Burning Down Your HR or TA Department

A few years ago my parent’s house burned down.  They were away on vacation and lightning struck the roof. Before the fire department could get there and put it out, most of the house was destroyed.  60+ years of memories and possessions, gone. In hindsight, it was a bit of a blessing; their house was at the age where everything was starting to need replacing, and my father was at the age, where he wanted to retire.

Those two things don’t go well together!  Major home improvements equals major expense, and a fixed income.  So, long-story-short, mother nature, and the insurance company, gave my folks a new house for a retirement gift!  All is well that ends well, I guess.

This situation, though, led to some deep emotional conversations about what the wish they could have pulled out, if they knew this was going to happen.  As you can imagine it was all the stuff you and I would want: our photos, our mementos, some favorite things that remind us of loved ones, or things that we were proud of.

I thought about this recently when having a conversation with a friend who just started a new position as the head of a large HR shop.  His comment to me was:

“What I really need to do is burn this place down and start over!”

To which I replied, “well, isn’t there anything you would keep?”  Bam!  That is what he needed. He did need to burn it down, but there were definitely some things he needed to take out before lighting the match.

It’s a common practice that Leaders tend to do when taking on a new position. We tend to burn down our departments.  Oh, we say we won’t, as we go around throwing gasoline on everything, and we say we aren’t rebuilding as we strap our tool belt on and start hammering away, but the truth is, most leaders want to remake their new departments into what they want, not what it was.

So, I’ll ask you to take a few moments today and think about the concept of burning down your HR or TA department.  What would you pull out and save?  What would you happily allow to burn up?  What would you miss?

Every day we owe it to our organizations to get better.  You don’t have to burn down the department to get better, but you do need to get rid of those things you know you would easily allow to burn up!

You’re Running Out of Time!

I have three sons, two of which are in college.  They can do anything right now!  If they wanted, they could fill a backpack and walk the earth. No one is going to stop them, in fact, many will congratulate them for taking this leap while they’re young.

In just a few years, people won’t say that.  They’ll tell them it’s crazy and you’re going to hurt your career, etc.

I’m in my 40’s.  I have a feeling that I’m getting to an age where I no longer can make a change in my career path.

Before you start commenting with things like, “Tim, age is a state of mind”, or “You can do anything you want”, or “Follow your passion”.  Stop it. I’m a grown ass man.  I like to think I’m an adult, although my wife and kids question that frequently. I have adult obligations: mortgage, college tuition, kids to raise, health insurance. I can’t just go off and polish rocks.

We all get to certain points in our life where you can no longer just go do ‘it’. Whatever ‘it’ is for you. I feel like I’m at a point where I can’t change careers, not because I don’t think I could, but because society doesn’t look well upon middle-aged dudes looking to change careers. Something is now wrong with me if I wanted to change careers. BTW, I don’t want to change careers, I actually think what I do is pretty cool. Or hip. Or Hella. Or whatever the kids are saying.

If I decided to go back and become a nurse, right now, at my age, with all of my responsibilities, people would say something is wrong with me. You know what? I would think there was something wrong with me.

My question is more around what is ‘that’ time when if you’re going to do it, you better do it now?

For traveling the world: I think it’s 18-22 yrs old, or after 60.

For completely changing careers: I think you have to do it around 30-35 years old. Later, and you just look like your reaching. (I think most people won’t agree with this, but it comes from my recruiting background and how hiring managers look at older candidates who have made this move)

For having kids: this one has changed a bit, but before 40 seems safe. Otherwise, you’re just tempting science to give you problems. One caveat, if you’re adopting, I’ll push out this age because those kids just need someone who will love them.

For completely your high school or college education: I’m really open on this one. I would say anytime before death! I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning!

For having grandkids: After 45 years old for sure. If you have grandkids prior to becoming 45, you did something wrong as a parent.

For getting your nose pierced: 17-28 years old. Yeah, I’m looking at you 37-year-old mom with the kid with a mohawk not wearing his seatbelt in the back of your Ford Mustang.

So, hit me in the comments with your age ranges on when you think it’s no longer socially acceptable to change careers!

Quality of Hire is NOT a Talent Acquisition Measure of Success!

I was looking at LinkedIn’s annual Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the way you measure your recruiting team’s performance today?

