Category Archives: Applicant Tracking

Too Many Recruiting Tools Are Killing Your Recruiting Efforts

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You’ve heard of this concept of the Inverted-U Curve, right? It’s fairly straightforward. In the beginning, you have nothing or very little. As you increase the resources you begin to become more effective. Eventually, as you add more resources you’ll actually reach maximum potential.

In the attempt to go even higher, you keep adding more resources, but you don’t see an increase in effectiveness or output, you actually see a decrease. This is the basic concept of the chart above.

This happens in recruiting too many organizations.

We start out with a bunch of recruiters and some phones. That’s not enough we need to add some other stuff, these recruiters need tools! So, we give them email and an ATS. Then comes the job boards, postings, InMails, etc. Might as well automate background checks and references. We really need to fill the pipeline, here comes sourcing tech!

Wish we had a way to get our messages out to candidates more effectively! CRM, branding technology, data analytics, SMS messaging, etc. Just keep adding more tools! That’ll a fix it!

Except it doesn’t!

What happens to your recruiting team as you add more tools?

  • The complexity of the process increases.
  • Core recruiting skills diminish, or at the very least don’t increase. (Laziness factor)
  • Increased points of failure in communication with each piece of new tech.

What we know is technology doesn’t make you better at recruiting. Technology makes you faster at recruiting, but if you suck at recruiting, technology will only make you suck faster!

Great recruiting starts with your people. Your recruiters. That’s your foundation, not your technology. Technology can help cover up some hickeys of bad recruiters temporary, but eventually, we will all see the real hickeys!

So, before you sign that next contract for some new technology, first take a look at your team. Do you have the right people on your recruiting bus? Do they have the core skills they need? How will I get them the skills they need?

The continued increase in technology will only take you so far. You can either solve this problem on the front side, or eventually, you’ll face it on the back side, but either way, it’s coming. In my experience, it’s easier to solve up front then wait for it to come up when twelve technologies deep into your TA stack!

T3- Jobvite’s Annual Recruiter Nation Report

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Talent Acquisition software provider Jobvite released their annual Recruiter Nation 2016 report today. This report always has some gems I love to share and usually use in presentations throughout the year. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s report:

– 51% say that employment branding is their #1 investment that they will make in the next 12 months! In case you’re bad at math, that is over half! This doesn’t really speak to a “real” need for EB, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what their organization truly needs from TA. For most companies, this will be a waste of resources. An organization can be great at attracting talent with a brand no one knows. The fact that half of all organizations will have this as their #1 investment is a painful reality of a lack of great TA leadership in the industry.

– Internal hires (38%) are ranked highest quality by recruiters — followed closely by employee referrals (34%). I actually laughed out loud when I first read this! Really? I mean REALLY!? Internal hires rank as your highest quality? Well, isn’t that surprising…They better be your highest quality!!! They already work for you, Moron! Sometimes I just don’t get why we ask stupid questions. Another stat you might find surprising, water is wet! Also, stop giving internal recruiters credit for internal hires. They didn’t do anything to fill that job.

– According to recruiters, 43% of them rated diversity as somewhat or very important when making a hiring decision. But 40% of them were neutral about diversity and its influence. Want to know why your organization isn’t moving the needle on diversity recruitment? It’s this stat! Your recruiters hear that it’s important, but they don’t believe it’s important. Why? Because you don’t show them any internal statistics that more diverse work groups, in your own environment, perform better than those lacking diversity. Show them, or shut up.

– 60% of recruiters rate culture fit of highest importance when making a hiring decision — topped only by (you guessed it) previous job experience (67%)! What didn’t matter? Cover letters (26%), prestige of college (21%), and GPA (19%). Yep, all you haters that still think cover letters are a thing! They aren’t, go back to 1997.

– This year, recruiters are most focused on growing talent pipelines (57%) and the quality of their hires (56%). 

Can we be real for a second? I mean really, really!? You’all are pissing me off!

56% of Recruiters are concerned with Quality of Hire. That’s nice. Tell me how you measure that? Oh, it’s when a new hire stays 90 days in the job. That means quality? How does that align with the industry? Oh, you don’t know, because everyone measures QofH completely differently and it’s a freaking meaningless metric! I WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD!

Quality of Hire is not a Recruiting metric. Quality of Hire is a hiring manager metric! It’s something that starts with TA, flows through HR, ends up in Performance Management and ultimately is tied to Hiring Manager decisions and their ability to develop and onboard new hires. TA has very little to do with quality of hire. TA is responsible for Quality of Source, that is a different thing.

So, just stop it. Stop doing this. You’re giving me an aneurysm!

And now back to the survey…

– 87% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, the largest of all networks. 67% of Candidates use Facebook to search for a job, the largest of all networks. Do you see a problem here?

Definitely, go download the report! It’s loaded with a ton of data that can help shape some of your TA decisions in the near future, or just get you to do more of what everyone else is doing because you were told by idiots like me it’s the new hottest thing on the market to do, and fun wasting most of your budget developing your brand no one will ever know about.

T3 – Brilent @GetBrilent

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This week on T3 I take a look at the candidate recommendation engine, Saas recruiting software, called Brilent. Brilent is tackling one of the most challenging obstacles to innovation by helping recruiters place great talent. Brilent’s core technology instantly matches a pool of candidates to a company’s open positions.

Here’s the problem you have with your ATS – Candidate applies for a job you have open. A candidate doesn’t get that job, or isn’t qualified, and is almost immediately forgotten. With Brilent, when a candidate applies in your ATS Brilent matches their qualifications to every job you have listed and gives you a ranking on how well they match. They might have applied to Job 1, but they actually might be a better fit for Job 2.

