Here it Comes!
Imagine pushing a button and your job description lands in all the places your next great employee lives. Social media sites, company employees, and even friends and colleagues of that ideal candidate are alerted that there is a job opening at your company. Job descriptions across every channel—with one click. Imagine that people you want to hire can get back to you from any location. And you have all of your recruiting data points in one network to accurately track results.
That is the future of recruiting.
How?
Omnichannel commerce meets talent acquisition.
Omnichannel commerce is what retailers are doing to move the shopping experience to where the consumer is. They do this to speed up the buying experience and earn more customers. Buying something at an Apple store is quick and easy because any employee can swipe your credit card on their point of sale device. Remember the days of standing in long lines at a cashier? They are fading fast as more retailers remove the friction from the buying experience by adopting the Omnichannel approach. Press Amazon’s one button order device attached to your laundry machine when you run out of detergent. How easy is that? The shopping experience is seamless for the consumer. With today’s e-commerce tools like Oracle commerce, all of the sales are driven through one database so analytics are timely and accurate.
The image below represents Omnichannel Retail, which is an integrated sales experience that allows retailers to sell their products and services from many places, giving the consumer a unified and positive experience.
Products and services are available for you to purchase where you are—at home, at work, or in your car—with the push of a few buttons.
Next generation applicant tracking systems (ATS) like SmartRecruiters, Lever, and Greenhouse are now applying that same principle to help you hire great talent—quickly and seamlessly. I’ve coined the term Omnichannel Talent Acquisition (OTA) to illuminate the trend.
The diagram below describes Omnichannel Talent Acquisition (OTA), a recruiting practice which uses many channels at once to attract candidates during their job hunting experience. Such channels include social media sites like Glassdoor, Facebook, mobile applications, in-store experiences, employee engagements, employee referrals, product or service experiences, Linkedin, and any other method a company can use to interact with a candidate.
Let your jobs live in the places where your candidates are. A powerful component of these services is that with the push of a button your job description is sent to multiple channels. Your company’s website and social media channels (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.), a dozen free job sites, and your employers who can seamlessly send it to friends and family who might be interested.
Success in talent acquisition often resides in your ability to leverage your best brand ambassadors—your employees. Birds of a feather flock together. By making it easy for your best employees to leverage their networks, you will significantly increase your ability to bring in top talent. Your job opportunities will live in your employees’ networks. And Omnichannel Talent Acquisition supplies key information to candidates during their research before joining a company
Candidates also have a seamless one-button apply process. So once they see your job description, they are more likely to apply.
Next generation applicant tracking systems are SaaS (Software as a Service) that integrate your talent acquisition process so everything is in one place. You can connect your paid job boards, pre-screening tests, technical questionnaires, employment applications, offer letters, background checks and on-boarding documentation on one platform. Track metrics for each step of the process--visible in real-time. Software provides talent acquisition professionals accurate and timely analytics. Applicant tracking systems like SmartRecruiters also have a marketplace of third party providers, so you can choose your preferred partner for many of these tools and tie these programs seamlessly into the applicant tracking system platform.
With SaaS you get regular updates, no need for servers since you don’t own the software, a customer success manager to help you, and the learnings of the hundreds of other firms using the software. They charge an annual subscription fee based on users and if you want to drop them, you can take your data with you. Most offer an API so you can integrate to your HRIS as well as other components of the talent acquisition technology stack.
Some of the critical reasons for moving your talent acquisition process to Omnichannel Talent Acquisition are that you need to justify your business case for recruiting to the C-suite. How can you ask for resources (like money) when you are not capturing all of the key recruiting analytics?
Ask your CEO how many deals are in her company’s sales pipeline and she will give you a nearly correct answer. Ask her how many candidates are about to get an offer and nine times out of ten she won’t know. And the reason is that until now, you and your C-suite have not had the tools to see all of the analytics such as the number of people you are interviewing and at what stage of the interview process they are in. In order to do that you need to have visibility into the real-time analytics that Omnichannel Talent Acquisition can provide
Sample C-Suite Strategy Conversation
VP of Sales: “We are going to sell 50 percent more this year!”
Recruiting: “How?”
VP of Sales: “By hiring 60 more sales people.”
Recruiter: “Says who?”
VP of Sales: “Say’s me. The recruiters need to give me 60 more salespeople now.”
Recruiter: <thought bubble> WTF!? (Everyone in the room including the CEO is looking at the recruiter and expecting them to say) “You bet VP of Sales, we will get it done.” (pucker factor code red)
As the scenario above plays out, the goal is likely not reached and recruiting is thrown under the bus, building acrimony between the talent team and their clients.
In contrast, what does a next generation talent conversation sound like?
New C-Suite Strategy Conversation
VP of Sales: “Recruiting, how many sales people can you bring on and have operational over the next three quarters?”
Recruiting: “Based on our previous experience, market data, and our current level of effort, we can have 30 sales people operational in that time frame. For an additional $5,000 in advertising, I can hire one additional sales person and have them operational in your time frame. I can improve that by ten sales people for each new recruiter I hire to my team and there will be a 2-month ramp for each new recruiter to be fully operational. It will cost $100,000 annually for each new recruiter I bring on.”
VP of Sales: “Each new salesperson is worth 500k in net new revenue over 12 months. CFO how much money do we have in reserves to budget for this to maximize our hiring?”
CFO: “I can allocate $350,000 over the next 12 months to recruiting to accomplish this goal. I will apportion it out every month and want to see performance reports from recruiting on a weekly basis to assure we are hitting these numbers.”
Recruiter: “Great. We will give you the hiring plan to match the allocated budget and get started today.”
This conversation is setting the company and the recruiting team up to win. The team sees hiring as a business function and the recruiters as a business line owner.
Would you like to know what the pool for salespeople is? What is the likelihood that they will find the right 60 and get them on-board and operational in the timeline you want?
These questions can only be answered with reliable data and today’s next generation application tracking systems are able to give you those answers. Tools like SmartRecruiters give users the ability to track resume flow from job posting to hiring. You can see real time data analytics such as number of resumes currently in the pipeline, quality of candidates being interviewed, time to hire, and the all-important cost-to-hire. With this information, executives can see how they can grow their business when growth is attached to head count. No more guessing at how long it takes to get people on board or what the cost will be. Imagine being able to see the historical cost-to-hire and to use that data to determine if a future project is going to be profitable. When you land a new client at a huge discount, now you can see how your hiring analytics will affect your profitability and ability to deliver on time and on budget.
Take your jobs to where the people are. This is the mantra fueling the future of business.
How are you meeting candidates where they are at?
Lorne Epstein, a Brooklyn native, has been in Talent Acquisition since 1996. He has interviewed thousands of people for jobs in Silicon Valley, New York City, Washington DC and many cities in between. He is renowned for his wisdom and good humor on the subject of job interviews.
Lorne has been helping others create spectacular careers and live the lives they were meant to lead. He informs and entertains participants looking to interview with power. Lorne has lead public workshops as well as campus events at Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, and other schools around the country.
He is the author of “You’re Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job,” a step-by-step guide on what to do before, during and after the interview to get the job you want. Lorne prepares both novice and just-plain-nervous job seekers for the interviewing experience with insider tips and strategic advice. This book is a practical, engaging and altogether indispensable career companion.
Dan Pink, Author of DRIVE said "Lorne Epstein invites you to bring meaning to your job search by giving authentic interviews that get your hired. This book is a must read for those looking to improve their interview skills."
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