Do you really need a modern Recruiting Solution?
If you don’t know exactly how to articulate just how critical recruiting is to the future of your company, you are missing the boat. A Boston Consulting Group study from last year showed that Recruiting has the highest impact of any HR function on business success. But, what about all the new products on the market? What’s the best way to make sure you are getting that impact?
I was on a webinar last week with Blogger and social recruiting strategist Bryan Chaney, about using content marketing to attract and engage candidates. Bryan had some great advice on the topic, which you can listen to here.
When we got to the Q&A time, someone asked me to compare SuccessFactors Recruiting to a vendor who has yet to release their first recruiting solution. Hmm – not sure what to make of that. Hard to compare something that exists with hundreds of customers using it successfully, to something that has yet to be tested by even one.
There is a lot of hype around solutions that are launching in the future, and don’t get me wrong – new is often very useful and very cool. But, when your company’s ability to grow depends on the ability to find, engage and hire the right talent, then you may not want to be the first to deploy an untried solution. Best to save that for companies who have more time to experiment.
In fact, if you are interested in the topic of recruiting technology adoption, Bryan Chaney will be coming back to share his wisdom on that topic on November 14th at 10 a.m. PST– register here.
So, next time you are researching a new recruiting solution, don’t forget to check out SuccessFactors Recruiting – get to know our real customers with real results.
Hi Adrienne,
I couldn't agree more with your notion about the importance of recruitment. Whether it is the most important HR function, I find difficult to say. If you recruit great people, but can't retain them, it doesn't help an aweful lot. Is it not rather that there is a number of interconnected processes, where the weakest link defines the overall strength (simplifying it a bit)?
The fact recruitment comes up as most important in studies could be interpreted in two ways:
1) it usually IS the weakest link and therefore improving it has the most impact. Wouldn't surprise me, as HR departments don't often seem to acknowledge the importance: they outsource it to a gang if firms, who treat recruitment like hardselling unnecessary incurance policies to consumers, thus finding random candidates at best and ruining their clients employee brand along the way.
2) It is the one process HR can mess up completely, if they are bad at it. Performance mgt, career planning, succession, retention: they all depend strongly on line managers anyway and they can also close much of the gap, IF HR fails. Much less so in recruitment. So, if you have a poor HR dept, it shows in recruitment first.
So, whilst not necessarily agreeing to the "most important" label in general, recruitment certainly is the first HR process a CEO should have an eye on - ideally using mystery candidates.
Kind regards
Sven
Thought this was great video on why you should attend the webinar.
Nice post. I guess everyone's definition of "modern" is different too. When you talk to recruiters who are really doing the work, what they want boils down pretty easily. They want tools that support them in their work and do not get in the way or create unnecessary work. Sure, they may get excited or intrigued by the latest bell and whistle that comes out, but unless it streamlines their job, adoption is questionable. New and modern does not always mean better.
Most recruiters would prefer to do as little "in system" work as possible, but the need for reporting and compliance tend to get in the way of that dream. So how do handle this? Automation (where it makes sense) and flexibility. Enable recruiters to structure their work in a way that makes sense and still captures the data needed by the company.
well said. modernity as so many other things lies in teh eyes of the beholder 🙂
Some people might say, a really modern system is one that doesn't need a lot of recruiters any more at all. It provides a comprehensinve and easy to use front end for line managers to leverage social recruitment from Linkedin etc (maybe the SCN, too?), so they only need HR at the tail end of the process. They just "tell" thi ssystem, what they need and it goes and gets them. Probably even more people actually biting, because they are addressed by the hiring line manager directly rather than some obscure support function.
(and now I have to hope for this to happen fast, as I'll never have a chance to get hired through a recruiter any more after this blasphemious post 😛 )