market has become increasingly complex with new providers emerging, old providers trying to reinvent themselves, and endless rumors of pending acquisitions. The modern talent acquisition tech stack is now designed to help companies manage both the tactical and strategic elements of talent acquisition. Yet, many of the companies we have interviewed over the past year are still confused about which solutions drive business results. Unfortunately, too much of the thought leadership in this industry is driven by vendors rather than practitioners and we’re excited to be conducting research that provides a better understanding of the challenges, strategies and technology enablers facing today’s talent acquisition leaders. This study will help to guide the research we publish over the next year and we’re inviting CXR readers and members to participate.
As a “sneak peek” of what we’re seeing from respondents so far, below are a few of the early findings to date:
Recruitment Challenges: For the past three years, improving the candidate experience has been identified as a top challenge for organizations. This year, over 60% of respondents identified competition across industries as the top challenge. In fact, 1 in 2 companies (even in industries such as retail and hospitality) identified engineering roles are the most difficult positions to fill. With a shrinking talent pool, some companies are reducing some of their requirements. Forty-one percent (41%) of companies are eliminating degree requirements for some jobs and one in three companies have stopped screening for every role at their organization.
Candidate Communication: Companies have made some small improvements in candidate communication including providing transparency on the application process (34% of companies compared to 11% from last year) and making information available to candidates (39% compared to 24% last year). It is no surprise that many companies are also relying more heavily on new channels of communication including bots, text, and video. Companies using bots to communicate with candidates were two times more likely to fill positions in two weeks. And, companies using text were twice as likely to improve first-year retention rates.
Scheduling: Scheduling was also identified as a top challenge for talent acquisition professionals. Sixty percent (60%) of companies have dedicated schedulers on their team and 66% said their biggest challenge is that hiring managers block-off their calendars. Many companies are looking for new solutions this year and one in three companies are leveraging an interview management platform to support them.
Recruitment Marketing Platform/CRM: One of the most interesting findings from this year’s survey was that only 2% of companies are using all of the functionality in their recruitment marketing platform. With over 70% of companies investing in some type of recruitment marketing platform or CRM this year, these solutions need to become simpler so that adoption is higher. The top area of technology that will be replaced this year was recruitment marketing and 59% of companies replacing these solutions cited capabilities and price as their top two reasons.
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The hundreds of data points collected thus far include a mix of different industries and companies with over 1,000 employees (25% of respondents have over $10,000 employees). Take a few moments to participate and we’ll be sure to share our findings with you as they are published!
