Category Archives: Recruitment Marketing

T3 – The Great Facebook Sourcing Hope

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About once a week I have this conversation with a fellow TA/Sourcing Pro:

TA/Sourcing Pro: “Ugh! I hate LinkedIn! If Facebook ever decided to put LinkedIn out of business they could do it overnight!”

Tim: “Yep.”

Okay, usually there’s all kinds of explanation and brainstorming around how we could ‘show’ Facebook how to do this, easily. But, you’ve already heard, or had, this conversation about a thousand times, so I won’t bore you with it again!

My plan is that Facebook does a LinkedIn type reset, but doesn’t screw it up like LinkedIn has. There is a true need for a ‘professional network’, but you can’t turn it into Job Board 2.0 like LI did. How does that help us TA and Sourcing pros? FB could pull this off. 2 billion profiles. They would have virtually everyone, and could attract back the college kids with the potential of company and job matching, by just working with college career placement offices, etc.  LinkedIn started doing this but walked away from it way too early.

FB then makes money off of company pages and postings. Plus, pay per click ads to very specialized groups of candidates that companies would easily pay to get in front of. I’m sure they’re a few other ideas they could make money on, without giving away everything like LI did.

Only about .02% of TA and Sourcing Pros are actually using Facebook to recruit.  None of those people are telling you how, because they’re making money on it, and don’t want you to know! Basically, it’s not how you think.  Almost every great sourcing product to come out has to do with IT sourcing.

It makes sense because that’s where all the cash is, so that’s where all the investment is. Facebook doesn’t play nice with others (let’s face it, they don’t have to), so you see virtually nothing coming out around Facebook sourcing. The reality is, though, you have the ability to Facebook source, by location, by a company name, by gender, etc., but you won’t do it because it means you have to do the heavy lifting.

What is heavy lifting mean? FB will get you about 80% there, but you have to go get the other 20%. There’s no easy ‘InMail’ to bail you out. You might have to search for an email, call into a company, etc. Heavy lifting…

Here’s a Facebook search engine (hat tip to Recruiting God – Steve Levy for sharing this):

https://inteltechniques.com/intel/osint/facebook.htm 

This isn’t the first and only one of these out there, but it’s a good one for sure. In fact, these types of FB search engines started showing up around the exact time FB launched Graph Search, then almost immediately took it down because it was actually too easy to search and find people! People complained FB listened (did you hear that LI?).

So, what’s the FB sourcing gold?  It’s low-end positions, not high-end. The high-end folks (IT, Engineers, etc.) figured out early that putting your title, etc. on FB wasn’t going to get you pimped constantly by recruiters and sourcers.  The lower skilled folks don’t care, because they don’t get non-stop job offers.

I know of a few recruiters making well over six figures, right now, only recruiting lower skilled and/or not your normal technical talent type pros on FB! Technicians, truck drivers, sales people, teachers, nurses, etc. Companies are struggling to find great talent at this level as well, and FB is a goldmine that virtually no one is sourcing.

Check out the search engine above. Connect with Steve Levy. He’s a great dude and one of the good guys in recruiting who is always willing to share his knowledge!

Top Jobs in 2016? Hope you’re good at math!

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Glassdoor released their most recent top 25 paying jobs report in the U.S. and one thing was common in 24 out of the 25 jobs, STEM!That’s right in 24 out of the 25 top paying jobs in the U.S. you better have exceptional, high-level math skills, or be great at science, preferably both, if you don’t mind.

That’s right in 24 out of the 25 top paying jobs in the U.S. you better have exceptional, high-level math skills, or be great at science, preferably both, if you don’t mind!

Here’s a taste of the top 10:

1. Physician
Median Base Salary: $180,000

2. Lawyer
Median Base Salary: $144,500

3. Research & Development Manager
Median Base Salary: $142,120

4. Software Development Manager
Median Base Salary: $132,000

5. Pharmacy Manager
Median Base Salary: $130,000

6. Strategy Manager
Median Base Salary: $130,000

7. Software Architect
Median Base Salary: $128,250

8. Integrated Circuit Designer Engineer
Median Base Salary: $127,500

9. IT Manager
Median Base Salary: $120,000

10. Solutions Architect
Median Base Salary: $120,000

Some things that standout from the list:

– These salaries aren’t really the highest paying jobs in the U.S. We all know of people making way more than $180K.  So, I’m not sure how Glassdoor actually came up this list, besides maybe asking going down to a coffee shop and just asking some folks. Hell, I know at least three people at Glassdoor, myself, who are making more than $180K, and not working in any of these jobs!

