Category Archives: TA Technology

T3 – 100 HR & Talent Technologies You Should Know Right Now!

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My good friend William Tincup (@WilliamTincup) is probably the single smartest person I know in the HR and Talent Technology space, worldwide! That’s saying a lot because this space is filled with smart men and women.

At HR Tech Fest a couple of weeks ago, William made a comment on stage that there is roughly 21,000 HR and Talent Technology companies in the world. Seems like a number I can’t even get my head around – I might know 200 or so!

To prove his point, William quickly put together 100 of the hottest companies on the market and shared them on LinkedIn. Since most of you don’t visit LI but once or twice a month, I wanted to share them here as well.

My suggestion is to demo one of these companies each week for the next 50 weeks. One hour of development per week, 50 hours total. Any of us can do this. Pick out the ones that make the most sense to you, in your role. This will change you professionally. You’ll be smarter. You’ll see what your competition is doing. You’ll begin to think more strategically. Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

This list is alphabetical. None of these organizations are paying me (yet). If you’re not on it, but want to be, connect with William on the Twitters and just ask.

T3 – Pimp My Job Descriptions

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I think there is one thing we all still agree on, most job descriptions flat out suck! This leads to a conversation around job descriptions versus job postings. HR pros will say job descriptions are boring because a job description is a legal document. That can be debated, but it’s why most job descriptions are boring and awful and don’t work in attracting candidates!

This is how most technology is developed. Something sucks and a technologist believes they can build a better mouse trap.

Right now most boring job descriptions are ‘jazzed’ up by outside marketing and design firms that charge you a ton and basically give you either a branded template that looks the same for all job descriptions. This is similar to dropping a SmartCar engine into a Porsche. It looks great, but its still crap on the inside!

The other thing they do is basically take your job description and totally build a microsite for that position. It looks like it’s own mini-website. This is ideal but usually very expensive. Many of the new Recruitment Marketing technologies are now doing this for a fraction of the cost.

Then along comes two new technologies that basically take your boring, stale job descriptions and make them exciting and fresh for a really low cost!

These two companies are GoSizzle.io and ViziRecruiter. I’m not writing them up separately because they virtually do the exact same thing for the a very similar price. You send them your lame job description and they give you back a landing page that is fully branded, interactive and professionally designed. For pennies on the dollar that you would spend working with a big design firm to do the exact same thing.

Both have similar metrics to show that their visual stimulating microsites will drive up to 40% more traffic to your postings.  These technologies also use machine learning to recommend to you better wording for higher SEO and higher levels of engagement from job seekers.

After uploading your job description you basically get back a hyperlink URL that you can use to socially recruit on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. For those organizations that do a lot of outbound recruiting this can be highly valuable.

If you’re mainly a post and pray shop (which most organizations are) I think this technology won’t necessarily do a lot for you. The one weakness both systems have is that while these microsites drive candidates back to your ATS process, they really do nothing for anyone who is visiting your career site and searching your jobs, or for candidates finding your job on Indeed or a job board.

This ATS integration is critical, and both are working on finding ways to make this happen. I expect some of their larger customers will help get this done soon. I’m somewhat surprised that ATSs haven’t picked up on this technology already and integrated it into their own systems. That would be ideal!

Check out both GoSizzle.io and ViziRecruiter. What they do for your job descriptions is 1000% better than what you have right now, and well worth a look, especially for the price!

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

T3 – The New Crap from HR Tech Conference Season

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By using “Crap” in the title I’m guaranteed to get at least 3 emails this morning unsubscribing from my blog!

You still with me? Hey, gang! What’s up!?

I’ve been to three conferences in the past two weeks and have gathered a bunch of new HR and TA tech I will be talking about in the coming weeks, but I need to spend some time and write all of this stuff up. Before I do that I had to first share some major themes coming out of the HR Tech space that you should keep an eye on.

1. Customization! 

Historically, great HR and TA functions were built on great processes.  Those processes were put in place to treat everyone and everything, exactly the same. If you would ask an HR or Talent pro to change or adjust their process, you might actually lose your life!

Now, all of this started because treating everyone and everything as unique, special unicorns takes a ton of work, and it’s extremely complex.  We don’t have that kind of capacity, so we had to lock it all up in tight processes, to ensure things got done on time, and were accurate.

Technology is changing all of this for both HR and TA! The great technology of today allows you to customize your processes and policies by employee, so the employee gets an experience unique to them, and you don’t have the pain of trying to track it all.

