Category Archives: TA Technology

Can we blow up Demos already? #HRERecruitTalent

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Sat in on a great opening session at the Recruiting Trends & Talent Tech Conference yesterday that was called Ideas and Innovations. Quick five-minute talks. Disrupt-style, where you have five minutes and some slides moving on their own.

Looking at the TA pros and leaders around me you could easily see the engagement and interest. People like being told about cool stuff in a very quick and efficient manner. Some of the stuff might spark them to want more, some stuff might spark them to know it’s not for them. Either way, they didn’t have to invest much to get there.

I constantly hear from recruiting tech companies that they want to do more demos, because they know demos lead to organizations buying their stuff. The problem is we all feel we don’t have the time to do demos, and we don’t want high pressured sales pitch. So, we disengage all together.

It’s a problem on both sides, the vendor and the buyer. Buyers actually need to do more demos and should be looking at more options then they do, and vendors need to get in front of more buyers. I’m not sure why conferences don’t do this, but I would love to see a session that is just 6, ten minute demos of technology I might want to take a deeper dive into.

Hundreds of people in the room, watching quick demos and deciding is this something I want to go and find out more about. Seems like it makes total sense for both sides! Yet, it doesn’t happen. Why?

I think there’s two issues (both of which are basically false):

  1. Vendors don’t feel comfortable doing a demo in front of potential competition, because they feel somehow they’re giving away their secret sauce.
  2. Conference providers believe attendees don’t want to view this type of content.

The truth is, there is no secret sauce with your demo. I’ve done a thousand demos and while some are better than others, that’s mostly do to the person doing the demo, not the actual demo.

Attendees want to learn stuff they don’t know and want to be able to take back knowledge to their organizations that makes them seem smart. No, they don’t want to hear for an hour how ACME Inc. implemented Oracle. But, they would be interested in seeing what the hell this new Oracle Recruit product is, especially if I’m not being sold to.

I think the modern demo should be really broken into two parts. One of those is just show me who you are and what you do in 5-10 minutes. The second one is your dog and pony show.

I think vendors are afraid to do the short-range demo because they don’t feel buyers will truly see who they are. The reality is if you can’t tell your buyer in 5-10 minutes who you are and what you can do for them, you shouldn’t be in the space.

Recruiting Trends and Trends and Trends… #HRERecruitTalent

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I’m out this week at the Recruiting Trends and Talent Tech Conference and guess what I’m speaking on!?!?! Recruiting Trends!

It’s pretty insane when you look at the recruiting landscape. When I was doing research on what trends I should talk about at the conference my initial list had over 50!

That becomes the big question – what’s really a trend and what’s mostly B.S.?

We think we can spot the B.S., but it turns out we are all pretty dumb when it comes to spotting bad trends. Remember QR codes in Recruiting!? How many of you had, or still have, one of those on your recruiting materials!?

Video Interviews! That’s a fad, no one will do a video interview! Until it becomes fairly normal. You should be texting candidates! No, you don’t understand Tim, “OUR” candidates wouldn’t respond to text.

Um, yeah, how’s that working out for you!? Everyone responds to text! I can’t call my parents anymore, who are in their 70’s, but they’ll respond in seconds to a text! Hourly workers, executives, nurses, truck drivers, everyone responds to text.

So, it would seem like the big one is A.I., Machine Learning, chatbots, etc. All of ‘that’ stuff. That automation, the machines can do your job better and faster than you technology stuff. Yeah, that’s a current trend for sure, but in one way it’s not.

We’ve been automating in Recruiting since we have had recruiting. So a major part of the A.I. trend is just next generation, evolution of automating the recruiting process. It’s definitely something to be embraced and understood, the reality is most of the technology you are using probably is already leveraging it in some form.

When I take a look at the landscape from the point of view of someone who follows this stuff way too closely I think the biggest trend is confusion. The in the weeds TA team and leaders are overwhelmed by options, by decisions.

The vendor community is so focused on selling you their ‘one’ product, solution, that they miss helping their clients on the bigger picture of how it should all fit together. The ‘buyer’ of our trends, hasn’t changed. They need to fill jobs, faster, with better talent.

Most will already have some semblance of a tech stack they are being forced to use, and they aren’t sure how you fit in and make it all work better. At the very least they probably have a core ATS who is telling them they can do it all, when in reality they probably do 25% of what’s needed to be competitive.

The winners in the recruiting technology space will be those who can make it idiot-proof. If you’re a TA pro/leader don’t take that as a put down. The reality is every leader or practitioner just wants tech that works, without thinking about it.

I have a job I need to fill.

I turn on your switch and the tech makes it easy for me to fill this position.