– Most people think doctors make way more than $180K. Many do – surgeons for example. Anesthesiologists make way more than $180K. Most specialized medical docs make more than $180K. So, who makes $180K? Your family doc. The one who sees your snotty-faced kid. That’s why there is a shortage of family docs!

– Being a Lawyer is the lone hold out where you don’t have to know math and science and still get a good paying job on the list! Oh, and most sales jobs. We forget to tell kids that, a decent sales person can make more than almost all of these jobs.

So, what does this list tell you?  First, go take the football out of little Johnny’s hands and put a calculator in it! More kids will get money to go to college for their grades, then their athletic prowess. The University of Alabama will pay your kid to go to school for free for having a 32 on their ACT. That is probably easier then getting Nick Saben to come visit. I know, you still have to live in Alabama, but it’s a free education.

As Fast Company points out, you don’t really need to make all that money anyway. $70,000 is the limit you need to be happy, or at least that’s what I keep telling my wife! I don’t think she’s buying that nonsense either!

The #1 Way You Can Tell Recruiting In NOT Important to Your Executives

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I had a recruiting leader reach out to me recently and ask for help.  They had some critical positions they needed to fill but weren’t having any success.  The executives were all over her to get her team to fill these positions.  The success of the company depended on it!

You feel her, right?  We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers.

She was looking for some advice about what they could do, because they tried everything, and she was at wits end. This exchange was through email, so the first thing I did was what I usually do. First, I check her LinkedIn profile to check her background. She was solid, good recruiting experience, good companies. Then, I check the company’s career site.

This is where I find most companies and ‘we’ve done everything’ start to fall down.

Nowhere on the first page of the company web page could you find a link to “Careers” or “Jobs” or “Positions”. Nowhere! Not at the top, not at the bottom. You could click on anything on their home page to get to what jobs they actually had open.

But, I’m a pro. So are you. We know exactly where it’s at. Click on “About” or “About Us”. Then scroll down to “Careers” and click on that. Then go through another click or three and you’ll actually find the jobs they have open and “desperately” need to fill.

I sent a message back and we set up a call. The first thing I said was you need to have some sort of link or button or something on the home page where people can access your open jobs with one-click. “I’ve tried getting that changed, but the executive in charge of the website (marketing) refuses to add it.”  You need to go above that person’s head, and actually bring the executive who has the open jobs and explain to the CEO why this has to change.

“Yeah, but even then, this isn’t going to fill our jobs.” You know, you’re probably right, this one thing won’t fill your jobs, but this is indicative of how your executives don’t support recruiting in your organization. If your executives won’t allow you to make this one simple change, which is a clear best practice in every industry, they don’t truly care about filling these jobs.

Having your “Careers” site link under the “About Us” tab on the home page of your web page screams you have no idea what you’re doing in recruitment. Having executives that refuse you to move it, shows you they don’t care about recruiting.  It’s really simple, and always 100% true.

Interviewing for a new Recruitment leadership position? Take a look at how easy it is to find jobs with the company. If it takes forever, ask in your interview how easy it will be for you to immediately change this. The answer you get will tell you everything you need want to know about taking this job or not.

Having your career site linked under “About Us” on your home page is the #1 way you can tell if executives support recruiting or not in a company.

Walking Dead: Reviving Your Talent Networks!

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You have a bunch of zombies surrounding your career website right now, and you don’t even know it.

They stumble around and look at your content, lurk at your jobs and then just stumble away when they don’t find anything to take a bite out of. Well, the folks at FOT and Smashfly are here to help you turn those zombies into real-life candidates by reviving the talent networks you probably don’t even know you have.

Who said zombies can’t turn back to real live viable candidates?! Not us, because the FOT crew knows how, and we’re going to show you, too. Join us on February 24 at 2pm EST and we’ll give you the following goods:

