You’ve probably heard about hiring for skills, the latest trend in talent acquisition. Companies face a tight job market, high turnover, and widening skills gaps as technology and business needs evolve. In a recent survey, Deloitte found skills to be the number one recruiting strategy concern for CEOs, and second only to inflation on the full list of business concerns. 

Every person that a company misses out on hiring is a missed opportunity to drive bottom line results. Korn Ferry predicts that companies could miss out on $8.5 trillion in global revenue by 2030 due to labor shortages. In this competitive market for talent, it’s clear that organizations need a different approach to hiring.

What is Hiring for Skills and Why Do You Need to Do It?

Hiring for skills is a recruiting strategy that focuses on the candidate’s transferable, real-world skills and competencies rather than an educational pedigree or list of previous roles. For example, consider the vast array of skills a military veteran might acquire during their service that might not directly correlate with a traditional job description. When you build hiring for skills into your candidate selection process, that veteran’s skills won’t be overlooked.

Hiring for skills widens your talent pools and helps you hire more diverse talent faster. In today’s world of work, waiting to move forward with skills-based hiring will keep you from seeing the full potential in candidates. When you hire for skills, flexible talent will grow and shift with your business instead of being stuck in the rigid box of overly-defined job descriptions.

Skills-based hiring includes conducting a skills inventory for key roles, writing skills-based job descriptions, and ensuring that skills-based assessments are incorporated into your candidate selection process.

Adopt the Right Mindset for Skills-Based Hiring

What’s the best way to get started? According to Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, Hiring Success at SmartRecruiters, the place to start is with expectations – your mindset. Any hiring for skills initiative is an exercise in change management. In our new ebook, A Practical Guide to Hiring for Skills, Allyn offers these tips to keep in mind as you take on the challenge: 

1. Hiring for skills isn’t a one-and-done process. Looking at jobs through the lens of skills and developing effective skills-based assessments is a living, breathing process. Don’t be frustrated if it doesn’t operate perfectly out of the gate. Start where you can and then iterate, test, and learn as you go and your organization’s approach to skills evolves.
2. Align, communicate, realign, and then align again. Continual communication among all of your hiring team stakeholders throughout this process will reduce barriers to change, get you searching for the skills you really need, and keep the process going. 
3. Let technology help lift the load. Examine your current tech stack and consider whether you may have any tools that can help you assess candidate skills or structure an unbiased, effective interview. See where your software and tools can automate some of this standardization so you can focus on identifying skills and leading change management. 

Even if you aren’t ready to start skills-based hiring now, you can start by reading our ebook. It offers a map for incorporating skills assessment into every stage of your hiring process, from the job description to the final candidate selection. 

Can an Applicant Tracking System Help You Hire for Skills?

A study by the Harvard Business School noted that 80 percent of business leaders say their applicant tracking systems filter out half of high-skilled candidates due to system parameters like résumé gaps or missing credentials. That doesn’t need to happen when you use a top-notch ATS. 

Using the SmartRecruiters approach to Hiring Success will help your company hire for skills. Features of our talent acquisition suite include:

• Easy-to-configure screening tools expand talent pools by allowing for a skills-based approach rather than filtering people out by irrelevant qualifiers. 
• Candidate scorecards level the playing field by guiding hiring managers on skills-based interviewing. Scorecards make it easy for teams to collaborate, ensuring an efficient and objective hiring process that can help you hire more diverse talent.
• Integrations with leading assessment providers allow interviewers to view assessment results alongside candidate profiles, ensuring that skills are accounted for at every step.

Skills-Based Hiring is Here to Stay

This topic is unlikely to go away – it’s more likely to expand over time as organizations rethink job architecture, career pathways, and hiring practices. As job seekers look for roles that align with their skills and competencies, moving away from hiring by role and resume and into a hiring strategy that focuses on skills, competencies, and whole person assessments helps you stay ahead. 

Start futureproofing your organization today by downloading the ebook, A Practical Guide to Hiring for Skills.