The HR and TA Leaders of the future are not about one great process. They’re about delivering customization to the masses. Not customization of software! That’s still the devil and will break your new shiny toys! 

2. Analytics Gone Wild

It appears that HR and TA analytics are still as big as ever, even though it also seems like the understanding of these continues to be at an all time low! So many systems. So many possible analytics. The Data Science folks love it. The HR and TA folks are lost.

We now have more analytics. I can’t say we have better analytics. We continue to struggle as a community, primarily because we all continue to do our own thing, which really only means something to us, and not anyone else.

What would really help this whole analytics nightmare would be one common version of the truth?  Here are the analytics we almost all agree will move the needle, and here’s a common way we are all going to measure these.

I will say the predictive analytic models that are coming out, are very impressive, and within five years almost all major companies will be using these to anticipate turnover, determine job fit, etc. The science is unbiased. We are forever biased. Something needs to change.

3.  We’re still scared of Saas

We actually aren’t scared of Saas software. Most of it is really great tech, and we love it. We are still scared that Saas is a big lie and these systems and their Open APIs still won’t work together well. So, we continue to think we need big bad giant full suit enterprise level systems.

This is usually some of the worse tech on the market as a whole, and even within these systems, there are major issues with the modules working together. Eventually, we are going to have to trust these Saas plays and their misunderstood Open APIs and see if what they claim to do, they can really do.

I have a feeling you’ll be pleasantly surprised. But, like everyone in technology loves to say, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM.” Until they did…

The Most Powerful Talent Attractor

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We make talent acquisition much harder than it needs to be.  We focus on things like employment branding, candidate experience, recruitment analytics, etc. All important stuff, but a lot of this focus takes away from what’s really basic and critical to being great at acquiring talent.

At its core, the most powerful talent attractor is simply just being desired.

This might seem ultra-simplified to you, but it’s not. Think about yourself for just a moment.

When you get a call from a recruiter, yourself, about going to work someone place else, doesn’t that feel really good?  No, I mean, REALLY, good! “Oh my gosh, you guys, I got this call today, from ABC Company, and they tried to recruit me! I was like, heck no, I’m great here, but I thought it was funny, they wanted me!”

We Love to be wanted! It’s a basic natural feeling and emotion.

The key to great talent acquisition is getting your team and your organization to understand this. If TA would act more like the nerdy guy trying to get a date, and less like the super pretty girl acting like being interested is the farthest thing from her desire, we would be so much more successful!

But, we don’t. We act like candidates should want us. Not we should want them.

Now, imagine that same recruiting call to yourself. This time instead of the company wanting to recruit you, they actually say, “well, we’re not interested in you, but wanted to see if you could refer someone else at your company.”

How would that fell!? It would feel awful and you would be pissed!

We want to be wanted. We wanted to be desired.

If you can get your recruiters to have that mindset, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to pick up the phone and talk to candidates.  If we all just truly understood that the candidate on the other end of the phone was just like us, they just want to be wanted, recruiting them seems like a breeze.

“So, you mean I don’t treat them like I’m doing them a favor by talking to them?”

Now you’re getting it! Treat them like you really hope they’ll go on a date with you! Just don’t actually ask them for a date! Just think about your own personality in these terms of how you’re communicating to the candidate.

#SHRMtalent – Is This a Recruiting Conference?

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I’ve been pretty outspoken throughout the years about the lack of great Talent Acquisition conferences on the national stage.  There are some great local and regional recruiting conferences, like Recruit DC, Talent 42, Minnesota Recruiters and, of course, the Michigan Recruiters Conference.

I really love the folks at SourceCon, and they do a great job, but for many corporate talent acquisition pros, SourceCon can get really way too far into the weeds, and most will feel intimidated by what’s being discussed. ERE continues to trip over themselves and hasn’t never fully turned itself into that national TA conference.

This is my first time to SHRM Talent and I have to say SHRM is well positioned to create something really big for corporate Talent Acquisition leaders and pros!

Much of the content was on the same par you would find at any of the top recruiting conferences around the world. Of course, I’m doing a couple of sessions and people were highly engaged, asking great questions. Some of the others here include:

Johnny Campbell from Social Talent who had another super engaged session!

Chris Hoyt, the Recruiter Guy, sharing great information on Candidate Experience!

Dee Ann Turner, head of talent for Chick fil a, one of my favs, and say what you want about them, they hire super nice and friendly people, consistently, at every location I’ve ever been in.

