Category Archives: TA Technology

9 Ways IBM (and the rest of us) Should Be Reinventing Talent @IBMWatsonTalent

Posted on by
3

Amber Grewal is the Head of Global TA for IBM. It’s a big job. She posted on LinkedIn recently and gave her 9 ways IBM is reinventing recruiting. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure she wrote it. My experience is with giant corporations that they rarely would ever allow one person to post something so big on a social platform, but I’m sure she got in her ideas with some ‘corporate’ wordsmithing, either way, I liked it.

I like when large organizations put HR and TA leaders out in front of the brand. That’s always a risk. I like that IBM is taking that risk. They’re a big player in the HCM/TA tech space, and if you want my attention, give me less PR and marketing pitches, and more practitioner know-how!

Here is the infographic that “Amber” put together:

I’ll go through and give you my comments on all 9:

1. Upskill the Recruiting Function – Oh hell yes! The main problem with corporate recruiting is very little actual recruiting actually takes place. A whole lot of administering the recruiting function takes place. When need to flip those two things!

2. Horizontally Source – This is the Talent Pipeline. The problem with maintaining Talent Pipelines is they’re very expensive. I would rather see an On-demand sourcing function, than a pipeline function, but I like that Amber to be trying to marry the two in a ‘ready-now’ fashion.

3. Work Agile – I think what Amber is saying, and I love it, is not all requisitions are created equal. Some jobs we fill are more important and have more impact on the organization. Yes, yes they do! So, do those things first and do them fast, to maximize the impact!

4. Create a Recruiting-First Culture – This would be my #1. Talent Acquisition doesn’t own recruiting. Hiring managers own recruiting. I can help you staff your department, function, location, etc., but ultimately, you as the leader must own it. If you can get here in your organization, you’ll be great at talent acquisition. The next step is then getting every single employee to understand their role and significance in constantly attracting talent to the organization.

5. Trust-based Hiring – Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Honestly, this is a large, enterprise-level organizational issue. Here’s what happens. Manager A has a great talent, but that talent is being underutilized in their group. Manager B desperately needs the talent Manager A has. Manager A should, for the betterment of the organization, give up their talent to Manager B, but they don’t because they believe they won’t get the talent they need in return. This happens constantly in giant organizations, and it sucks.

6. Proactively Source – Maybe a good first step here would be to first ‘actually’ source! 😉 I like that Amber is focusing her team on certain things the organization needs. Hey, we suck at hiring females in tech roles! Cool, let’s make that a priority and specifically use a rifle approach to go out and get more females in tech roles. That’s just good recruiting. Might want to work with HR to ensure those females will feel like they actually belong as well, when they get into those roles or you’ll never get off that treadmill.

7. Cognitively Assist Candidates – Thanks for joining Marketing! This is where an LI post becomes a commercial and I would bet my entire salary (as a writer) that Amber didn’t actually have this on her original list! This one is supposed to be about Candidate Experience and I’m sure that’s what Amber had, but this is where Watson got shoved in. Not saying that’s bad, but it doesn’t sound like a practitioner put #7 together.

8. Personalize Offers – More Watson, but I will say personalization across the recruiting process is the key to reinventing recruiting. We all want to be recruited like a five star running back to Alabama. We want that experience. It doesn’t matter what role you get hired for, you want to feel like the most important person in the world to that company.

9. Interview with Cognitive – Okay, more Watson, but this is where I’m a huge fan! Very, very, very rarely will you go wrong when hiring smarter people who can process information faster. This doesn’t mean hiring only people who have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. There isn’t a ton of correlation between GPA and actual cognitive processing speed. Go find great cognitive pre-employment assessments and hire smart, it won’t let you down. Apparently, IBM has something like this called Watson or something, check it out.

Amber, thanks for putting this together! It’s a really strong plan for other TA leaders to follow!

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech – iCIMS buys TextRecruit

Posted on by
Reply

iCIMS made big news this week by acquiring the best-of-breed recruiting software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is a program that uses text messaging, live chat, and artificial intelligence to help companies hire faster.