  • Show you the difference between a Talent Network and a Talent Community. We’ll give you ways to build your talent network into active pools of great candidates. By using and developing talent networks, you’re letting those zombies hanging out around your career site tell you “I’m next…” “Pick me…”, making it super easy to identify your next victim!
  • Help you develop a Talent Network Strategy that lasts, with little effort from your team to keep it going. The biggest problem we all face is we just don’t have enough capacity to do more. Talent networks give you the more— without the work. We’ll show you how.
  • Show you 5 ways the best companies are engaging their Talent Networks to make real placements.We won’t just tell you the ways, we’re going to hear about straight from a Talent Pro who is using these now to successfully hire and fill position within her company.  The good, the bad, the dead. You’re going to hear it all!
  • Give you 3 things you can do with candidate contact information before they even apply to your company. Talent pools aren’t about the apply, they’re about getting you to apply. Some zombies are ready to eat, some are just milling around being zombies. What do you do when potential candidates aren’t ready to eat? We’ve got the answer.
  • Provide insight to how you can measure the success of your talent networks. By now we know none of this matters if we can’t back it up with measurable data that proves it works. Talent networks, and the data you get from them, will give you a ton of insight to what is working in your Talent shop and what might need some tweaking.

Don’t let your time get “eaten” up by a bunch of zombie candidates who will never fill the needs your company has. Learn how to build great talent networks that will give you real live placements, with less effort than you ever thought imaginable. It’s time to fight back and win against your walking dead applicant pool!

Come join the FOT Zombie Hunting crew on February 24 at 2pm EST and learn how you can implement and take your talent networks to the next level!

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T3 – Beamery @BeameryHQ

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing the recruitment marketing platform Beamery. Beamery is fairly new to the market being launched in 2014, and jumping into the hottest sector in HR and Talent technology: CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation. They are carving out space by billing themselves as candidate engagement software, knowing almost every company in the world is concerned with candidate experience.

Beamery records and helps you track every single candidate that engages with you and your career site, whether they apply or not. That is important because a solid 70% of those people coming to your site will never apply, but if continue to engage them, you’ll get many to eventually apply.  Beamery’s strength is creating an inbound marketing machine for your recruiting department.

You can develop unlimited talent pools by whatever criteria you select, and engage each pool of candidates differently based on how you decide. The talent pool management, built on machine learning, is definitely a powerful piece of what Beamery delivers.  Beamery integrates with your ATS and is already partnered with Greenhouse.io, one of the hottest new ATS products on the market.

5 Things I really like about Beamery:

1. Beamery has integrated Candidate Experience surveys into their platform, that you can automate to be sent at a certain point within your process, manually push, change by position, etc. All the analytics are then put together on the backend within Beamery analytics engine. This is something not all recruitment marketing plays have right now.

2. Beamery uses predictive analytics for automated followups based on algorithms they have developed.  This truly helps recruiters stay onto of what’s important, and helps them not to forget. It’s a classic recruiting weakness because so many of us end up putting out fires, and we forget about a possible great candidate from a few days ago. Beamery automatically reminds you to follow up.

3. Their email sync with outlook and google is very powerful. One problem every recruiting shop has is getting information from email strings to where it needs to be within a system of record. Beamery uses machine learning to pull any email communication between recruiters and candidates in automatically, without the recruiter having to do anything.

4. Like many of the Recruitment CRM software, Beamery also does unlimited landing pages for jobs, events, etc. Allows to push simple calls to action to build talent pools and easily moves these pools back into your ATS. They also allow one-click action by candidates to engage with you by sharing any kind of social profile – Facebook, LinkedIn, Github, Google profile, etc.

5. Beamery is the first platform I’ve seen that truly has separated the function of Sourcer and Recruiter – working to define that Sourcers use Beamery, Recruiters use the ATS, and they’ve built a workflow to help organizations really build out this practice. For large organizations that have both functions, this will really help define the roles for your team.

I really liked Beamery’s technology and ease of use. Clearly, recruitment CRM software is for more sophisticated recruitment shops, who work in competitive marketplaces. That doesn’t mean just technology jobs. Finding Truck Drivers, Machinist and Retail Managers are super competitive! But you have to want to embrace the technology to help you reach your goals.

Beamery has a great introductory price point for 1-5 seats, and will work with you on enterprise pricing. I was shocked at how low of a cost a SMB shop could get into this software! Check them out, Beamery is well worth a demo.

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.

T3 – SwitchApp @GetSwitch

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This week on T3 I review the new “Tinder” for job search app called SwitchApp.  SwitchApp is a completely mobile job search app for candidates and companies to help match them together.  It’s basically a marketplace for passive job seekers, where they can ‘swipe’ right if they are interested in a job, and a notification will go to the company of the interest.

Swipe left, and the company doesn’t get notified. For you Tinder users, you’ll get this. Obviously, to make all of this happen a job seeker first must download SwitchApp to their Apple or Android device and set up a profile. They can create a profile easily by linking their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, or filling it out manually. The profile is automatically set to anonymous, and any company on your profile will not be able to view your profile.

