Category Archives: TA Technology

Your Weekly Dose of HR Technology: @ZipRecruiter – Connecting the Right People with the Right Jobs!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take an updated look at ZipRecruiter. Often I’m writing about technology on my site that none of you have ever heard of. I’m 100% sure almost every single person who reads my blog has heard of ZipRecruiter! At the very least you’ve heard their commercials on TV, Radio, Podcasts, etc. They are everywhere!

ZipRecruiter started in 2011 primarily as the job board for hourly, blue-collar types, to help SMBs hire better and faster. They didn’t try to hide who they were, they set out to build a job board, and they did it through advertising everywhere and anywhere. Come hire people fast and cheap. Bam, that’s who we are.

Fast forward to 2018 and a fresh round of over $150M in new capital and ZipRecruiter is now one of the most trafficked sites on the internet! Over 1.5 million businesses have used Zip, and they have received over 430 million applications for jobs listed on the site. And still, the Recruiting Community loves to dump on ZipRecruiter!

On Facebook last month someone posted a comment about ZipRecruiter and some of the biggest recruiting brains on the planet immediately started talking “ish” about Zip. I had one simple question, “Hey, have you used them in the past year, two, three?” Not one of them!

I hesitated writing this post because I actually didn’t want to give Zip publicity! Why? Because it works, and if it works and I’m using it, and you’re not using it, I win!

Privately, I’ve been having this conversation with TA leaders for a year or so:

Tim – “Hey, are you guys using Zip?”

TA Leader – No, we tried them three years ago and they sucked!

Tim – “Okay, you might want to test them again!” 

TA Leader – “Oh, you mean for hourly openings?

Tim – “No, for everything!”

Zip doesn’t get industry love from folks like me because Zip has never played “the game”! Meaning, Zip has never wined and dined the industry thought leaders or analyst. The belief is “hey, our customers are SMB and the vast majority of folks hiring for SMB will never read anything from an industry pundit”. Okay, that’s correct, but come one play the game with us, I love free steak! Instead of playing the game, they run more commercials and have built industry-leading technology behind the scenes!

As their leaders are proud of saying “We do things. We don’t talk about doing things.”

Zip has put a tremendous amount of resources and focus on engaging job seekers to make the experience sticky. That comes from ensuring Zip is matching jobs to candidates that actually match their skills and desires, not keywords. I can’t tell you how often I get sent emails from other sites for Nursing jobs! Why? I used to run TA at a health system and recruited Nurses! That’s bad tech. Zip doesn’t do that!

Zip’s recommendation matching technology is second to none. Netflix-like in the way it continues to improve based on the jobs you engage in and apply to, the more an applicant uses the technology the better the matching algorithm gets in returning great jobs to them the second one comes up on the site.

Google for Jobs (GFJ) also has had a tremendous positive impact on Zip’s candidate traffic. GFJ leveled the playing field for sites like Zip, and SEO is one other thing they are good at and prepared for when the opportunity came around. And Zip plans on using a bunch of that new cash to hammer home some machine learning SEO technology to continue to stay out in front and take advantage of the GFJ changes.

Is ZipRecruiter a silver bullet? No. Nothing in the industry is a silver bullet right now. Can ZipRecruiter be one of those bullets you have to finish the job? 100%. Will ZipRecruiter fill your Java Developer opening in BFE Wisconsin? Probably not, but nothing else will either! Will they drive additional traffic to most of your jobs, for a fairly inexpensive cost? Yes, they will, and that’s what they set out to do all along.

I’m a huge fan of testing annually. You’ll rarely hear me say, “Yeah, that didn’t work three years ago, so we don’t use it!” Really, three years ago? Okay, well, good for you! In TA we need to be a function of constantly testing and trying. You will be amazed at what doesn’t work in January, amazingly will work in July, etc. So, if you haven’t tried ZipRecruiter recently, it might be worth a test!

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.

5 Things Great Employers are Doing to Drive World Class Candidate Experience in 2019!

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I’m still struck at how for the most part, we treat candidates like garbage. Historically in Talent Acquisition, we had this really weird power dynamic that took place. We believed we (TA) had jobs to give out or not give out, like prizes, so we would force candidates into our processes and make them jump through hoops.

It’s been a super hard habit for many of us to break! Even with historic low unemployment numbers!

I have some help for you! 