They said:

  1. Quality of Hire metrics (hiring manager measure not a TA measure – my opinion)
  2. Time to Hire (the single worse measure of all time – my opinion)
  3. Hiring Manager Satisfaction (has no correlation to whether or not TA is actually good or not – my opinion)

I hate all of these answers!!!  In fact, these answers are so bad it makes me question the viability of the future of Talent Acquisition!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  Most of us have no freaking idea how to actually measure the quality of hire, or that what we are actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90-day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go, recruiters, you’re hiring quality!” No, they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only works if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure, to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  No? That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

The Worst Hire You’ll Ever Make!

A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports team, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely.

We have this belief that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is work with what you have and make it the best you can until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

T3 – @W_e_d_g_e video screening

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!

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.

The Definitive Recipe for Success 

Early this week I was in the car listening to NPR on my way to a meeting. I can’t even remember which show and who was being interviewed but I remember what was said by the person being interviewed. The topic was about success.

The person being interviewed said that you reach success by having four components, which are:

– Talent

– Persistence

– Patience

– Luck

You don’t have to have all four at the same time to be successful, but you’ll probably have all four in some kind of combination if you are successful.

At first, I thought, well, yeah, duh, if you’re talented, if you’re the most talented, you’ll be successful. But that isn’t true. I can give you a hundred examples of the most talented people in any profession who are failures because they didn’t use their talents. They wasted what they had.

I love persistent people. The hustle. The grind. The never give up attitude. The scrapers in life. These are my people. I won’t take no for answer. I’ll keep doing it and doing it and doing it until I break through. So, of course, persistence is a key ingredient to success.

Patience is where I struggle. You see persistence and patience aren’t usually friends. They don’t like hanging out with each other. But, when I look at the most successful people in my life that I hang out, they all have great patience. Having patience doesn’t mean you’re willing to sit around and wait to be successful, but it’s knowing that sometimes the best path to success if putting in your time to get there. Ugh! I wish I knew this when I was 25!

Luck. Oh, boy, here we go. Successful people never want to admit luck is involved. I’m a self-made person. I did it on my own. I’m not lucky! Luck is a bad word to successful people, but it discounts the hard work, the effort and the time you put into becoming successful. But, again, each successful person I know can point to a time, or a person, or a meeting, or some chance circumstance that can only be categorized as luck. You can do every single thing right in your life, and not be successful, without that one lucky break.

I like the model.

It doesn’t let you off the hook. You still have to do it all. You can’t just say, ‘well, I didn’t get it because I wasn’t lucky enough”. That’s false, be patient. I didn’t get it because I wasn’t talented enough. No, keep at it. Luck finds those more rapidly who are talented, persistent, and patient.

I lucky enough to have a pretty good career. It only took me twenty-five years of grinding to find that luck…

Let’s face it, we love pretty people!

So, you’ve probably heard by now that some companies in Silicon Valley decided to hire models to attend their annual holiday parties and act as friends of executives. The purpose was not to show the executives had pretty friends, but to add some ‘prettiness’ to the party:

Along with a seemingly endless string of harassment and discrimination scandals, Silicon Valley’s homogeneity has a more trivial side effect: boring holiday parties. A fete meant to retain all your talented engineers is almost certain to wind up with a rather same-y crowd, made up mostly of guys. At this year’s holiday parties, however, there’ll be a surprising influx of attractive women, and a few pretty men, mingling with the engineers. They’re being paid to.

Local modelling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with “pretty much all men” who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn’t name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they’re friends with, in case anyone asks why he’s never seen them around the foosball table.

So, my HR brothers and sisters lost their minds over this on the social webs!

There were many comments all going down the path of: “Gross”, “Pathetic”, “Trumps America”, etc.

I have a different take. This is Recruitment Marketing in the real world. Most of us don’t live in Disneyland, and the real world of hiring is a bit different for the majority.

Here’s the deal. Tech hires are mostly men. White men, brown men, black men, really, really pale white men, but mostly men.

If you have a holiday party at a Tech company and it’s all dudes, well, that’s not very exciting. In fact, it’s pretty sad for all the dudes standing around looking at each other. If you were part of that party, as a dude, you probably wouldn’t tell your friends to come work with you.

Now, if you go to a party and there’s a bunch of hot women, hey, this place is pretty great! I’ve got a chance. Now, if you knew all that ‘talent’ was paid for, now it becomes depressing again. But, if you thought, these are just ‘friends’ of some of the other employees who got invited and they just love to hang with techy dudes, now it feels a bit better, again.