Talent Acquisition has changed forever. Rising volatility and competition have dramatically changed the way you source talent. Remote work has transformed the way you hire. The great resignation is reshaping how you manage and retain employees. Job openings have reached record heights, putting recruiters under pressure. Clearly, the first generation ATS hasn’t moved fast enough to meet the challenges of the day. What do you need to stay competitive in this new world?

Table of Contents

• A traditional ATS is no longer enough
• Compelling candidate experience
• Engaged hiring managers
• Productive recruiters
• Take our ATS Quiz!

A traditional ATS is no longer enough

An applicant tracking system, often referred to as an ATS, is a software application that automates the hiring process. Applicant Tracking Systems were originally designed to store job applications and track applicants through the process. Over time, their capabilities expanded to incorporate candidate sourcing and hiring, among other recruitment needs. The problem is that many of these newer functionalities were designed to be process-centric rather than candidate and engagement-centric. Because these new functionalities were bolted on to the legacy solution, and not developed as an integrated tool, the UX is often clunky and not easy for recruiters to use.

Today, organizations need to be agile and engagement-focused to attract, select and hire the best talent at scale. This is achieved when the 3 pillars of Hiring Success are aligned: candidates have a compelling experience, recruiters are productive, and hiring teams are engaged. If you’re struggling to achieve this with your ATS, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s explore some of the critical capabilities you should look for to achieve your hiring goals.  

Compelling candidate experience

Qualified candidates are a lot like prospective customers. They have bargaining power and lots of options. Their entire experience matters – from how candidates learn about your company, to how you interact with them, to the tools they use to apply. To find and engage them, recruiters need to think like marketers. An ATS that only addresses the bottom of the funnel (candidates trying to apply for jobs) will not position your team for hiring success. Instead, you need to look for a robust set of recruitment marketing features that will help you attract passive candidates and engage them towards conversion. 

A career site that’s geared for conversions

Most ATSs offer basic career sites – static job pages with long lists of open positions. This might have worked in the 90s, but in 2022, your career site needs to do a lot more. It should be part of  your recruitment marketing tool belt, and it should be used in a more strategic way. Think about this: about 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. They do some high-level research. They want to educate themselves about the market and their specific role, and possibly your company and your product before they decide to apply. A career site that contains high quality, personalized content that’s optimized for search helps you attract them. We have seen companies using this strategy increase the number of organic search conversions by 40%. 

The success of your career site will also be determined by its ease of use. Candidates want to be able to apply quickly and easily, on the device they choose. Long and drawn out application forms are things of the past. 

Besides an optimized career site, you need tools to build a digital marketing funnel. That’s where programmatic advertising comes in.  

Programmatic job advertising and sourcing 

Your talent acquisition team needs tools that will help them discover top talent, understand what they are looking for and attract them with targeted campaigns. A first generation ATS should help you post jobs to your job page. A second generation ATS should post automatically to job boards, LinkedIn and other channels. A third generation ATS goes further: it intelligently places ads on job boards that drive the highest conversion for each job type, and dynamically shifts budget to the highest priority roles. Modern ATSs need to have a sophisticated job advertising capability that is pipeline aware, automated, and dynamically allocates budget to the highest-converting job boards.

Obviously not everyone who lands on your job postings will be ready to apply. But that’s ok because you can invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or job alerts. Once candidates make it into this talent pool, you need candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities to nurture them towards conversion. 

Candidate nurturing and talent relationship management

According to Fosway, “Applicant Tracking System vendors without a TRM-offering are at high risk of being replaced.” An ATS with CRM or TRM capabilities helps you nurture candidates and match them with the right roles. This critical functionality should also help you track all touchpoints and candidate journeys in one system, just like you track customers. 

These recruitment marketing capabilities help you find the right talent and engage them with a compelling experience, so you can ultimately convince them to apply. This brings us to the second pillar of hiring success. 