Swipe’s job matching algorithm then goes to work showing the jobs that the job seeker is eligible to see based on Switch’s matching criteria. If a job seeker is matched to the job, the organization can ‘like’ it to show their interest.  Then it’s up to the job seeker to decide if they’re interested. Right now, 47% of candidates matched by Switch and shown to companies are ‘liked’ by the company.

SwitchApp allows companies to post position with a structured data job posting. Basically, a company will input all of the skills they need for the position, title, location, salary range, etc. The matching technology does the rest. SwitchApp does not allow companies to ‘search’ the database of job seekers and contact anyone they want, there must be a match to make the magic happen!

Current users of the app actually love the fact that there is no searching taking place. Just post the job and see if matches come back. It eliminates much of the traditional noise you get from postings and having so many people apply that aren’t close to what you’re looking for. With SwitchApp you only get pinged when a candidate matches the criteria you put into your posting.

SwitchApp is currently free for employers to try out and use.  Primarily, it’s only going to work in New York and San Francisco (the Bay Area), because that’s where it’s being tested and launched first.  It’s not only for tech hires, the app also has finance, advertising and other business-related professions they are targeting.

It’s free. Give it a try if you’re out in those areas and looking for talent, many companies have already made hires. Eventually, Switch is going to be charging employers for usage, so it’s best to try it out now before that kicks in sometime this year.

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.

T3 – SmashFly

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SmashFly.  Wierd name, really great technology for ‘Pre-Applicant’ engagement.  Basically, SmashFly is a company that will make your recruitment marketing really work. No, not that flyer you made yourself with clipart. Real honest to goodness big boy and big girl marketing, for talent acquisition.

When most people think about recruiting, sourcing, etc. There is really little thought put into talent attraction.  Wait, you mean we just don’t post jobs and candidates magically appear!?! Nope, they don’t. That’s why your hiring managers hate you!

We love to talk about ‘Talent Communities’ and ‘Talent Pools’ but few of us really know how to actively engage these, and even if you do know how, you don’t have the tool. This is where SmashFly comes in.  Most companies now probably have something like a CRM (Customer Candidate Relationship Management) tool.  It might be baked into your ATS, or it’s something like Avature. You might use tools like Jobs2Web, Work4 or TweetMyJobs.  These are all great ‘bolt-on’ type of tools that will do some of what Smashfly does.  The difference being Smashfly isn’t disjointed, it’s end-to-end recruitment marketing in one box. Job Distribution, SEO, Career Site, Talent Networks, CRM, Mobile, Employee Referral Programs and Social.

Don’t underestimate the value in bringing all these disparate solutions into one platform, the data is unbelievable!  SmashFly has the coolest analytics in sourcing that I’ve seen. You get real-time looks into candidate pipelines, their status and sourcing performance.  Recruitment funnels by source, and where your internal roadblocks are! A full dashboard that will show you exactly which recruitment marketing initiatives are providing the most applicants, most qualified candidates and the most hires.  It was really cool to see how many times the program bringing in the most applicants, isn’t your best for quality of hire, but we keep funneling money to these programs!

Companies that use someone like SmashFly are usually large mid-market to enterprise type employers.  You’ll be hiring hundreds, if not, thousands of hires per year. You are already use to spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in recruitment marketing annually already.  Smashfly will make this money work a lot better for you. A system like this pays for itself, year one, easily.

5 Things I like about SmashFly:

1. Unlimited landing pages.  Guess what?  Candidates like to feel special. Creating a website landing page just for a certain job or candidate makes them feel special. With Smashfly you can have a separate landing page for every job!  You could create a landing page for a specific candidate you want “Tim’s Job Page”. Go crazy!  They literally made one for me, in about 30 seconds.  Your entire sourcing and recruiting team will be able to do these easily and all will match your branding and be connected to all systems. Seamless. No extra cost.

2. Ability to Engage and Disengage automatically. Getting ready to make an offer to a great candidate and all of sudden your CRM sends them an email about another position!? Ugh! That’s embarrassing. SmashFly’s system knows where a candidate is in your workflow and will disengage them automatically without you doing anything, and re-engage if that status changes and you need to again!

3. Full Control over Brand, Messaging across all channels (job ads, career sites, social, email campaigns, etc.). Want to change some messaging for a program on your career site, it will go across the platform everywhere else as well, or not, depending on how you want it. You create it when and where you want.