One of my 2018 predictions was that ‘Text’ messaging for recruiting would go mainstream. When you look at most corporate TA tech stacks the one missing component, surprisingly, is still the lack of integrated text messaging capability. Sure your recruiters are sending text messages to some candidates through their personal smartphones, but all that data is lost.

Companies like TextRecruit and GoCanvas.io are offering organizations the ability to text message candidates, from an integrated platform that is much more effective than single text messages from smartphones. These newer text recruiting platforms allow organizations to message many candidates at once, and ensure this data from both sides is captured and usable for the future.

Capturing both sides of a text conversation between organization and candidate should be a big deal for organizations who take compliance seriously.

So, what does this merger of iCIMS and TextRecruit mean?

Right now, it will be mostly business as usual. iCIMS will keep selling their recruiting platform with TextRecruit being an integration partner in the iCIMS marketplace, and TextRecruit just got some giant inside information on selling to iCIMS current and former clients.

In the future, it’s fairly easy to see that iCIMS will probably take advantage of developing fully integrated text messaging and screening into their main platform. Within the next three years all organizations, large and small, will be using some sort of messaging capability to connect and maintain a connection with candidates. Email isn’t dead, but it surely isn’t the primary means of connection for GenZ and Millennials.

iCIMS is really the first best-of-breed unchained HCM talent platform on the market to go all in on messaging. Some ATSs in the market have text messaging capability, but nothing close to what TextRecruit is capable of, so this is a huge win for iCIMS. Full enterprise HCMs with talent modules, for the most part, aren’t even close to having this capability, and it might be years before they can get there.

iCIMS will still have aggressive competition from Greenhouse, Jobvite, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc., who are all building much more robust messaging capabilities with their ATS systems. iCIMS true advantage from buying TextRecruit will be on the enterprise side of the market where Taleo, Silkroad, Workday, etc. are now even farther behind iCIMS from a capability standpoint.

2018 should be an interesting year for merger and acquisition within the TA-Technology space as the five years prior to this year the amount of money invested into TA technology has been off the charts. You have a ton of small TA tech companies that are ripe for purchase and a bunch of ATS providers looking to build out a full function Recruiting end-to-end platform.

Is Your Organization Using HR Tech for Good or Evil?

Posted on by
1

Right before Christmas when things were crazy and no one was paying attention, something happened in the HR Tech world that didn’t get much press. This happens at certain times. It’s why corporations, governments, etc. release bad news on Fridays at 5 pm. It gets buried during the weekend.

The thing that happened was the announcement that many companies (Amazon, Verizon, UPS, and even Facebook themselves) were using Facebook Ads to exclude older people from applying for their jobs! That’s big news, right!?

If these same companies were using the exact same technology to exclude females or African Americans, don’t you think the world would have stopped, if only for a second until Trump tweeted again!? I think it would have, but it didn’t.

From the article:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

Verizon is among dozens of the nation’s leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

So, is this right? Well, Facebook seems to think so:

Facebook defended the practice. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.

“Age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry standard”. Really!? Well, in one way it is. But only if you’re doing it for good, not evil! If you are out trying to specifically recruit older people because you lack an older population in your workforce, then “yes” that is accepted.

If you don’t want older people, because they don’t fit your culture, then “HELL NO” it’s not an accepted standard!

The holidays came and went and all of this is forgotten because we don’t care about older workers. That’s a fact. We treat older workers like garbage in America. Once you reach 50 years old in America, you become stupid and worthless to hiring managers, even when those hiring managers are over 50!

We would have killed Facebook if they said it was an “industry standard to run ads for only white dudes”. But they are running ads for only young people and that is now an industry standard.

It’s not. It’s prejudice. It’s wrong. It is not an industry standard. Segmenting recruitment marketing is tricky. We have to be responsible enough to know when you exclude a certain group, that better not be an underrepresented group in your workforce and not the majority of your workforce (Facebook!).

So, what do you think? Industry accepted standard or bad recruitment marketing practice? Hit me in the commnets and let me know!