Engaged hiring managers

According to recent findings from Josh Bersin, collaboration between recruiting and hiring managers is the number one indicator of high performance talent acquisition. This is where effective applicant tracking, evaluation and collaboration play a critical role. 

Applicant tracking

The original ATS was designed to move a paper or email-based process to a computerized system so that recruiters could scale. A modern ATS is more like a system of record, a single source of truth across the entire talent acquisition process. It should make it easy for recruiters to work with many different candidates and spot an applicant’s status quickly, across multiple workflows. It should include advanced candidate search functionalities. It should also help you screen and evaluate candidates faster. 

Evaluation

Modern ATSs come with chatbots and automated Q&A or screening tools to help you speed up the evaluation process at the beginning. Some also include AI capabilities that help you screen hundreds of candidates down to dozens, and create a shortlist of potential matches. Once the recruitment team sources the right talent and makes the key connections, it’s up to the hiring team to close the YES candidates. With the right data at hand, the hiring team is better positioned to collaborate with their recruiting counterparts. 

Collaboration

Modern ATSs should foster collaboration with hiring managers so you can make better and more informed decisions. For example, it should enable you to assign focus areas to each interviewer. It should allow interviewers to collaborate on their findings, in a way that minimizes bias and groupthink. It should come with a central messaging engine and let you configure tasks and notifications to keep your team on track. 

Productive recruiters

As we discussed above, talent acquisition teams that are highly productive operate more like marketing and sales teams. We talked a lot about the importance of collaboration throughout the process. Recruiter productivity and hiring optimization are just as important, especially at a time when job openings are at an all-time high. 

Analytics and AI to improve decision-making

Great recruiting teams know “their numbers” and leverage them to not only prioritize tasks across the hiring spectrum, but also provide accurate hiring forecasts and achieve desired business outcomes. A legacy ATS is not positioned to support this. Legacy solutions don’t capture nearly enough data to assess hiring performance. Much less to measure if your hiring process is working for or against the bottom line.

An ATS with robust analytics provides deep insights through trend analyses on historical hiring decisions and dashboards on pipeline performances, with all the data stored in one place. Josh Bersin’s latest study on global TA teams reports that high-impact TA teams are 6x more likely to use AI and predictive analytics and see 30% greater profitability compared to those that don’t use these tools.

Internal mobility

The great resignation is keeping recruiters and HR teams up at night. But according to a recent Sapient Insights survey, only 22% of companies have an internal mobility program in place. Recruiters should be looking for talent internally and externally. The problem is that they don’t have the right tools. Companies are at risk of losing their talent to the competition if they don’t compete on an equal footing. 

A modern ATS should enable you to build an internal career site and build talent pools of team members who are interested in different career paths. Match people to jobs using AI matching and set up internal interviews the same way you do external interviews. 

Onboarding support

Successful recruitment teams also know that the first 3 months of employment are the most vulnerable period. In some industries, a poor onboarding experience can lead to a 22% turnover rate. That’s why many are looking for a comprehensive solution that will address this critical part of the journey as well. Your onboarding process should not just be about legal formalities, it should facilitate a smooth transition from applicant to employee. 

The final word & our ATS Quiz

As Fosway explains, “standalone ATSs that only cover the lower part of the recruitment funnel are a thing of the past.” Your ATS should go beyond workflow automation and candidate tracking. It should incorporate recruitment marketing for active and passive candidates, and career sites that boost your employer brand. It should also facilitate enhanced HR decision making based on your desired business results. Moreover, it should be built for today’s complex talent market, offering you a competitive advantage with internal mobility features and a great candidate experience that’s optimized down to the onboarding stage. 

Take our quiz to find out if you should replace your ATS. 

Google Hire has been scheduled for discontinuation. In September 2020, the applicant tracking system (ATS) will be removed from G-suite, affecting recruiters and business owners across North America and the U.K.

This news comes as a disappointment to those who rely on the ATS to source and hire new talent. As a company devoted to connecting people to jobs, we can empathize. A well-made recruiting platform can mean the difference between company-wide growth or total stagnation. Finding such a tool can be hard; having to give it up even harder.