Also, Brilent matches all the candidates in your database to instantly find hidden talent in your ATS you didn’t even know was there, or you just forgot about.  Then gives you a ranking of which candidates in your database are the best match based on their search algorithm which is much more advanced than simple keyword search.

5 Things I Really Like About Brilent: 

1. The team is led by former Facebook Data Science pros, so they know how to play with data really well! They understand this is a core issue for 99% of ATS users, and they’re finding a way to solve it!

2. The platform automatically matches candidates with all jobs, not just the one they’re applying for, and alerts them to jobs they are a strong match for. This ensures you that the candidate isn’t missing something, plus provides a higher candidate experience with no effort.

3. The system is built on machine learning so the more you use it to search your database to find great talent, the smarter it becomes to bring back possible matches, and less likely to bring back false-positive matches.

4. Brilent integrates directly with your ATS, and basically helps to cover up the single biggest weakness most ATS systems have in not allowing you to effectively leverage your database of candidates to find that hidden gold. The candidate who applied three years ago, but never went anywhere because your hiring manager found someone on his own. Bam! There she is again – ready to be contacted!

5. The ranking of candidates gives you a great visual of who has applied and who is in your database and who you should be contacting for the position based on how they ranked.  Also, anytime a candidate applies and gets a highly ranked match of one of your jobs, the recruiter gets alerted immediately.

Sometimes the best technology is the one that makes the most sense.  Brilent knows you normally don’t want to blow up your ATS and start over, but they also know your ATS isn’t working for you like you need it to work. So, they solve that. The best tech does that, it solves a problem and doesn’t blow up everything you have.

Well worth a look and a demo. It’s quick and easy to use. Check them out!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Top 70 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in 2016

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Ongig released this study this past week – The Top 70 Applicant Tracking Systems of 2016. This study is based on around 3300 employers around the world, most in the U.S.  To put that into perspective, there are over 200,000 employers in the U.S. alone with over 100 employees.

I use 100 employees, because once you get to that magic 100 employee number, usually at that point we see companies begin to purchase their first real HR technology – HR System of Record and an ATS. So, it’s a pretty limited sample, but better than anything else you’ll find, plus, it’s a good list of a possible 70 ATSs to take a look at. Also, realize, and I don’t have an exact number, but I would be there are well over 500 ATS systems on the market right now.

Here’s the list:

ATS 2015 Share
Taleo 36.43%
Homegrown 11.10%
Jobvite 8.58%
Kenexa – Brassring 7.56%
iCims 6.39%
ADP 4.79%
SAP-SuccessFactors 3.72%
PeopleFluent (Formerly PeopleClick) 2.52%
Silkroad 2.27%
iRecruitment/PeopleSoft 1.74%
Ultipro 1.67%
Greenhouse 1.67%
HRDepartment 1.28%
Newton Software 0.78%
Jobscore 0.50%
Lumesse 0.50%
WorkDay 0.46%
Lever 0.46%
PeopleAnswers 0.46%
Kronos 0.39%
Jazz.co 0.39%
HRSmart 0.39%
MyStaffingPro 0.35%
ContactHR 0.32%
Ceridian 0.32%
HireBridge 0.28%
PCRecruiter.com 0.28%
Force.com 0.25%
HealthCareResource 0.25%
ApplicantPro 0.21%
ATS OnDemand 0.21%
ApplicantStack 0.21%
HRMDirect 0.21%
eRecruiting 0.18%
Cornertone OnDemand 0.18%
Smartrecruiter 0.18%
CATS ATS 0.14%
SmartSearch 0.14%
Luceo 0.14%
Pereless 0.14%
Bird Dog 0.11%
GlobalSuccessor 0.11%
Hiredesk 0.11%
iApplicants 0.11%
TrueBlue 0.11%
Hyrell 0.11%
Bullhorn 0.11%
JobScience 0.11%
Vitae 0.11%
ResumeWare 0.11%
Navicus 0.07%
RecruiterBox 0.07%
Workable 0.07%
Recruiting.com 0.07%
Snaphire 0.07%
Tribepad 0.07%
ClearCompany 0.04%
Jobstreet 0.04%
Konetic 0.04%
Njoyn 0.04%
Selctrak 0.04%
SpeediARMS 0.04%
HireRabbit 0.04%
JJ Keller 0.04%
netMedia 0.04%
NovaHire 0.04%
PracticeMatch 0.04%
TeamWorkOnline 0.04%
PeopleAdmin 0.04%

Crazy, right?

Obviously, Taleo has a huge market share, and many large enterprise clients use them because of the integration with Oracle. Taleo has a giant built-in market.

More surprising for many would be the huge number of homegrown ATSs being used. I’ve seen so many of these, and almost every single one is awful! In fact, you can get a free ATS that is better than 99% of the homegrown systems being used today.

Another thing you’ll see, and it won’t change, is that the top enterprise level HRIS systems on the market, will also have a huge share of the ATS market – Orcale/Taleo, Workday, ADP, Kronos, SAP/SuccessFactors, UltiPro, etc.  Most of these ATS systems are designed for big, giant cumbersome talent acquisition processes. They are not the best ATS technology on the market, but HR executives who know nothing about recruiting, usually, just want integration. This is one major reason why most giant organizations fail at TA.

This list, alone, is why buying a new, or first, ATS system is so difficult. The choices are endless, and many of these on the list, are frankly, not very good ATS technology, some are brilliant. So, you can’t just buy what everyone else is buying, because that is a major trap as well.  So, do your research, and if you still feel lost, find someone who actually knows this technology!

At the very least, before you sign the contract, talk to current customers of the ATS that are at all stages – current implementation, a year into using it, seasoned users. Also, talk to people that have left them in the past year and find out why. If the ATS vendor won’t help you find these contacts, run away from them!

Thanks to Ongig for putting this together – cool stuff, if you’re a geek like me!