I’m partnering with the folks over at Candidate Rewards to put on a free, live 1-hour webinar titled:

5 Things Great Employers Are Doing to Drive World-Class Candidate Experience in 2019! 

What can you expect to get from this webinar?

– 5 Rock solid strategies and tactics you need to be using to deliver more candidates to your organization!

– 3 Things great organizations never do to candidates, and that you can easily change in your own TA Shop!

– Candidate Experience data that will give you the ammunition you need to change your executive’s mind and give you more budget money to fix your Candidate Experience issues!

– Live Q&A with me on your toughest Candidate Experience questions!

Candidates Experience has been one of the hottest topics over the past five years, and it’s never been hotter when it comes to the hiring environment that we are in right now! Right now is the perfect time for most of us to look at our 2019 strategies around Candidate Experience, because for most of us it’s TA Budget Time!

If you don’t plan, you plan to fail! That’s what we are always told, right!? So, let’s sit down for an hour and discuss how to make 2019 the best year you and your TA team has ever had!

REGISTER NOW for this free webinar! 

I’m looking forward to presenting this information, it’s the first time I’ve ever done a Candidate Experience presentation, and I’m sure my takes will probably be a bit different than most, but you’ll have to let me know!

How do candidates find your company?

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I have a brain crush on Smashfly’s Tracey Parsons. She’s a great Recruitment Marketer who flat out gets what you and I should be doing to get candidates to find us!

I only tell you this because Tracey shared something online this week that I had to share. I came on a LinkedIn post by Joel Cheesman (you can look him up as well, he’s way less impressive than Tracey, but he might be your flavor! JK, Joel! He’ll cry himself to sleep tonight if I don’t say that!) where Joel was stating a stat “80% of applicants start at Google“.

Cool stat. You probably didn’t know that. About a year and a half ago, Google said it was 47%, before they launched Google for Jobs, so it shows that GFJ is actually already having a big impact on candidate behavior.

Tracey’s response was this:

“And approximately 0% of those searches involve your brand name”

Bam! Mic drop! Walk off stage.

She’s dead on 100%-ish percent accurate!

No one is going to Google searching for “Jobs at Amazon” or “Jobs at ABC Manufacturing”. If they already know they want to see your jobs, they’re just going directly to your career site, or corporate site, where you’ll make them click around for five minutes to find your jobs. Oh, wait, maybe they should be Googling jobs at “X”!

I think Tracey’s point is that you shouldn’t be focused on SEO to drive people to your ‘brand’. You should be focusing on SEO to drive people to the market and the jobs you have, the brand at this initial point, doesn’t matter.

We love to think it matters, but 99.8% of us have an unrecognizable brand to the majority of candidates. That’s not a negative statement, that’s just reality. They don’t see any difference in what it’s like to work for us unless you’re a Unicorn brand.

But we aren’t all Google or Facebook or Amazon. We’re just good, solid companies to work for, that are virtually indistinguishable from every other good, solid employer who’s out there.

So, what can you do?

  • Truly understand the impact Google is making on candidate behavior.
  • Turn yourself into a Marketer. Think like a marketer. What would it take to get people to know who we are?
  • Turn your employees into Brand Advocates.
  • Stop paying Referral Bonuses, and buy Employee Referral Technology.
  • Build and turn on a Recruitment Marketing machine for your shop.

Also, go read and learn from super smart people like Tracey and Joel. That’s what I do.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Hiretual – Find, Engage, and Pipeline Candidates

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review the sourcing technology Hiretual (Hire-Tool). So, I’ve been hearing from my sourcing friends for about two years that Hiretual is awesome and I need to check them out. Hiretual is a modern sourcing technology platform that allows a Sourcer or Recruiter to quickly search for possible talent online from dozens of different possible sources.

There’s now an entire verticle in the recruiting technology industry dedicated to sourcing technology and Hiretual falls squarely in that camp. I’m keen on saying that it’s never been easier in the history of recruiting to find talent, and it’s that way because of sourcing tools like Hiretual. Hiretual spiders the web finding profiles of potential talent that meet your exact search criteria from over 30 different channels. Places like LinkedIn, Github, Facebook, etc.

Hiretual is simple to use. You can build a custom search for what you’re looking for, or simply drop in a job description and the system will automatically pull the data it needs to begin the search. It will then do an initial search and have you rate the quality of the candidates. This helps the AI within Hiretual to begin learning what it is exactly you’re looking for and return better candidates.