We aren’t launching the Space Shuttle, we are filling roles. Ultimately, the TA Leader in me doesn’t give a hoot about your trends! Trends are for early adopters. Work through your issues. Find what works and what does’t. Then let’s talk.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where the trend is selling stuff that just works…

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Pocket Recruiter (@pkrecruiter)

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the recruiting technology, Pocket Recruiter. Pocket Recruiter drastically reduces the time it takes to screen, source and evaluate candidates, helping recruiters achieve a higher interview to placement ratio. 

Pocket Recruiter is one of these new recruiting technologies built around the concepts of Machine Learning and A.I. Basically, it integrates with your ATS and will automatically scrap every new job (or you can manually put in jobs as well) and then it will go out and source candidates for each job you have from both your internal database and external data as well.

Where Pocket Recruiter stands out is it’s ability to match candidates to your job, and it’s ability to learn and get better. The recruiter gets a list of matching candidates that are scored out and ranked based on, pattern recognition, the internal algorithm, etc.

Your recruiter gets a shortlist within minutes to go out and start connecting. Organizations are seeing savings of up to 60% in time to source and screen, because most of the heavily lifting of sourcing is done, and the matches are of higher quality, so you’ll need less screens. They are also seeing improvements of 90% from resume submitted to the hiring manager to request for interview. So, the quality is definitely improving.

What do I like about Pocket Recruiter:

  • Your recruiters can override the algorithm within Pocket Recruiter to bring back different results almost immediately, if something isn’t coming through like it should. This might seem small, but it’s huge as we that recruit usually quite a bit more than the algorithm in terms of what we are looking for.
  • You can add your internal employees into the mix, making Pocket Recruiter a great tool for internal mobility.
  • The Performance Metrics might be one of the best I’ve seen in any recruiting tool, as it basically replicates your recruiting funnel for you on each individual recruiter. So, not only are you finding talent faster, but you also now have this great performance management tool for your team. I also loved the ROI tool built into Pocket Recruiter.

For me, technologies like Pocket Recruiter are the future of recruitment and how I see A.I. having the biggest early impact to how recruiting evolves in the near future. Pocket Recruiter ensures you are utilizing all of your candidates to the fullest, and it speeds up the entire process to get to hires quicker. Well worth a demo!

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes shopping!

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Big news out of the world of the Talent Acquisition technology. Jobvite, with a major investment from K1 Investment Management, went out and bought three best of breed recruiting technologies:

  • Talemetry – CRM, Recruitment Marketing technology
  • RolePoint – Employee referral and internal mobility technology
  • Canvas – Text-based screening and interview technology

All four of these technologies, separately, I’ve recommended that TA pros and leaders should demo. They are all top rated recruiting technologies on their own.

I think these acquisitions are just one more signal in what we see is a growth of the Talent Acquisition Suite, away from core HRIS suites. The TA Suite of the future is a stand alone tech stack that can become a competitive edge for organizations.

The one part of this acquisition that confuses me, a little, is Role Point. While I love them as a point solution, Jobvite already has Jobvite Refer, so this acquisition seems a bit redundant. I mean Jobvite invented Employee Referral technology. While I’ll agree RolePoint is better than Jobvite Refer, I’m not sure they are that much better tha I would spend millions of dollars to acquire.

I will say that that Internal Mobility is a hot topic in almost every organization, so I’m assuming this is the main reason for the acquisition.

Regardless, I believe this positions Jobvite uniquely in the space to be able to offer an advanced Talent Acquisition suite that no one else in the space can put forth, at this point.

One thing to consider is how other ATSs like iCIMS and Greenhouse (we also see Ultimate Software/UltiPro doing this on the HR suite side) are building out their stacks for their customers. Both have taken the App/Marketplace concept. Think of this like your Smartphone. You buy your base iPhone, and then add the apps you want.

That’s the big question! Will the market want a suite or will they want a marketplace of pre-built integrations that you can select and plug and play?

Both buyers are in the market. We already see the suite buyers who want one enclosed technology that does almost everything they need under one umbrella – what it looks like Jobvite is building with these acquisitions. We also know some buyers love to select specific technologies and somewhat build their own stack, based on their own unique needs. It’s really just positioning, I’m not sure we’ll see one strategy win out ultimately.

Definitely an aggressive move by Jobvite. They were falling behind the market a bit and this will definitely thrust them back into the lead pack. I think we all felt like 2019 would be a great year for acquisitions and Jobvite has come out of the gate making a giant swing!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @PowerToFly

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This week on The Weekly Dose I review the D&I technology platform Power to Fly. Power to Fly is a recruiting platform used for connecting people with companies committed to building more diverse and inclusive environments. 

