Need to Upgrade Your Tech?

Bots Are Your Friend

Bots, more bots, and better bots. The simple ones are great for FAQ support on a career site. More advanced once can also serve up relevant jobs.  The most advanced follow the candidate from first touch out on the web through on-boarding. There is a growing list of bot vendors but a shrinking list of software platforms they run on.  The techies in your IT department will be well aware (and have opinions) about which platform will win: Google, Microsoft, Amazon or IBM (Watson) platform. 

Look for AI enabled "Persona" tools. These tools enable targeting talent the same way marketeers target consumers.  For example, a well known, mid-west, firm was looking for tech talent they could develop. Their persona research told them their idea candidate lived in Northern California, had a young family and was renting.  They targeted real estate channels with messages of the superior career-growth and life-style opportunities and had stunning success.

TIP: don't know where to start? Start your journey with a FAQ bot on your career site. The complexity will start to fade away and you'll see all that smoke was just a wizard behind his curtain having fun.

Don't Source, "Market"

The image to the right shows the convergence of virtual reality and reality. RFID tags (chips) inside those boxes will enable you to find what you want faster and marketeers to make real time offers to coax you into their alternatives. The scary part is the possibility they could follow you home...

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Not too long ago career builder experimented with this model. You could open their app, point it at a building, and see the available jobs. It failed to gain traction, but it's an example of how consumer marketing innovations are being applied to talent acquisition.

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Have you ever clicked on a link, looked at the product, and then seen an advertised for that product again while browsing your favorite social site? Marketeers call that "programmatic advertising with retargeting". They literally know exactly how much to spend to generate a sale.

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Several vendors have emerged to apply this principle to a job post. They can also tell you exactly how much it will cost to generate a hire and even model cycle time to cost.  

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TIP: Talk to Recruitics, ClickIQ, On-Recruit, Recroup or JobAdx.

Build Your Stack

Start your exploration with A.I. enabled social and sourcing platforms, augmented writing platforms (supercharge your posts and site content), programmatic advertising, video job postings, mobile text and a career site FAQ bot.

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If you do this right, you MUST plan for a significant increase applicant flow (20% to 75%). Don't let all that traffic crash to a stop in your old-school (human) shortlisting structure!  Explore gamified assessments, culture/function videos, digital interviewing, AI enabled short listing and candidate self-schedule interviews. To get even further out there - explore launching a job-status bot to connect with and communicate with that talent!

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TIP: There are plenty of additional tools to optimize the hiring manager interview through on-boarding process. But you should pause here and explore the cost-out opportunities you've yielded. You will increase fill rate, reduce cycle time and the need for some humans.  It's your call if or how to use their new-found bandwidth, but make no mistake, your tech improved results and reduced cost.

Find Your Backbone

Almost all TA Tech starts with a combination of some foundational, or "backbone", tools. They include Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), subscription job boards, career pages and some form of Candidate Relationship Management (CRM). 

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The challenge is that many ATS systems are not candidate friendly (painful apply) and don't support the actual hiring process. Job board traffic is declining. Career pages sell but don't market and often the CRM strategy is disconnected.

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But some ATS providers are bringing robust capability along with tech alliances to make integrations less painful. The boards are shifting to provide content (Glassdoor) or traffic (Indeed) and increasingly, offering a pay for performance option. Career pages supported by internal IT are giving way to fully functional "Talent Marketing" platforms with integrated CRM functionality. 

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TIP: Find backbone firms with either an "open API" model or, better yet, significant established alliance partnerships. Easy integrations and flexibility are the keys to building an effective tech stack.