What I like about Hiretual: 

– You can target competitors or specific companies you want to see candidates from and the technology will search for just individuals with a background at those organizations.

– If you search for candidates with government clearances, Hiretual can specifically help you with this. I’m amazed at how many times a year I’m asked directly about this capability.

– You can run multiple searches simultaneously, and save searches you run frequently.

– You can message and nurture candidates right from Hiretual.

Sourcing technology, like Hiretual, aren’t a recruiting silver bullet. I’m in love with this type of technology, but it won’t magically find you, candidates. It will magically find you talent, that you then have to ‘sell’ them a reason on why they should want to talk to you and come work for your organization. For the most part, Hiretual is returning passive candidates, not active. This is a struggle for recruiters and sourcers who only know how to work with active candidates.

Hiretual is super powerful in helping you find people with the skills you desire, but you still need to get them interested in you. If you and your team are ready to start recruiting passive candidates than this is definitely a technology you need to 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.

7+ High Volume, Low Unemployment Recruitment Strategies!

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Gather ‘round talent buffs and let me tell you a story – of a time not so long ago in a land not so far away. A little agency called The Bureau of Labor Statistics (you may have heard of them) released a report claiming that the unemployment rate dropped below 4% for the first time in 15 years. Did I mention that this is a true story?

That’s right, in April 2018 the unemployment numbers dropped to 3.9% in the good ol‘ US of A. This information is great for the domestic economy, but not so great for employers who are using outdated tactics to build their teams.

But have no fear – Fistful of Talent and Canvas have put me on the case to help organizations refresh their TA approaches during our WEBINAR, Help! We Can’t Hire Anyone! How to Hire When Unemployment is at Historic Lows (Click to register), on October 9th at 12 PM ET.

I’ll be dropping the following silver bullets of recruiting wisdom. When used together these bullets can help you hit the hiring bullseye every time:

* Not one, not two, but SEVEN new strategies to attract the best of the best during this low-unemployment era, from hourly workers to C-suite-grade talent

* The top talent attraction technology working for high-volume recruiting teams RIGHT NOW to level the playing field in this hot job market

* Three moves you are currently making that are putting a damper on your hiring efforts, and how you can make your recruiting dollars really count

It’s all going down on October 9th at 12 PM ET – register to save your spot for our WEBINAR, Help! We Can’t Hire Anyone! How to Hire When Unemployment is at Historic Lows (Click to register), TODAY to make your TA shop full-employment environment proof)

Register Here! 

I won’t be handing out one silver bullet in this webinar, I’ll be handing out handfuls! There isn’t a single silver bullet that will fix the problems we have, but a bunch that when used together, will help your organization succeed in hiring…even when unemployment drops below 4%.

About Canvas:
Canvas is the first text-based intelligent interviewing system that empowers organizations and recruiters to screen more job candidates and market employment brands. For more information, visit www.gocanvas.io and follow Canvas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Saba Makes a Big Purchase & Scheduling with TextRecruit

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Today on The Weekly Dose I’ll give you the low down on some major HR Tech moves of the week. The first one comes from Learning and Talent Managment technology Saba. Saba announced this week they acquired talent acquisition technology Lumesse. 

Why should you care about who Saba purchased? 

If you’re already a Saba shop, this gives you a great ATS option that will be fully integrated. If you’re already a Lumesse shop, you can now have a world-class learning and performance platform fully integrated.

The bigger picture for me is that we are starting to see more and more best of breed technologies beginning to merge together to build out end to end HR Tech that doesn’t have obvious weak spots. It’s the one complaint I hear from most HR and TA leaders about their suite solutions.

“We bought “SomeDay” and we really like the HRIS and the Payroll, but the recruiting and performance sucks!” It’s fairly common that most suites have some major holes and just don’t have the time, money, and expertise in-house to build out a fully functioning technology in the functions that aren’t core to their main product.

Saba is great at learning. They acquired Halogen that was great at performance management. They then purchased Lumesse which is a very solid recruiting platform.  Best of breed suites, finally taking advantage of their Saas design to build a better end to end solution that you can pre-built currently.

