Talent Acquisition Applications: 3 Top Benefits for Recruiters

Talent Acquisition Technology is Top of Mind for Businesses

Recent purchases across the HCM software landscape have yielded some rather unique insight into what businesses and vendors want; and the resounding answer is talent acquisition applications. Indeed, whether an organization’s needs revolve around applicant tracking, mobile, or the newer capabilities of social engagement with potential employees; recruitment software has succeeded in edging out some of its brainier counterparts like human capital analytics to become the number one thing that businesses are after. Why? Well, let’s look at the following scenario to get an idea of what we’re talking about here. Ask yourself…does this sound familiar?

Your time to hire and cost to hire are well above industry standards and you are struggling to find the appropriately qualified talent—often leaving key posts vacant. Productivity and service levels are becoming compromised and your business is at the leading edge of losing its competitive advantage.

If that sounds a bit too much like what your company is going through, the good news is that research shows you’re not alone. Take the Manpower Group's finding from their sixth-annual Talent Shortage Survey for example; which shows that 52% of US Employers are experiencing difficulty filling mission-critical roles within their businesses—an increase of 14% from last year. Or consider a recent IHRIM survey on talent management which found that less than half of CEOS believe their company “has the skills necessary to perform at industry leading levels”. The fact of the matter is that there is an urgent need for many of you to evolve your hiring practices to compete effectively in the talent wars; and many of you are likely well aware that recruitment software can deliver that functionality you need to make your talent acquisition process more effective. Unfortunately, according to a recent KMSI survey, over 40% of those organizations who admitted to needing technology solutions for acquiring talent hadn’t bought anything yet. Now admitting you’ve got a problem is certainly the first step, but those figures are just unacceptable to us. Not when recruitment software is bringing more to the table than ever before. Not when it can improve so much for your business.

Talent Acquisition Applications: Selling the Solution to Your Recruiters

To help with that, we’re starting a series of articles dedicated to getting you over the obstacles that are keeping you from this all-important purchase. Maybe it’s a lack of knowledge about HR software selection or implementation processes. Or maybe you’re unsure of what features your recruitment software should have. In this first article though, our focus is on your recruiting team; because if there’s one group that can stymie your adoption progress it’s them.

For one thing, bringing in new recruitment software can net resistance from your hiring team because they’re entrenched in an existing way of working. Or perhaps this subset of your staff is simply apprehensive about adopting new technologies. Regardless of the reasoning, below we have set out several arguments than you can make to help convince your team of the need to try out the latest talent acquisition technologies. After all, garnering this support early on is going to pay off dividends down the line in terms of cooperation and championing during the procurement and installation process.

Talent Acquisition Application Benefit #1: No More Sifting

On average, during 2010, research shows that U.S. employers were getting 40.5 applicants per job—figures that would indicate that resume sifting for short-list generation is likely to be a highly repetitive and time consuming manual task for your recruiters. However, talent acquisition applications often contain parsing functionalities—meaning the system is the one interpreting data from resumes and generating applicant short-lists. This in turn frees up time for your recruiters to work on more stimulating and often exciting work.

Talent Acquisition Application Benefit #2: No More Rote Correspondence

While the preparation of acceptance and rejection letters are necessary tasks, it’s probably the case that your recruiting team finds this aspect of their jobs highly laborious and perhaps even wasteful given the fact that it takes them away from more value-added and interesting work. To ease this burden, the bulk of recruitment software systems on the market today have mail-merge capacity and e-mail integration functionalities—meaning that template-driven (but personalized) correspondence can be sent out to applicants in an automated fashion on mass and at the click of a button.

Talent Acquisition Application Benefit #3: Postings Will be Easier

Each time a job is posted, chances are you’ll need it posted on at least 3 or 4 jobs sites. And, chances are, each of these sites will have a different job submissions process; any of which can be time-consuming and complicated. As were the above items, this posting process can be a frustrating task for your recruiting team who wind up spending much of their valuable time wrestling with complicated user interfaces, rather than writing high quality job descriptions that will attract top talent. To ease this specific burden, the bulk of talent acquisition systems will enable recruiters to automatically publish jobs to a range of sites—all managed from one, rather than multiple systems.

Talent Acquisition Application Buy-in – Final Thoughts

Given the fact that a recent Gallup survey showed that fully 39% of U.S. employees (at mid-career level) are worried about being laid off, any introduction of a new software system which promises to automate previously manual processes is likely to cause some employees to feel as if their job is being replaced by a computer. Assuming your reason for talent acquisition automation is not headcount reduction, you should ensure you clearly communicate that there will be no job losses—addressing possible anxieties and concerns within the team, and boosting receptivity of the message. Remember, introducing software for talent acquisition can be a “win-win” situation if you play your cards right. Not only will you be able to net a reduced time-to-hire and cost-of-hire, but focusing your recruiters’ efforts on delivering quality of hire, will contribute to an increasing competitive advantage for your business. You just need to get your team on board with this new way of thinking first.

  Categories: E-Recruiting Software

  Tags: recruiting software

  Permalink: www.hrlab.com/talent-acquisition-applications.php

 Author: Micah Fairchild

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