The role of recruitment in talent management solutions

Recruitment management software helps you find the right candidate

Swipe left, swipe left … swipe right. The Internet has completely changed the way millions of us meet potential partners.

It has also spawned myriad job boards. There’s no doubt that job boards are a quick and easy way of putting a vacancy out there, but are they always the best method?

Yes, job boards allow us to reach hundreds, perhaps thousands of potential candidates. Which is great if you want to employ hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. But we usually want just one person. The right person for the job.

Of course, there are job boards that specialise, but even these can’t lessen the risk of hiring an unsuitable candidate. “One bad hire can lead to a domino effect of more bad hires and decisions costing a company millions”, says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who estimates bad hires have cost his company "well over $100 million.¹"

It’s estimated that two-thirds of employees are actively looking for or open to a new job. With over three billion employees around the world,²; surely the right person’s out there somewhere?

So how do you increase your chances of finding the right candidate?

Using recruitment management software as part of your talent management strategy would be a positive step. This will help you to:

• Start with job requirements — ensure that all hiring staff agree about what the role entails, and what experience, qualifications and special qualities are required.
• Complete a job profile — getting the profile exactly right will help weed out unsuitable candidates. This could include those who are over-qualified. Wasting candidates’ time reflects badly on a company’s reputation.
• Integrate with multiple job boards — automatically send your role to the most suitable job boards and aggregators, as well as relevant social media.
• Use scoring to help ensure a good fit — automatically assess each candidate based on your pre-set criteria.
• Create a shortlist — based on your criteria and the number of people you want to interview, a shortlist will be created automatically.

In times of economic growth, finding the right talent becomes more of a concern. PwC’s The Talent Challenge survey reports that during the last global recession in 2009 the number of CEOs worried about finding talent with the right skills had fallen to 46% (from 61% the previous year). This percentage had risen to 63% by 2014.³ The report goes on to say that while 93% of CEOs saw the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent, 61% hadn’t taken the first step towards that change.

For most companies the first step would seem to be simple: install recruitment software as part of their HR suite of solutions

Using recruitment software as part of your talent management strategy will save time, save money and attract better candidates. Automating certain processes and providing guidance will help streamline the whole process, allowing hiring managers to concentrate on interviewing and making the final decision.

Using job boards without recruitment software can lead to employers either failing to reach the right candidates (the proliferation of job boards means that candidates who are actively looking may not be looking at that particular board). Or it can be too successful, leaving hiring managers with piles of CVs to trawl through.

The best recruitment software will include social media. This can be useful not only in alerting candidates to the current vacancy, but also for courting potential candidates for roles that may be open in future.

The importance of hiring the right candidate

A McKinsey article from last year reported on the productivity gap between high and average performers: “In highly complex occupations—the information- and interaction-intensive work of managers, software developers, and the like—high performers are an astounding 800% more productive.⁴”

Steve Jobs once said, "The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world." It’s clear that any tool that can help you find the best people for your role is likely to give you a competitive advantage.

Keeping the talent you have

In a world in which talent is limited, your recruitment process needs to begin long before there’s a vacancy. If you use technology to improve employee engagement, you’ll find a double benefit: you’ll decrease staff turnover (so avoiding costly recruitment in the first place) and you’ll help make your organisation an employer brand of choice. It’s obviously much easier to attract talent to a company where people want to work.

Integrating your recruitment management software with other HR suite solutions can help you spot potential recruitment needs earlier, it will provide the necessary data to perform tasks such as skills gap analyses, and will help attract and retain the new tech-savvy millennials who are predicted to make up 35% of the workforce by 2020^.5 The new workforce will expect HR information, such as their payroll, bonuses, holidays, etc., to be readily available from any device, and they’ll be looking for technology that involves them, helps their career development and enables them to collaborate and share.

Find the right recruitment management software now and it will be easier to find the right talent tomorrow.