Therefore, to make the transition easier, we’d like to offer a demo of SmartRecruiters with free data migration to all existing Google Hire customers. We’d love the opportunity to share with each and every one of you something we’re very passionate about—Hiring Success. 

We define Hiring Success as the ability to attract, select, and hire the best talent for any role, on demand and on budget—an outcome enabled by the SmartRecruiters technology. And to-date we’ve empowered over 4,000 companies in 100+ countries across the globe to achieve such outcomes. This is what Hiring Success has looked like for many of those companies: 

Don’t take our word for it, though. Here’s what one of our clients—Sandi Lurie, VP of Global Recruiting at Optimizely—has to say about SmartRecruiters and Hiring Success:

SmartRecruiters is not just a great ATS, they are an incredible partner in the journey to hiring exceptional talent. The platform itself promotes easy collaboration across hiring teams and the UI is intuitive.

Sandi Lurie
VP of Global Recruiting
Optimizely

Interested in writing the first chapter of your company’s Hiring Success story? Then schedule a demo today. And, as mentioned above, to make the transition as seamless as possible, we’ll offer full support with free data migration. We look forward to hearing from you!

Recruiting operations are mission-critical to enterprises searching for top talent, yet the majority of hiring teams continue working with legacy systems that fail to deliver ROI. 

Modern businesses are under continuous pressure to remain competitive in today’s economy, with an increasing focus on adopting technologies that enable agility and strategic thinking. In fact, digital transformation is a top priority for C-level executives, with 74% of enterprises already employing, or currently implementing, a digital transformation strategy. As businesses prepare to tackle future disruptions, such change is inevitable. Change, however, is scary.

As a result, many organizations stick with the status quo, betting on traditional processes and legacy systems to deliver successful future outcomes. Meanwhile, technology is evolving at an exponential rate, and organizations that embrace digital transformation know full well the role of technology in keeping businesses organized, productive, and communicative. 

SmartRecruiters recently surveyed Talent Acquisition (TA) professionals about their existing recruiting technologies, and found that the vast majority (89%) fail to see value in their legacy systems, particularly among enterprise companies. What’s more, when asked the likelihood of recommending their current ATS to a friend or colleague, survey respondents gave a -67 NPS score. 

Check out the complete survey results in the infographic below:

While some shy away from challenging the status quo, it’s clear that most enterprise companies are open to the possibility of change. Of course, with myriad options to choose from, how can one decide? Choosing a new ATS solution may appear challenging, but companies that switch to a modern, intuitive, and enterprise-ready ATS are seeing measurable ROI on hiring, particularly around budget optimization and candidate quality.

While technology adoption is only one element of implementing a digital transformation strategy, it is a crucial piece that cannot be overlooked. Contact SmartRecruiters today to find out why over 750 enterprise customers have already embraced our modern recruiting platform, and are experiencing immediate improvements to their talent acquisition processes.

Don’t lose great talent to the competition because of bad recruiting software—here’s why your hiring team needs a TA solution that makes no compromises.

Recruiting is changing on a fundamental level. Today, 36 percent of the US workforce currently freelances, and reports project this figure will grow to over 50 percent within the next decade. Conversations about the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning replacing human jobs are at the forefront of our social consciousness, and recruiting is becoming exponentially more difficult in this economy.

Traditional sourcing channels are no longer yielding the quality candidates they used to, and truly exceptional talent is not actively seeking new work opportunities, though 82 percent admit they are open to them.

As a result, recruiting is shifting from a reactive function into a proactive one, with a greater focus on candidates. Attracting passive candidates requires your company brand to stand out from others, your job offers to be highly competitive, and your recruiting practices to be fast-moving and engaging. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through feature-rich recruiting software.