Great Keynotes by Jim Knight and Kat Cole – again solid, solid, speakers and talent pros.

Chloe Rada, Recruitment marketing at Sodexo, talking employer branding.

And just a ton more talent practitioners sharing really solid information.

These are people you would expect to see at the top TA conferences in the world, challenging people with some really innovative ideas and best practices.

Of course, in a large national conference, you need content at all levels, so all of it won’t be for everyone. I’ve come to grips with that. I sat in a session and found myself wondering ‘how the heck did this person ever get picked to come to a TA conference?’ When you have 50 plus speakers, not everyone is going to be for every attendee.

But, for the most part, I’m thoroughly impressed with what SHRM put on, and you all know I don’t normally say that! There were around 1400 attendees at SHRM Talent, and I really thing SHRM can position themselves as the premier TA conference in the world, just as they’ve positioned SHRM National as the premier HR conference in the world.

What are the next steps for SHRM Talent, in my opinion?

  • They need a technology track – TA corporate pros are hungry to learn more about what technology can do for them.
  • They need a few more hardcore recruiting, sourcing speakers.  Some folks who will get into the weeds for those who desire that.
  • I would love SHRM play around with session times. An hour and 15 minutes is your parents conference presentation. Most attendees, now, would prefer TEDx style presentations. This becomes a logistical issue, but I think if you move speakers and not attendees, they could test some of these things. No one wants to sit for 75 minutes and hear speakers drone on.

I’m leaving Orlando encouraged about SHRM and the direction of SHRM Talent. Corporate Talent Acquisition is in desperate need of a great conference and SHRM might actually be able to fill this need for the future!

T3 – Boon

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This week on T3 I take a look at Boon. Boon is a new talent crowdsourcing marketplace. Basically, Boon is a referral marketplace for sharing relevant opportunities with your personal network. Ther are some others in this space, that do it a bit differently, but it’s basically a recruiting disrupter that cuts out the middle man.

Boon is set up a bit differently, by allowing agency and independent recruiters to set up a profile and work within their system as well. This would allow a recruiter, or any employee, to refer their ‘network’ to your openings. The real goal though is to allow anyone to do this kind of referring.

Membership is free, both for companies and for the individuals who sign up to refer candidates. If the employer hires someone via Boon, it’s billed $5,000. Boon then takes a 10% cut—and passes $4,500 to the member who made the referral.

5 Things I like about Boon:

1. Boon uses a matching algorithm to automatically match your network with jobs on their platform, so you don’t have to do the work. It then shows you who might be a good match, so you can decide which ones you want to refer easily

2. You could easily use Boon as an internal employee referral program. From the dashboard you can input all of your employees, they can decide if they want to tap their own networks, but the system makes it easy to share and match their company jobs to their networks, plus it also eliminates tracking and paying out of referrals.

3. From the referral side, Boon, auto tracks your referrals and the dashboard shows you where your referral is within the process, so you don’t ever have to wonder what happened to that person you referred.

4. Boon takes 10% off the top of the referral to the referring person, the company pays Boon directly. Currently, the Boon referral is $5000, but soon a company using Boon for employee referrals will be able to customize that amount as a percent of the hiring salary.

5. Boon also allows organizations to post their jobs privately, to only your employees, or publicly to all Boon users, in case you wanted to give your employees first shot at referring a friend or peer.

Boon is really simple to use and upload job descriptions. The matching technology to the referring user’s network sets it apart from similar technology on the market.  Well worth taking a look, especially if you don’t have any technology for employee referrals, this could be a very inexpensive alternative!

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

Top 70 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in 2016

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

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

Here’s the list:

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

Crazy, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

T3 – Elevated Careers

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This week on T3 I take a look at new careers site being developed by dating site eHarmony, called Elevated Careers. I actually reviewed them back in October of 2015 at the HR Technology Conference, but they were in beta. They had their big launch recently, so I wanted to remind folks to check them out now that it’s live!

I was at the launch and learned a few things to add:

  • Dr. Warren is super passionate about making this work. He truly believes Elevated Careers can match companies and candidates for the right fit.
  • Organizational Fit is still something that organizations haven’t figured out. Which makes this a giant market that is basically untapped.
  • Elevated Careers is taking great care not to become a job site for eHarmony.

Elevated has taken the successful compatibility matching technology of eHarmony that is responsible for 438 marriages per day – that’s 4% of all marriages in the U.S. per day! – and applied the same scientific methods to match employees with jobs and companies. Just as eHarmony came about because Dr. Neil Clark Warren knew there had to be a better way to finding love than just luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be much more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity.