Reference Checking for Employment is Dead!

Posted on by
1

I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all, I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

NEW WAYS OF CHECKING REFERENCES THAT CHECKOUT

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. SOURCE YOUR OWN REFERENCES

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. USE FACT CHECKING SOFTWARE

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

T3 – @W_e_d_g_e video screening

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I take a look at Wedge. Wedge is a video technology designed to be used by both candidates and employers. Besides having the worse twitter handle in the history of HR technology (underscores are bad for a handle, four underscores are a death sentence!), there could be some real application for both sides of the hiring equation to use this easy to use tech.

For candidates Wedge was designed to give them something they could use that was quick and easy from a video perspective to show employers who they are beyond the normal text-based resume. The system asks each candidate five random questions and gives each person one minute to respond to the question. Then the candidate gets a unique URL they can share with employers, along with their resume to get a complete package of who you are as a candidate.

Employers can use Wedge as a video-based pre-screen, picking specific questions for candidates to ask, or even designing your own unique questions. These video files can then be shared with hiring managers, or anyone else involved in the hiring process. These files can also be uploaded into your ATS as attachments.

Very soon, Wedge will be releasing a new version that allows employers the ability to do text-based searches of the transcript of these videos. As you can imagine, in video-based answers candidates could talk about experiences and skills that don’t show up in a text-based resume, but would be things your hiring managers are looking for.

Wedge is one of those TA technologies that is very narrow in what it is trying to do. It’s simple and straightforward to use. This simplicity is its real strength. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not. It does one thing. It allows you to easily get a short video of candidates answering questions you want for your hiring managers. That’s it.

It’s easy to use and inexpensive and doesn’t need anyone from IT to get involved for you to add a video component to your hiring process. You can embed the process on the front side of your application screening process, or pick and choose positions you feel it might be more critical to have a video component as part of your assessment.

There some large-sized organizations currently using Wedge, but it’s my opinion that this tech is basically designed for low volume SMB TA shops. The larger the volume, the more you really want this tech embedded into your ATS, or within a video platform that gives you a more robust dashboard.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to add video to your application process that isn’t very involved, Wedge might be right for you!

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Future of Sourcing is Here!

Posted on by
3

So, yeah, the future of Sourcing, as a function, is not Artifical Intelligence (A.I.).

I know that makes a ton of folks working in Sourcing really excited to hear! For the past year, all Sourcers have heard is that the Robots are coming to take your job. That is incorrect.

The correct version is that the robots are going to take most of your job.

Wait, what?!

Yeah, I know it sucks, but horses don’t pull carts anymore and they made out just fine.

Look, the reality of sourcing is that most sourcing technology on the market today, is better at sourcing than over 90% of actual Sourcers working in the sourcing function. No, not you SourceCon geeks! The true specialist will always have jobs.

When you take the current sourcing tech on the market, add in the A.I. component, you now have a tech landscape that can automatically take your openings, go out and find candidates on the internet, job boards, your own ATS database, etc., contact them to see if they’re interested, then deliver activated candidates to recruiters. And, the tech does this 24/7/365, without bitching about not having a LinkedIn Recruiter seat.

Yes, that is current reality.

So, what’s the Future of Sourcing?

Say, hello, to my little friend! The Telephone!

The future of sourcing is connecting with those millions of candidates, who don’t have a social footprint on the web, or at the very least don’t have enough of a social footprint to ever show up in any kind of crazy search you could dream up.

It’s Larry the Engineer, sitting at his desk in Detroit, MI. Larry works at GM, 20 years experience, hates Facebook, doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and doesn’t attend conferences or his former college events. Larry is a candidate ghost. Larry sits in a large sized office space with 35 other engineers who all do similar stuff. You know probably 25 of those engineers. You know nothing about Larry.

You only find Larry one way.

Step 1: You map out that group. You find someone on the inside that tells you about the 35 engineers. You then start piecing it together and find out you can only find 25.

Step 2: You start asking all 25 for referrals. Who do you work with? Who is great in your group? Who doesn’t anyone know about, but they should? Etc.

