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Talent Acquisition and Technology - TATech Conference Plots the Future for Your Next Great Hires!

Written by: Roger Lear
Published on: Sep 30, 2016

Last week, the TATech Conference hosted at the Palms Resort Las Vegas was packed with talent acquisition leaders, TA technology providers, and global employment branding agencies.    It was great to be in the same room with everyone to talk about the tools that are evolving to find and hire great talent. 
 

I really appreciated speaking with the many talent acquisition leaders who were impressed by all the different technologies and especially analytics that has been created to get them hires.  With so many products, talent acquisition leaders are in a precarious situation on what will actually work at their company because they can’t do it all.


“I want to post jobs and get hires and spend as little money as I can.  Love technology but I really just want to know that I am getting quality candidates from the sources that I use”, mentioned one manager


TA managers know their job requires them to dig into all the resources available to them that helps recruit and hire talent.  At a conference like this, it gives them a chance to see exactly what the “secret sauce” behind many of these new products.


Examples of this are:

  1. People analytics
  2. Programmatic ad buying
  3. Mobile solutions
  4. Recruitment advertising
  5. Video recruiting
  6. Social/digital recruiting.


Learning about new products shine the light on your current recruiting products and many discover the real “numbers”.    To me, this is the biggest takeaway and many are surprised that the “secret sauce” of their current products are not even maximized to perform at top effectiveness. No matter what products you may switch to in the future, some of the current issues may have to be fixed.  Here are some takeaways to this point:
 

  1. Your Applicant Tracking System is failing you.  According to the research, only about 12% (from desktops) of the candidates who begin the journey in your ATS actually complete a full application. Ouch.  The reasons are numerous but for most, your ATS application process takes way to long, asks too many questions and requires the job seekers in many cases to put in information they don’t want to share (not knowing how to answer the questions). 
     
  2. Mobile Recruiting.  Howie Schwartz of Crowded.com said it best.  The iPhone was invented in 2007 and nine years later a candidate struggles to apply on their mobile device.  Many employers are so tied to their applicant tracking systems that they miss the opportunity of candidate applying via mobile (8% via mobile make it through the ATS application process). Mobile is “scaring away our candidates”.  Can’t agree more Howie.
     
  3. “Last Click Metric” is a horrible metric.  Many ATS’s provide you a report letting you know where anyone who applied came from.  Was it a job board, your career website, Google, social or any other means? Most ATS systems asks the job seeker to select the source.  Most will select the last place they clicked and that is why many of you think your own career website is one of your top sources.  It is very hard to get a truly accurate source if you don’t have technology that uses tracking source code to “follow” the job seeker who finds the job on a job board and then six days later sees a Facebook post which they click and it takes them to your corporate career site and hopefully a complete an application.  This is an issue.
     

The new products are out there to address many of these issues.  One that I am very excited about is from a company called reThink Data.  Founder John Bell has spent the last four years of his life working on a solution that will allow job boards like GreatInsuranceJobs.com to have our candidates fill out one application that resides on our site.  When they apply to your job from our site and you have and ATS (no matter what brand), instead of redirecting, it already will pass the application your ATS (in your format) and the process is 4 minutes, not 45 minutes.  While we are not integrated yet, the statistics of applications getting into your ATS will go up dramatically and your cost per hire will go down.


Peter Weddle runs a great talent acquisition technology association and your company should consider becoming a part of the future.  The conferences and information sent throughout the year is spot on and extremely valuable to your company.  Here is some additional information or TAtech.