TextRecruit Adds Automated Scheduling: 

One of the most frustrating things about being a recruiter is the constant back and forth we go through in setting up interview times between candidates and hiring managers, or just trying to set up screening times with candidates between you and the candidate. TextRecruit added a feature this week to help out with automated scheduling.

For those who are already using TextRecruit you can now easily text out a link to candidates who can click through and pick out their own interview and screening times that work for them. TextRecruit’s Automated Scheduling is linked directly to your Outlook or Google Calendars, so you can also automate this using TextRecruit’s chatbot, Ari.

Take a look at this video and check it out:

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.

What Makes a Great Talent Acquisition Conference? #SourceCon

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Hey gang! I’m back from attending and speaking at my first ever SourceCon conference. Can I be real for a second? I never attended SourceCon in the past because I was intimidated. For real!

Let me explain. I’m not a Sourcing Nerd! I’m not going to sit down on my laptop and go deep diving into the national archives to find names of whatever or build search strings that are 5,000 characters long, so I thought, yeah, this just isn’t for me. I was wrong! It is for me! Okay, not the super sourcing nerd stuff, but I even like watching that!

SourceCon was filled with passionate Talent Acquisition pros and leaders, not just Sourcing Pros. Like I’m just going to come up and introduce myself and start asking questions about how I can better and share with you on how you can get better. The interactions at all levels at the conference is off the charts, and unlike I’ve seen at other recruiting conferences, especially around how to make you as a professional better!

So, what do I think makes a great Recruiting conference like SourceCon?

– Leadership to break away from the normal content stream and put different stuff on stage. Shannon Pritchett and the ERE leadership are always willing to push the envelop and try stuff!

– A culture of sharing! Everyone at SourceCon seems to be there to share openly with everyone else, and it makes for interactions and conversations happening everywhere!

– Feeling like you’re being welcomed into the trust circle! That was my initial fear. I’m not really one of them, they won’t want me, what do I have to give them!? It’s the opposite, truly. Steve Levy, an industry veteran is just one of a bunch of actual “Welcome Wagon” pros who volunteer to introduce you into the inner circle and make instantly feel like part of a movement.

– Content where you can’t write fast enough! The content at SourceCon is packed with “oh, crap, I’m stealing that idea and taking that back to my own shop and we’re doing that tomorrow!” Like every session!

– Content that forces you to think differently about what you and your organization are doing. That challenges you, and might even make you feel a bit uncomfortable. Not every session, that would be exhausting, but you need a little bit to force you to think differently about the profession.

SourceCon 2019 is in Seattle, and Shannon and the team just keep finding ways to make it better. Definitely check it out as a great development option for you and your team next year.

Could We Use Congestion Pricing Theory in Recruiting? #SourceCon

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Oh, lord, what the heck is Sackett talking about now!?

Congestion Pricing Theory (CPT) is basically paying more for convenience. We see it used on things like tollways, where if you want to ride on this road you pay a premium, or if you want to use this certain lane on a tollway you pay more for the access to a less congested lane of traffic.

You also see it at places like the movies. You pay $12 per ticket to go to a movie on a Saturday night at 8 pm, but if you go at 10 am on a Tuesday morning, you might get that same ticket for $8. It costs more to go during the busy time.

Airlines fully embrace CPT when you pay a little more to get on the plane first so you don’t have to deal with full overhead bins, etc. Theme parks now have tickets you can buy that lets you bypass the long lanes. Congestion Pricing Theory allows consumers to pay more for what they believe is important to them.

So, could we use this model in recruiting?

Let’s say you’re Google and you have thousands of people apply to your jobs that will never get seen. Could Google use CPT to allow applicants to pay an upcharge if they were certain to have their application examined and given feedback? Maybe it’s $25.

For $25 you can be assured your application will have a real human look at it. Would you pay to ensure that would happen? Depends on the company, the job, the competition, your income level, etc. But, the reality is, if someone turns CPT on in their hiring process, and their brand is very attractive, people would pay the fee!

Now, ethically, is this right?

Ethically is it right to have roads paid for by tax dollars, then to drive on those roads in a less congested way, you still have to pay more money? Is it right to charge one person a different, higher, price for the same service that another person paid less for?

One of the main complaints that candidates have about applying for jobs is the lack of information. The reason they don’t get the information they want is it costs too much money for organizations to properly staff TA shops in a way that would allow them to give this high level of feedback.