Step 3: You cold call Larry. You do your Sourcing magic in getting Larry really excited about going to work for Ford.

Welcome to the future of Sourcing.

The robots can’t do this. This is the real future value of sourcing.

Sounds super old-school doesn’t it!? That’s because it is. Turns out, we can find almost anyone online. The “almost” portion accounts for about 25% of the adult population. That’s about 40 Million adults in America alone that the robots won’t find, and neither will your searches. These are people you have to dig up manually, the old school way.

Okay, I’ll tell you the new old school way will be better because you can use texting and messaging and whatever else the kids are using to communicate. But, your real value as a sourcer will not be picking off people who are now online that any robot can find. Your real value will be networking your way to that talent that has no social footprint.

My mom, who started recruiting in the 1970’s would be today’s greatest sourcer! She could talk anyone into giving her anything. If you knew ten people, she could get you to make an additional one up, so she had eleven names and numbers. Your ability to get more referrals of people no one else knows about is the future of sourcing.

Everything that is old is new again.

T3 – Are Enterprise HCM systems Killing Talent Acquisition?

Posted on by
6

Last week I sat down with the folks at iCIMS to take a look at their system. iCIMS is the second largest ATS/ talent platform by market share for enterprise-level organizations, with only Taleo (Oracle) being larger. Workday, Ultimate Software, IBM/Kenexa, and SAP/SuccessFactors are also large players in this space that are growing quickly.

Do you see what all of them (except iCIMS) have in common?

That’s right, all of those other ATSs are apart of full suite focused HCM products.

Does that make a difference? Yes.

The people selling you full HCM (Oracles, SAP, Workday, IBM, etc.) will tell you all of the advantages of having all of your data under one umbrella in using one fully integrated system.

What they won’t tell you is that they really specialize in HCM and that their talent acquisition products/modules are probably 2-3 years behind where modern-day ATS systems are at. Also, with cloud-based, open API ATS systems, getting data to sync between your ATS and your HCM is no longer something that is difficult.

Enterprise level HCMs are built for large/giant level sized organizations. Those organizations with thousands, if not millions, of employees, do have some unique challenges, and all of these HCMs do a great job at addressing those needs. So far, they don’t do a great job at doing that on the talent side of the business.

This is where iCIMS comes into play. iCIMS is one of the few ATSs on the market built for enterprise and the specific ATS needs of large organizations. iCIMS has the background and experience of dealing with the compliance and volume of large hiring, coupled with a much more robust talent engine then you’ll find with the vanilla talent offerings that are currently being peddled by enterprise HCM vendors.

iCIMS also has a fully integrated marketplace that allows each organization to tailor what functionality they want and need. From background check providers, pre-hire assessments, video interviewing, texting, etc. These aren’t bolt-on technologies, but fully integrated, one-experience technologies you can choose from based on what functionality your organization needs, that isn’t already built into the main iCims products.

iCIMS has three main products: their ATS (Recruit) which is used by 100% of their clients, Connect (their CRM) used by about a quarter of their clients currently, but growing quickly, and Onboarding used by about half of their clients. iCIMS has also recently updated and improved their user-interface (UI) to make it look like many of the new ATSs on the market.

One major complaint I have with HCM ATS products right now (one of many) is the fact that almost all force candidates to register into the system to apply. This added friction into the apply process has been shown to be something candidates hate and causes massive candidate drop off. iCIMS gives organizations many options on how to handle this issue, and lets you decide how you want candidates to apply, allowing to eliminate as much of that friction as possible.

iCIMS also has an entire development team focused on Google for Jobs. Why is this important? Because you need your job postings to match as closely as possible to the GFJ schema to ensure your jobs are getting the highest candidate traffic possible.

Ultimately, if you are an enterprise organization you need to run an ATS that can handle enterprise-level demands. The big question is, do you want to run an ATS that helps you hire better and faster, or one that is just part of an overall larger system, not specifically designed to higher better and faster?