Founded in 2015 by two females who were named one of Fast Companies most creative people in business. The original concept was to connect women with remote jobs (which it still does). From that PTW learned many organizations also wanted and needed gender diversity in their in-house teams as well. Today it’s not only women but all underrepresented talent in the marketplace. 

The original concept of being a marketplace to connect one type of candidate with companies isn’t new, but Power to Fly definitely come at this from a different angle than most. While you can post your jobs on their site, which has over a million profiles of female candidates, Power to Fly focuses more on community events and interactions, both in-person and virtual. 

Power to Fly hosts in-person networking events hosted by client(s) companies to bring women in a specific marketplace together. These interactions help females and underrepresented candidates build a network of their own to leverage as they grow their careers. 

These live events bring together upwards of 200 women and are sponsored by some of the largest brands in the world, but can also be leveraged by a handful of employers in a market coming together to co-sponsor together. Power to Fly has found females are much more likely to apply to your jobs after attending these events (and the research into gender-specific applies echoes this as well).  The likelihood of apply from those attending these events rose 60% after attending. 

Power to Fly also holds virtual events with top Female executives and thought-leaders allowing women to ask live Q&A to help them in their career. Giving anyone a chance, in an ultra-safe environment, to ask questions they probably wouldn’t or don’t even have access to a mentee to ask. 

I love the concept. Traditionally, men clearly have had so many built-in networking advantages to aid their career path. Building out these networks for females and underrepresented candidates is a must and long overdue. 

If you are looking to add diversity into your talent pipelines Power to Fly is definitely something to check out. Job postings, live events, and virtual events, the power of their community is their real strength.  It’s women helping women in the most positive ways! 

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @EmployUsApp – Referral Automation

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the candidate referral automation platform EmployUs. I actually first told you about EmployUs about four years ago when they just launched, but since then they’ve improved their tech and added a bunch of stuff, so I wanted to give you a second look! 

You guys already know I’m in love with candidate referral automation. In my experience of looking at every kind of HR and TA Technology I believe it has the single highest ROI of any tech on the market, and let still relatively few organizations actually use it as part of their TA Tech stack.

EmployUS took candidate referral technology one more step and actually allows you to use it both internally and externally with your organization. Clearly we love using this tech with our employees to get more of their referrals, but what if we could also use it outside our organization to gain more referrals as well? EmployUs allows you to do that, if you choose.

What I like about EmployUs:

  • They jumped into the chatbot/AI world to help those referring candidates make it much easier and faster, and through the use of SMS they’ve actually made is super simple for hourly workers to now refer candidates in seconds! Always a draw back to traditional referral software.
  • The automation aspect truly helps make the referral process simple for your internal employees who might not be thinking of this all day, every day, but once they do decide, you need it to self-sufficient and fast.
  • Tailored email and texting campaigns so you can target parts of your organization for specific referrals.
  • A dashboard that tracks and automates payouts based on the rules you build, that also gives you the gamification aspect of internal scoreboards to keep your referral program top of mind all the time.

Here’s what we know. Most of our top hires come from referrals. Our most inexpensive hires come from referrals. Almost all of us would say we need more referrals in our hiring process.

Then we watch our old, tired, analog referral program deliver the exact same results year in and year out, and we do nothing to change it. Go demo EmployUs and take a look at what your candidate referral program should look like.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Xref automated reference checking

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the automated reference checking platform Xref. Xref is a fully automated solution that turns a slow and inconsistent task into an efficient and valuable stage of the recruitment journey.

Answer the following question: Does your organization check references?

SHRM’s recent survey showed that 89% of organizations still check references of candidates before offer of employment. The majority of those are still manually doing reference checks.

Xref is a technology platform that gets 98% of your candidate’s references with just a fraction of the current work you’re doing in your hire process. The Xref process is a simple message sent directly to your candidates and it puts the candidate in control of obtaining those references by inputting the references and having a message come directly from the candidate to their professional references.

Answer me one more question: When was the last time you didn’t hire a candidate based on a bad reference?

What I find is most organizations struggle to answer that question because it happens so infrequently. What I love about automated references is the normal rate of false offers is 8-14%. This happens because when a reference gets the chance to answer questions on the platform they are more open to give information than during a live conversation.

What I like about Xref:

  • Tailored questions based on role that are easy to change and customize, at the same time can be used right out of the box.
  • A dashboard shows you every candidate and exactly where they are in the process in great detail from where the candidate is in gaining these references, but also where the references are in responding.
  • Mobile optimized. 55-60% of references are actually completed on a mobile device. This is how all of us would probably do this in our busy lives.
  • Candidates also have a view to see where their own references are in the process, so they can nudge the folks who are dragging their feet.
  • Nurturing effect of sending polite reminders to move the process along quickly. Most references are completed within 24 hours!
  • Shows how a reference assessed based on others in the same level of position within your own environment.