The recruitment market is currently worth over $215 billion worldwide, and at a projected growth of 5.6 percent over the next few years, is estimated to be worth over $330 billion by 2025. Today’s market vendors offer talent acquisition suites and recruitment technology solutions to organizations at the enterprise, SMB, and startup level. With so many offerings available in the market—HCRM, ATS, CRM—it can be difficult to wade through the alphabet soup to decide which solution will work best for your organization.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) systems are top choices for recruiters; however, many believe that they don’t need CRM if they already have an ATS. In reality, top recruiters rely on a solution that offers both CRM and ATS in one platform, as each focuses a specific function within the hiring process.

But what’s the difference between an ATS and CRM? And why should you use both in order to source, attract, and hire the best talent?

What is an ATS?

An ATS is a type of recruiting software that facilitates and optimizes the hiring process. It acts as a repository where recruiters and hiring managers can create and post job openings, collect and organize applications, and screen, evaluate, select, and move candidates through every step of the hiring process in one platform.

What is CRM?

A CRM system is designed to strengthen relationships between potential candidates and recruiters so that recruiters can use these candidates for future job openings. In this way, CRMs are considered part of Recruitment Marketing strategy, allowing TA professionals to create talent communities and deliver targeted messaging that helps build and nurture relationships with passive talent. That way, when it comes time to fill a rec, recruiters already have a pool of vetted candidates from which to choose.

What’s the Difference Between an ATS and CRM?

CRM systems work to scale a recruiter’s sourcing efforts by attracting passive candidates ahead of demand. Meanwhile, ATSs are built to make selection and hiring as streamlined as possible by eliminating unnecessary administrative tasks and improving the three most important hiring metrics: hiring velocity, hiring budget, and net hiring score.

In other words, an ATS is a workflow and compliance tool for managing applicants, while a CRM system is a pool of all passive and active candidates, as well as previous applicants already in your system. A bad ATS does little more than execute repetitive functions, meaning recruiting teams waste time on non-value added tasks rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.
Here are some signs that your ATS is not fully optimized with CRM:

• Multiple entry fields that require manual input
• Candidates are categorized by their current jobs or work rather than their desired work.
• No way to evaluate the candidate-recruiter relationship (i.e. measuring the candidate’s level of activity or engagement)
• No ROI (time to hire, cost per hire, quality of hire are still low)
• ATS functionality is mostly administrative work
• Hard-to-fill positions remain open for months

Why Integrating CRM With an ATS Makes Sense

Today’s candidate-centric work economy means that companies need to be aware of candidate experience now more than ever, and technology solutions that prioritize this will be critical for the success of talent acquisition leaders. Between 70 and 80 percent of recruiting happens during the pre-applicant stage, so delivering the right messaging to the right people at the right time gives companies an advantage when attracting top talent in today’s ultra-competitive market.

This can only happen when hiring teams leverage a powerful and comprehensive TA suite that seamlessly integrates CRM with an ATS in one platform. Recruiters who maintain their talent pools with CRM systems can make better, data-driven hiring decisions. And because CRM nurtures strong relationships with past, current, and future candidates, speed and efficiency are built in when it’s time to hire, making the applicant’s journey through the ATS a better experience.

With the right tools for the job, all recruiters can make great hires that drive business growth. As future industry trends emerge, the technology solutions designed to meet these demands will evolve in response, and recruiters who stay on top of what today’s exceptional candidates value will be in prime position to hire them.

Hiring is all about predicting the future—is your applicant tracking system doing the same? Here’s a look at five features that aren’t just trends, but must haves for the new year.

Better Buys previously identified the top trends for the ATS solutions market as social media integration, greater emphasis on interviewing and assessment tools (i.e. video interviewing), and predictive analytics. In the two years since that report, recruiters and hiring managers have encountered challenges with reactive hiring, thinning talent pipelines, and a greater need for automated processes—all while fighting to secure great talent.

Looking ahead at 2019, these new demands are driving the future direction of applicant tracking systems across the industry. As companies continue to build out their ATS platforms to be more feature-rich and provide better solutions, here are some of the trends we can look forward to in the coming year.