I think we are quickly approaching an HR Tech environment in our organizations where we need two major systems. You need a great HCM to handle your day-to-day employee HR related work. You need a great Talent Platform (Sourcing, CRM, ATS, etc.) to handle your talent attraction and hiring work. There is currently not one HCM on the market that does talent acquisition as well as stand-alone talent platforms can do it. And by the time they get to be equal to current stand-alone ATS platforms, they’ll still be behind, because those systems keep advancing at a very fast pace.

So, if you’re using an HCM platform to run your talent, what you’re basically saying is hiring the best talent really isn’t that important to us. You can tell yourself something different, but either you’re using great TA technology, or you’re not.

 

Corporate TA is Doing Contract Hiring All Wrong!

Posted on by
2

In every university on the planet in every Economics 101 class, professors teach a very simple concept of FIFO (First In, First Out). It’s basically meant to describe the way products/material move through a system. There are two basic types, FIFO and LIFO (Last In).

FIFO is you get some supplies shipped to your warehouse, but you first use the supplies you already have in your inventory.  LIFO is you get those same supplies shipped to you, but instead of using the inventory you already have, you first use this new inventory to fill orders.

Unfortunately, in Talent Acquisition we really haven’t figured out the basic economic theory when it comes to Contract labor.

We’ve built Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) which we thought were the answers to our prayers, but I find most corporate TA leaders and most vendors being pushed through these systems, are unsatisfied with the results on both sides.

So, How Do We Fix It? 

The pain point in bad contract hiring is caused by speed!

Yes, that same speed we desperately want is causing us to hire poorly!

Stick with me. VMSs work as a middle person between vendors and corporate TA. They’re basically a wall so your hiring managers and TA pros aren’t taking a million calls a day from bloodsucking recruiters.

VMSs have tried to fix quality issues, but the reality is in their veal to deliver talent quickly, that get caught in this LIFO dilemma. Almost every VMS on the planet runs their submission process in the same way:

  1. Job requisition goes out to suppliers
  2. Suppliers have some sort of limit of candidates they can put in (like 3 each), and the requisition has a limit of submissions it will accept as in total from all suppliers (like 25)
  3. Suppliers are on the clock to put candidates in before the competition puts them in.
  4. Riot mentality ensues and suppliers put the first garbage they can find into the system for fear of missing out.
  5. The “first-in” candidates are interviewed and a candidate is hired on contract.

The hiring manager is told this the best talent available, sorry, you’ll have to do.

This is a lie. 

One small change by VMSs and corporate TA could easily fix this problem. Do everything exactly the same way you’re doing it now, but don’t allow any vendors to submit talent for 48 or 72 hours. With this ‘window’ of time, your vendors would actually contact more talent, better talent, and not have the fear of missing out in shoving talent into your system as fast as possible. They would still be limited to three, but now they could actually select their three best – NOT – the first three they get in touch with.

Simple. Easy. Effective.

The two or three days of waiting, is nothing, compared to the increase in candidate quality you would get.

The contract hiring world has actually gotten to the point where it moves too fast. Too fast to give recruiters a chance to find the best talent that is interested in your openings. Indian call center recruiting shops are killing VMSs because of how they are set up. It’s all about meeting a number, it has nothing to do with actually finding great talent for your organization.

Contract hiring is increasing in all markets. This isn’t going away, so we need to find better ways of doing this. As you look into 2018 and beyond, and start to analyze your total workforce (ftes, contractors, temps, consultants) the portion of the total that will be contingent is growing. The more it grows, the better quality you need to have. Moving fast is great until it isn’t.

Company aren’t hiring the best contract employees they can right now, they’re hiring the fastest. There’s a big difference between those things.

Unchained! Attracting Talent That Isn’t Chained to a Desktop!

Posted on by
Reply

From manufacturing to construction to retail to restaurants to the service industries, most of our talent doesn’t actually sit ‘chained’ to a desk, but we’re still using recruiting practices that start with the notion we all sit at a desk waiting for a recruiter to find us!