If you’re like me, the first time I heard of Elevated Careers, I chuckled a bit. I admit, I’m sophomoric and a twelve-year-old at heart! Once I got a chance to see the product, and smart minds behind it, I was chuckling for a different reason. These folks know what they’re doing, and they have a giant captured audience to leverage. Think what you want about dating sites, but they know how to build trust, get massive amounts of data on their members and at that point is just a matter of leveraging that data.

5 Things I really like about Elevated Careers:

1. Elevated Careers gets what most career sites don’t even focus on – Fit Matters!  Their backbone is a freaking dating website; they’re going to be better at matching and fit than almost anyone!

2. eHarmony has been public about making this work. This bodes well for ensuring they’ll get the investment needed to make a great product. The UI is already very tight and intuitive. They made a very easy to use product.

3. Elevated will have a unique talent pool to leverage, that is unlike any other product on the market. You won’t be able to contact dating website members, that would kill that brand, which they have to very protective over, but you will be able to market to those members through Elevated.

4. Their fit technology will give candidates a Compatibility Score. This will help candidates know how well they will potentially fit with a potential company, but also show them where and why they fall short.

5. The job function is more than just an aggregator, as organizations will have to validate themselves before their jobs will show up in search. This way candidates know the jobs they’re applying for are current and up-to-date.

Having trouble hiring people that fit your company and culture?  Give Elevated Careers a demo and see what they’ve got.  The science behind their product is proven and very strong. They just might have found the secret sauce for organizational and job fit!

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

T3 – @RecruiteeHR

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform, Recruitee.  Recruitee is an all in one ATS, recruitment automation, career site builder, and employment branding platform for the SMB market, with a very intuitive interface that follows about 99% of every recruitment pipeline out there.

Recruitee allows you to build your own career site, easily, and it doesn’t look like something your twelve-year-old put together from a template at a free website builder company.  Everyone tells you doing this is easy, then you pull your hair out and call Todd from IT to bail you out. This really is easy to do and you won’t need Todd.

Recruitee also allows you to build your applicant process by just dragging and dropping the steps in your process to match the needs of your organization. Plus, you’ll move candidates through the process with the same drag and drop ease. It’s one of the only platforms for the SMB market that I’ve seen that allows you to manage so much, all in one place. There are a ton of ATS options for the SMB market, but very few that allow you to build and manage your employment brand by yourself!

5 Things I really liked about Recruitee:

  1. Sourcing Plug-in Extension makes it super easy to import candidates into the system while you’re sourcing, plus the extension will also give you the email address (if it can be found) for those candidates you are sourcing.
  2. Job Promotion to both free and premium sites through the system. Easy job push with one click. Plus, you have the option to push it to paid sites for a discounted fee from what you could probably get on your own, for most SMBs.
  3. Career Site Editor. Most SMBs have to get in line behind everyone else to ever make a change on their career site. Recruitee puts this power directly in your hands, and you can now make changes on a daily, hourly basis if you wanted. For fast moving SMBs this is huge!
  4. CRM functionality that allows you to build talent pools and keep connected with them. Great functionality for a product that caters to this size market.
  5. It’s really about as idiot-proof of a recruiting platform as you’ll find on the market for SMB. This is important because you’re usually talking about a 1 or 2 person shop in small companies and these people have to wear all the hats! That means they need a platform that can do a lot, but doesn’t break easily.

Very impressive small market recruiting platform. I continue to be amazed at what the SMB market has access to in talent acquisition technology. Recruitee gives you so much for a rather small price. Well worth a demo if you’re in that space and looking to add or expand your recruiting technology.

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

2 Minutes with Tim! SHRM-SCP or HRCI-SPHR?

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Hey! guys, I’m trying a new platform out this week called Anchor.FM which allows me to post audio right on my blog, and if you have the Anchor App which you can download for free from the App Store for iPhone, you can easily respond back.

Here’s how it works – I have 2 minutes to tell you anything I want. You have one minute to tell me I’m full of hot air! It’s really that easy. Check it out! Either way, you can listen by just pushing the play button below.

This week, I decided to discuss if you should get your SHRM-SCP or HRCI-SPHR. I was asked this question this week via private message and thought others would love to join the conversation.

Let me know what you think about the audio post in the comments!  Anchor is made for people like me – a face made for radio!

I love the idea and think it could be a great way to post every once in a while, or a regular Thursday edition, who knows!