Congestion Pricing models would definitely give candidates and organizations an option to offer this service for those candidates who truly wanted the feedback they desired or at least more feedback then they’ve historically been given.

So, we don’t do this because we’ll say it impacts the poor and those out of work the most. They can’t afford the price to ensure they will be seen, so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I think it’s interesting that this is the main argument of doing something like this, but we don’t argue this type of pricing when it comes to other parts of our life where these things used to be free, and now they are not.

I’m not saying that we limit those who apply. All are still open to apply and all will have the same experience as they had before. Some, who choose to have an elevated candidate experience, will choose to pay for that experience.

I’m not saying this will ever happen, but if it does, I’m not going to be shocked because we’ve seen so many successes using CPT in other areas of our lives.

What do you think? Hit me in the comments.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @LinkedIn Talent Insights – LI’s newest product!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at LinkedIn’s newest product, LinkedIn Talent Insights, which is getting released today for public consumption. Talent Insights is LinkedIn’s first self-serve data and analytics product. Talent Insights provides companies with access to LinkedIn’s global database of 575M+ professionals, 20M+ companies and 15M+ active job listings, to help talent professionals and business leaders develop a winning workforce strategy and make smarter talent decisions more quickly.

What we know is if LinkedIn has anything, it has data! I first got to see this product at the 2017 LinkedIn Talent Connect conference when it was still in beta and they weren’t even quite sure what they had yet, and I was like, “Oh, boy! this is crazy cool!”

Here’s how it’s crazy cool. Talent Insights provides access to LinkedIn’s global, accurate and up-to-date data through two reports:

  • With the Talent Pool report, companies will be able to precisely define and understand specific populations of talent with global insights including skills the talent has, what industries and locations they’re in are, how in demand they are, what schools and degrees they have and what companies are hiring them.
  • Using the Company report, companies will be able to understand their own talent at the company level and see how well they are doing in attracting and retaining talent, and develop branding and recruiting strategies to get even better.

Here’s what companies can expect.

  • On-demand data: Talent Insights users will have the ability to access LinkedIn insights, in real-time, to quickly answer complex talent questions. As members update their profiles, the aggregated data within LTI also updates, providing real-time updates to help companies keep up with the market.
  • Actionable insights: The tool is simple and easy to use making it possible for recruiters, HR, and talent leaders to understand the most accurate view of labor market trends at any given moment, without relying on a team of data scientists.

So, why is this something HR, Talent Acquisition, Marketing/PR, Sales, and a lot of other functions in your company will want to get their hands on it? 

Talent Insights provides some super cool competitor data you can’t get anywhere else!

Need to know what kinds of people your competition is hiring and where? Talent Insights can show you that! In fact, it can give you insight to stuff your competitors are working on that isn’t even public if you can just connect a few dots!

“Hey, why is ABC, Inc. hiring a ton of autonomous developers in Omaha!? Oh, no they aren’t, are they!? Yes, they are!”

Talent Insights also gives HR leaders insight to your current workforce, like who’s coming after your talent, where are your employees going, where are the best coming from, where should you be looking to build your next headquarters (I bet Amazon is looking at this!), etc.

This is definitely a product that TA Leaders will want to leverage, and I’m in love with it’s ability to pull competitor data. Just know, as you’re pulling your competition’s data, so might they be pulling yours, and there’s nothing you can do about it. LinkedIn Talent Insights is available to anyone who wants to pay for a subscription, and you don’t have to be a customer of other LI products to get it.

LinkedIn Talent Insights is definitely worth a demo. You might find it’s just not data that your organization needs, but I think the more competitive you are within your marketplace, executitves are always willing to listen to you a little longer when your wrap your needs and wants around competitive data, so take a look!

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: My Review of The HR Technology Conference #HRTechConf

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Last week was my HR Nerd Christmas as I was attending the annual, and world’s largest, HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. It’s one of my favorite conferences to attend, the expo is beyond words, the content has increasingly gotten really good, and they keep pushing the envelope and trying new ways to engage the audience. Hat tip to conference chair Steve Boese and the LRP crew!

What did I like this year at HR Tech? 