These models aren’t hookers. They’re at your company party to make the ‘atmosphere’ better. Basically, these models, are like the free laundry service and ping pong table you provide. It makes the environment better. You like where you work more. You don’t tell your employees, “Hey, we offer dog walking services for free because it really has been shown to help retain you.” Everyone kind of gets that.

This is no different. Having good-looking people at your employee events, makes it seem like this place is cooler than it probably really is. By the way, these pretty people, are in on the game! They are making money using their god given assets. Just as the techy people are using their big brains.

We love to hate. The reality is, America is addicted to pretty. We made the Kardashians millionaires for absolutely no reason except for their looks. We want to be pretty. We want to hang with pretty. We are a nation that values pretty over almost everything else.

Is that right? No! Is that part of the game we are in right now? Yes.

Pro Tip: I get around hiring pretty models (male and female) at my holiday party by just hiring pretty employees to begin with! Stay thirsty my friends.

 

Do your Recruiters have a Code of Ethics? @ATAPglobal

Recruiters are…

 

The reputation of Recruiters has never been very good, to say the least. Most people don’t trust recruiters and they’re fairly good reasons for this. Recruiters have one job to do. That job is to find talent for your organization. That job is not to find the candidate a job.

It’s hard for candidates and even Recruiters themselves to understand this concept. It’s the recruiter’s job to look out for the best interest of the organizations they work for. The candidates, while valuable to the recruiters, are truly just a product of their labor that is being paid by organizations.

Therein lies a big problem.

It’s like when you buy a car. You hope the salesperson is going to give you a good, fair deal and not sell you a lemon of a car. Candidates hope a recruiter (corporate, staffing, RPO) is going to help find them their dream job, not pay you less than they should and offer you a job with a psycho hiring manager.

Some cars salesman lack ethics and they’ll overcharge you for a crappy car. Some Recruiters lack ethics and they’ll tell you stuff that just isn’t true.

This is why it’s super important for you and your Recruiting team to have and believe in a Code of Ethics for the Recruiting Profession, and I’m really excited that ATAP released the first ever Recruiter Code of Ethics for our membership last week! (Click on the link to check out the full version, but here’s a taste):

  • PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE
    I will maintain an active commitment to professional development and remain knowledgeable about current regulations, trends and tools relevant to the recruiting process so that I provide the highest quality of service possible to all parties involved in each engagement.
  • DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
    I will serve as a strategic and vocal advocate for workforce diversity and inclusive work environments throughout each recruiting process.
  • CONFIDENTIALITY
    I will honor the trust placed in me when provided access to sensitive information including secure storage and ethical disclosure.
  • TRANSPARENCY
    I will treat all parties connected to a recruiting engagement with integrity and honesty by setting clear expectations, sharing information to which key stakeholders are rightfully entitled and revealing all conflicts of interest.
  • COMMITMENT TO THE PROFESSION
    I will proactively create, improve upon, and share resources, education, and learning opportunities with other practitioners.

Each and every single ATAP member is required by terms of membership to live and follow this Code of Ethics to maintain membership in ATAP. So, when you are working with or hiring an ATAP member, you know you are getting a Recruiter who has and follows a code. A code that promotes professional ethics in a profession that currently leaves it completely up to an individual to cross their fingers and hope you got a good one.

The Recruiting profession has never been hotter in terms of the position of importance we hold in helping our organizations to become successful. Now is the time to take this platform we’ve been given and show the world what Recruiters and Recruiting are all about. We are not used car salespersons. We are Talent Acquisition Professionals and we are the first line in our organizations in providing great talent.

So, tell me what you think. Did we get it right? Will you have your Recruiters follow this Code of Ethics? Hit me in the comments.

_________________________________________________________________

What the heck is ATAP?!? I get asked this question almost daily. ATAP stands for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals. Founded in 2016, ATAP’s mission is to develop a body of unified educational, ethical and measurement standards, advocate on issues that impact those in our profession, and build a global community of inspired and informed professionals. I’m a member! You should be one too – Join Here – use my code to get $5 off your first-year “ATAPDISCTS”! 

T3 – Are Enterprise HCM systems Killing Talent Acquisition?

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.