4. Complete Visibility through Analytics.  It fully integrates with your ATS, so you get end-to-end analytics like nothing you have seen prior. It’s an agnostic platform so it will give you the real scoop and evaluate all channels and media to show you what is really working, and what is not!

5. Marketing automation for recruiting.  Talent acquisition shops hate working with their internal marketing departments, because you’re never the priority. A system like Smashfly puts you back in control in to focus on the technologies and tools that can help you consistently and predictably attract qualified candidates.

It’s a really great tool, so powerful.  Check them out, it will not be a waste of your time (Demo)!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be T3 – send me a note.

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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As many of you know I’m a writer over at CareerBuilder’s recruiting blog called The Hiring Site. Great group of industry practitioners writing about everything related to talent and recruiting. Because of my relationship, they share cool data with me, that I can share with you!

Some of the most eye-opening stuff I’ve gotten recently is all around hiring sources, and it’s not stuff you normally hear about or see.  Let’s face it. We (Talent Acquisition Pros) hate sharing our data because it makes us feel like we’re giving up our secret sauce!

It’s not really secret sauce, that’s the secret, we all pretty much do the same thing when it comes to talent attraction. We get referrals, we leverage our internal databases, we use job boards and postings, we pray. We pray a lot!

Here’s the data that CB shared with me from crunching the data of 1600+ CareerBuilder clients in 2015:

– 21% of hires came directly from using CareerBuilder.

– 41% of hires actually could have come from CareerBuilder, if the client was fully utilizing the technology they purchased!

– 45% of companies added more sources of hire over the past five years

– On average a candidate will use 18 sources to search for a job!

What does this really mean?

Every organization’s talent acquisition strategy has to have a multi-pronged approach.  You have jobs that you can post on CareerBuilder and find great talent. You have jobs that you will need a great referral strategy to fill. You have jobs that you’ll need outside specialized help to fill. You have jobs that need hardcore sourcing and bust-your-butt on the phone recruiting to fill. You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

The key is are you fully utilizing the easiest, fastest sources you have?  We tend to want to discount our job board vendor (mine is CareerBuilder), but the numbers usually tell a different story.  41% of hires seems like a lot, but the data is deep! 1600 clients equal ten’s of thousands of recruiters banging on CB technology. The data is real.

What does this really mean, to you?

1. Make sure your recruiting staff is fully trained on the technology you give them. Then, retrain them!

2. Make sure you’re accurately measuring your source of hire. This is the single most important thing that recruiting leaders miss, consistently. It drives all of your purchasing decisions. I can’t tell you how many recruiters I speak with that truly believe LinkedIn is their most valuable source, and, so far, 100% of the time, the data says it’s not when we pull the numbers.

3. Are you looking at your existing internal database first? It’s the most valuable source in the industry and this is consistently underutilized.

Happy recruiting my friends!

 

T3 – @Clinch

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing Clinch. Clinch is a recruitment marketing software that will help organizations attract, identify, and convert active and passive candidates, and oh so much more! It does a ton, so much, I will struggle to actually tell you all Clinch can really do, you’ll have to demo to see everything.

So, I’ll start off with an example we all have in TA.

Most passive candidates won’t spend time applying to your jobs. They’ll stop by the careers site, check you out, lurk on some content, watch some videos, etc. But, probably will never apply the first time they look you up.  This is a problem for all of us, because we really would love to know who these people are. Clinch solves this for you, and it’s really cool!

Clinch lets you know how candidates are engaging with you, when you don’t even know them yet. The technology tracks people who come to your site, without them knowing (by the way, most sites do this to you now, you just don’t know it).  The tech doesn’t actually know much about you at this point. When that candidate comes back, and maybe inputs their email address to get download a whitepaper, or something, now the tech puts all these dots together, and begins to share all the data back to you.

How awesome would it be to know that some engineer, who just downloaded a cool piece of your content, also was the same engineer who had already stopped by two other times and the tech shows you exactly what they looked at and for how long. Also, the tech sends your recruiter a quick message to your recruiter saying “hey! he’s on the site right now checking out a job, but isn’t applying!” So, your recruiter can send them a quick message!

That’s cool, right?!

Clinch also makes it super easy for your team to quickly set up landing pages for jobs, with unique content, etc. Basically, enhancing the ATS experience for your candidates. As well as automating candidate messaging so your candidates, or potential candidates, are getting messages to them that make sense to the context in which they are engaging with your brand, not just generic emails sent to the masses. Talk about raising your candidate experience game!