– The inaugural Pitchfest was a freaking homerun! 30 companies pitched their product to judges in the middle of the expo hall with giant crowds surrounding the stage. The energy was awesome. People who watched it got to find out about 30 new companies and determine which ones they might want to deep dive later.  6 Finalist emerged, with one winner! (To be fair, all 30 were winners as just making the round of 30 gives each company some great publicity) The finalists were:

Blendoor – (The overall Winner) – is a hiring technology that reduces unconscious bias by hiding data that’s not relevant and highlighting data that is. Their CEO, Stephanie Lampkin, blew everyone away!

ComplianceHR – is the first ever and only, a suite of intelligent employment applications, delivering expert legal guidance at internet speed and scale. Like your own employment attorney without the $500 per hour fees.

Jane.ai – Jane is an artificial intelligence platform that makes all of your company’s information accessible through chat. Like having your own HR robot that can answer almost everything!  (This was one of my finalists during my judging – very impressive!)

RelishCareers – a job board platform that helps grad school students and alumni get discovered by employers looking for top talent.

SwarmVision – A globally-validated Profiler to assess your innovation skills. Need to increase the amount of innovation in your company? This was really cool.

Talvista – (The overall diversity winner) -provides a view beyond the noise of unconscious bias, ensuring a skilled talent pool and workforce that is more diverse and inclusive. While Blendoor’s CEO was the best presenter, Talvista had the better technology in this space.

Many of the 30 that presented that didn’t make the final six just weren’t able to articulate what they did and why you should buy them in the 3-minute pitch and 2 minute Q&A allotted. That is super tough! Put yourself in front of anyone right now, start the clock, and tell them why they should use you, over everyone else, in three minutes!  Oh, and surround yourself with hundreds of onlookers!

– iCIMS CMO, Susan Vitale, on her panel said that out of their thousands of clients, millions of candidates, they’ve seen a 90% increase, year over year, in candidate traffic coming from Google For Jobs (GFJ). It was just one example at the conference of the impact GFJ is making across the industry that everyone is watching. For decades we’ve conditioned candidates to look for jobs, first via job boards, then via sites like Indeed, and now it will be through Google for Jobs.

– Monster.com came out of hibernation to announce a new leadership team, and some new technology, including Monster Studios, which lets you record, edit and publish video job ads from a smartphone in minutes. Loved the tech! And all the data shows video job ads get a higher response rate. Beyond that, Monster, like CareerBuilder and ZipRecruiter, has done a great job helping their clients navigate the job schema around Google for Jobs and they are seeing huge traffic increases. JobBoards didn’t die, they just re-tooled, and are still relevant in the talent attraction game. If you haven’t checked them out in the past 24 months, it’s worth some testing if you’re struggling with your traffic and Indeed is asking you to spend the double amount you did last year.

– Chatbots are everywhere, even if you’re not seeing them, yet. Some of the coolest A.I. I saw was Jane.Ai and AllyO. When A.I. first hit hte market they were extremely careful to say this tech wouldn’t eliminate the need for real humans, that marketing didn’t work, so they are now willing, to tell the truth! It does! That’s what the ROI is based on! Hello! Also, this tech, while not perfect, has exceptional potential and it keeps getting better.

– The future of the HR Tech and TA Tech stack are not a big umbrella, we do everything, enterprise systems (Workday, Oracle, SAP, etc.). The future of the tech stack is something akin to the Apple App Store. You have your base HR Tech platform, let’s say Ultimate Software, and then you go into their App store and pick the best of breed tech you want it to work with! Same with the TA Tech space. You pick an ATS like Greenhouse, then pick all of the TA tech you want it to work with, sourcing, interview, assessments, etc. But, not as it is right now with integrations and separate contracts, etc. Pick your core, foundation tech, then surround it with the best tech on the market that fits your business needs. There were a number of new startups positioning themselves in this space. We want all the advantages of using “one” system, but one system can’t give you all the best tech. For those who want the best tech, in all aspects, your world is coming!

If you’re an HR or Talent Acquisition leader today, one of your core competencies has to be around technology. It used to be that we would just allow IT or the CFO to pick what we used, but we’ve quickly moved into a world where your HR and Recruiting tech stack has a unique competitive and strategic advantage. Future HR and TA Leaders will not be sitting on the sidelines when ‘their’ tech stack is chosen.

If you haven’t been to The HR Technology Conference, or haven’t been for a few years, it’s something as a leader you must put back into your plan for next year! Way too much to learn here about how modern HR and TA practics are running!