I’m a giant fan of this technology as I see so much capacity being lost in organizations that are still manually checking references and getting really nothing to show for it in terms of hiring better talent. Well worth a demo, automated reference checking technology is one of the highest ROIs you’ll get in the TA technology space.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

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If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Content_App – Job Branding

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the job branding and messaging technology Content. Content is a mobile-based SMS text-based technology (app) AI social media assistant that scales across your recruitment teams to help your business get the most from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Content will send you a text message when she/he/it discovers something relevant for you to share. Every share Content creates will have relevant hashtags and an image to ensure you get the best engagement.

Content will also decide the best time to share the article so your recruiters don’t need to worry about the details. Just reply yes to share it, or no to decline.

Content will also automatically grab your jobs from your career site and brand them to look like a professionally digital marketed piece of content for your team to share out to your networks and talent communities.

One of the biggest issues we face as Recruiters in sharing great content with candidates is usually we don’t know what good content is out there, and we don’t have time to go out and find good content. The Content app does this automatically for you, while still keeping the power of customization in your hands.

What I like about Content:

  • Content is built on machine learning algorithms that will learn what content you like and dislike, and work to deliver more of the content you want to share with your talent networks.
  • Solves your share issues – want to share a piece of content to your internal team so they’ll share it outwardly, Content uses SMS-text based communication to do this with a simple “yes” or “no” via a text reply.
  • Tracking ROI via clicks is pretty cool showing you which person is responsible, plugs into your Google Analytics on your career site, and will give you ROI verse pay per click advertising.

One of the most difficult things in talent acquisition right now is being able to measure the ROI on social media recruiting and Content gives you a tool to actually show these results, but also makes it super easy for your team to share more and better content out to the networks they are trying to engage with.

Ultimately Content does the one thing we all need more of which is to get more traffic to our career site, and with the right CRM and retargeting, this really puts our recruiting on a different level. Well worth a quick demo, as this simple to use tool will help move many TA shops to the next level.

The team behind Content is the former team behind Broadbean, so you know these guys understand recruitment and how to drive traffic to your jobs.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Questions I’m asking myself in 2019!

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I’m constantly being asked about what are the “trends of 2019”.

Honestly, year to year trends are usually fairly unnoticeable to most people working a real job in HR and TA.

Google for Jobs was a giant trend in 2018 and yet most TA leaders still have no idea what it is and haven’t felt a real impact of it. Yet, it was a huge trend.

I can give you some great guesses about what the trends will be in 2019, but it’s fairly worthless. Me telling you that machine learning assisted automation will change how you find talent in 2019 isn’t going to really change a single thing you do.

Instead, I have all of these questions I would love to get answers to in 2019. Some of those answers will come from the industry, some will come through testing, and some will be left unanswered.

Here are some of these questions:

  • What are the common talent acquisition metrics we all should be using to measure the success and failure of our efforts? How do we get all TA shops to use these, or better, how do we get ATSs and TA suites to build these ‘common’ measures into their technology? (If you tell me Days to Fill/Hire I will punch you in the face!)
  • Can we automate most of the sourcing function across the talent acquisition supply chain? (I know it can’t all be automated, but it would seem with the current technology in the market 90% of sourcing could be automated. The last 10% are those Super Sourcers, like the folks that attend SourceCon.)
  • Can selection and assessment science make better hiring decisions than hiring managers? If so, how do we gain buy-in from hiring managers to move this science forward?
  • Is “Job Brand” more important than “Employment Brand”? Do candidates care more about your job or your company? (This is clearly predicated on the idea that the majority of candidates aren’t searching for companies, they are searching for jobs, yet we spend just a fraction of time on our jobs versus our employment brands.)
  • How can I tell if a person (either experienced in recruiting or entry level) from outside my environment will be a great recruiter inside my environment?

Let’s not kid ourselves, a softening of the economy in 2019 and 2020 won’t make our jobs significantly easier. A 4.0% unemployment versus a 5.5% unemployment isn’t really going to change most of our jobs. Talent will still be difficult to find.

While the TA industry has grown so much over the past decade, we still lag many other functions when it comes to some basic building blocks that will really move us forward. The idea we don’t have common measures of success across industries in recruiting is shameful for a function that wants to call itself a profession.

I’m super interested in what questions you are trying to answer in 2019! Hit me in the comments.