5 Things I really like about Clinch:

1. Clinch lets you show candidates something new every time they stop by to see you. Your normal careers page has a lifespan of about two years, and candidates just see the same thing over and over. Clinch makes it unique for them and every position that candidate looks at.

2. Automatic scheduling for all of your companies employment branding social feeds of when to promote certain content, jobs, etc., how often and which platform.

3. Clinch grabs candidates before they even hit the ATS, which is great because most drop off before they get too deep into your process. Gives you searchable lists of these candidates, and allows you to still engage with these potential candidates. Think about how you could easily use this in campus recruiting. Just input a student’s email address, or have them do it on tablet at your booth, and BAM, Clinch allows you to market to them and track them, especially as they begin to engage with your brand, career site, etc.

4. Clinch gives you a way to go after your competitors employees, by letting you know when an employee from a competitor is visiting your site, and will even show that competitors employee a specially designed landing page built to speak right to that individually!

5. On the Clinch roadmap is a tool that so many of us in TA will want. The ability to begin tracking the behavior of how our hiring managers engage with the candidates we sent them! You will have to check this out, it’s really cool. Dare to say, this is something every TA leader will be talking about next year!

There are a number of really great recruitment marketing tools in the space right now, and Clinch is showing it wants to be a market leader. Well worth a demo. Be prepared, it’s a lot.  I can see some TA Leaders getting overwhelmed about how they will use all of this. Clinch is designed for larger companies (mid-market to enterprise, 100-1000 hires per year) that probably have recruitment marketing as a position or function, or are seriously considering adding this function. I will say, regardless of your size, it’s very affordable for what you get.

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.

T3 – @Lever #ATSDifferently

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This week on T3 I get to look at a rather new entrant to the applicant tracking system (ATS) field, Lever.  Lever was designed from the ground-up to be different than every other ATS on the market.  Most ATS software are built for the recruiter in mind. The thinking being this is a software used by recruiters, we need to design it so the recruiters will love it.

That all makes perfect sense, if the basis is true – used by recruiters for recruiters.  Lever decided that basis wasn’t totally true. ATS software should be used by everyone in the company. Yes, recruiters definitely need to use it. Also, hiring managers need to use it. Those in the interview process need to use it, etc. If attracting talent is a key component of your organizational success, then you need an ATS that is designed to be used by everyone, not just recruiters.

Lever is designed for organizations who are really focused on talent attraction, where hiring managers own the talent on their teams and are keenly involved in the talent acquisition process. Lever isn’t trying to be the ATS for everyone. They’re trying to be the ATS that companies in tough talent markets use, where talent is an organizational priority, not an HR or TA priority.

5 Things I really like about Lever: 

1. Lever structured their database differently so that you don’t end up with duplicate profiles within your ATS.  It’s structured around the candidate, not requisitions, so you end up with a much cleaner database overall.

2. Lever is designed around CRM functionality, it didn’t bolt on a CRM to it.  This makes a difference when it comes to the functionality of how it automatically follows up in the future for you.  The hope is you don’t end up with a gold mine of talent in your database that you can never mine. Lever is constantly working to mine the gold you already have.

3. Lever’s reporting is a step above most ATSs in that they, again, went at it from an organizational need, not HRs need. Within Lever you can instantly see your pipeline speed and conversation rates all at a granular level to see the detail you need to make quick decisions.

4. Candidate interview scheduling is built within Lever, and integrates all parties, the candidate, hiring managers, interview teams, HR and TA. No back and forth stuck in the middle go between any longer. You select who to involve and the system will instantly show you when and what conference rooms are available to get it done. All in one step.

5. Collecting candidate feedback is another strong functionality within Lever.  It’s a simple interface any hiring manager or anyone on the interview team, can use easily. Plus, there are auto reminders that will continue to bug all involved until it’s done!

Lever is fairly new but already has over 700 customers, with some major tech companies who have recently switched over from some very big ATS products, which really speaks to how they are doing things differently within the ATS space.  Definitely worth a demo if you are not happy with your current ATS, or in the market looking for something new.

Lever is led by a great team, and I suspect you’ll continue to see innovation come out of this camp.  I met with them personally at HR Tech, and their CEO, Sarah Nahm, was one of the few HR Tech executives who truly seem to care what I thought about the product and took written notes as we discussed it. Most just want the free publicity, she wanted to know how to make her product better. That’s rare, and exciting!

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.