It’s amazing that over the past couple decade most talent acquisition departments have recruited in basically in the exact same way for both office-type workers and those workers who never sit behind a desk. Which is to assume every person, regardless of where they actually work, apply and look for jobs in the same manner. They don’t!

Sign up for the Unchained! Attracting Mobile Talent Webinar with Tim Sackett and Samantha Herbein for a free discussion on how to recruit great talent out in the field, out on the plant floor, or out servicing your customers. This webinar will take place on Tuesday, December 12th at 1 pm EST! 

On this webinar you will learn:

  • The tactics top recruiting organizations use to find great talent out in the field
  • How to craft engaging text messages with introductions, call-to-actions, and signatures
  • Best practices for making introductions, asking questions, screening candidates, and scheduling interviews
  • As well as old school and new school talent attraction techniques that work, that you can start using right away!

This is a free webinar focusing on how you and your organization can begin to use innovative, modern recruiting practices to find that talent you need most!

 

T3 – Google Hire ATS Could Dominate the SMB ATS Marketplace

Posted on by
Reply

With all of the hype and craziness surrounding Google for Jobs, most people haven’t even been paying attention to what ultimately might be the bigger Google product to impact the talent acquisition technology market longterm, Google Hire.

Google Hire is Google’s entry into the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) marketplace that is built around an integration with their entire Google Suite of office products (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive, etc.). The integration is so tight that you can’t even demo Google Hire if you’re not already a Google office suite customer! Basically, it won’t work unless you use the Google suite.

Rob Kelly, at Ongig, did an exceptional write up of his demo of Google Hire, last week, click on the link to read his take.

One critical factor about Google Hire is that it is designed for the SMB market, for the most part under 500 employees. They might be able to move mid-market, but as of right now, their main focus will be employers who have less than 1,000 employees, who are using the Google suite of products.

Ongig also looked at some pricing around Google Hire:

  • $2,400 per year  for 50 employees
  • $4,800 per year for 100 employees
  • $12,000 per year  for 250 employees
  • $24,000 per year for 500 employees*
  • $48,000 per year for 1,000 employees*

While it’s not ‘free’, Google Hire isn’t expensive for what you get, especially in the SMB ATS market.

One main attraction for using Google Hire as your ATS (and it’s a HUGE attraction) is having direction integration with Google for Jobs, and the potential ability to more than likely have your jobs show up higher in Google’s search results.

In the past, you got great free traffic from Indeed, in the future that free traffic will most likely be coming from Google for Jobs. The assumption is if you’re using Google Hire, you’ll be getting more free traffic than those not using Google Hire.

Another pretty big advantage Google Hire has over most SMB ATSs on the market is its search capability using Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language technology that its Google Cloud Jobs Discovery career site search technology uses. ATSs, especially within the SMB market, are notoriously bad at search, Google Hire will not be.

There are really so many awesome features Google built into their ATS, click over to Rob’s article to read more details.

So, how big can Google Hire really get? 

We know there are millions of corporate G-suite users and most of these users fall in that under 1,000 employee position. This means Google Hire has a giant potential to grow, and grow very quickly, especially if Google decided to just give Hire away for free! Even as a paid technology, Google Hire looks to be a must-demo ATS for those looking to make a move to a new ATS.

The SMB ATS market is tricky. Most SMBs don’t have a ton of money to spend on TA tech, so even though Google Hire is relatively inexpensive for what you get, most still don’t have thousands of dollars budgeted to make this switch. For those SMBs that are fairly tech savvy, I suspect those will be the first to make the jump because of the G-suite integration.

Google Hire has the ability to be the dominant leader in the SMB ATS market, but only for those organizations using the G-suite at this moment. Lack of Microsoft Office/Outlook integration will keep it down market, as most larger organizations are too far down the path of using Microsoft, and ultimately that’s where most ATSs are making their money.

If you’re an SMB shop, and you use the G-Suite products, and you are looking for a new ATS, you would be crazy not to have Google Hire on your demo list. But, Google Hire isn’t the best ATS on the market, even at the SMB level, as Lever, Greenhouse, and SmartRecuriters all offer a better product as of right now.