1. Candidate Relationship Management

With job openings at a record high and unemployment at record low numbers, the competition for great talent is even more fierce. Companies are struggling to hire quality applicants, and many qualified potential candidates are not actively seeking work. Finding the right person for a role will require more robust sourcing tools, and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solutions will provide recruiters with stronger talent pools ahead of demand. CRM solutions will ultimately change the recruiting function from reactive to proactive, enhancing talent pipelines before companies post their open jobs.

2. AI

“Gut feeling” prediction of whether a candidate is a good fit for a role isn’t going to cut it in 2019. For example, candidates with impressive diplomas or certifications do not necessarily make great employees, and assessment tools struggle to test for traits like work ethic, a positive attitude, dependability, and working well under pressure.

Recruiters need to know which candidate is most likely to accept a job offer and stay with the team long enough to make an impact. Native AI solutions like SmartAssistant will offer recruiters measurable insights into a candidate’s skills, cultural fit, the likelihood of accepting an offer, and probable retention with greater efficiency, and less bias. AI will also help recruiters make better decisions with candidates who are moving between fields with comparable skills and promote more internal mobility within their organization.

3. Automation

Recruiters are constantly being pressured to fill more roles with the best talent at a faster, more cost-efficient rate, and this means that automation will continue to be a top priority among the best Applicant Tracking Systems. Automation will help optimize repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and applicant pre-screening, but ATS automation in 2019 will include targeted email campaigns and recruitment marketing platforms, allowing recruiters to deliver specific messaging to nurtured talent communities.

According to Rebecca Carr, VP of Product at SmartRecruiters, automating these processes will make “it faster and easier for businesses to build and convert their talent pipeline within one system.” Ultimately, automation and native AI solutions will work together to “challenge the old way of “tracking” candidates through a workflow.”

4. Collaboration and Communication

The future of recruiting is all about “the team” effort, where recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers work in tandem to source, attract, and hire the best talent for their organization. But there’s often a disconnect. If not everyone involved in the hiring process is using the ATS, then time is wasted relaying information and collecting feedback. An ATS should be intuitive and allow for greater communication between all team members, which directly affects an organization’s time to hire and overall candidate experience.

Features like different access levels within an ATS to ensure each person sees the right amount of information and more comprehensive dashboards that give candidates an overview of where they are in the hiring process will be highly valuable in the coming year.

5. Integration

Enterprises are no longer the sole entities in need of end-to-end recruiting solutions. Startups are just as eager to hire great talent for their teams, and are often much faster adopters of new technology. For these organizations, an ATS that offers open APIs and a large marketplace of third-party vendor integrations is highly attractive.

Martin Snyder, President of Main Sequence Technology Inc., argues that, “key drivers of market share changes for 2019 are not likely to be technically revolutionary, but rather more operational efficiency.” Meaning, an ATS that offers features like streamlined integration with email, calendar, and Slack—systems that teams are already using—along with “easier solutions to teach and learn, easier ways to get data in and out, and lower pricing” will become the top choices for enterprises and startups in 2019.

The surest way to earn 3x revenue and 3x profit as your peers? Invest in recruiting.

The current global marketplace is highly dependent on technology, but when it comes to finding and hiring the best candidates, much of the tech deployed to do so is out of date. With power shifting from hiring teams to candidates themselves, coupled with forecasted talent shortages in the coming years, companies need to assure they have the best systems in place for candidates to apply quickly, easily, and on the go.

Recruitment systems, usually integrated into blanket enterprise resource planning (ERP) models are notoriously clunky. Tech reminiscent of the dot-com boom has no place in a world run from smartphones and social media. Management often misidentifies talent acquisition as weeding through resumes, and chooses an ERP with back-office HR functions in mind. That’s because most ERP models specialize in managing specific aspects of HR like payroll, benefits, and performance management. While settling for an ERP with a “good enough” Applicant Tracking System can seem like a simple solution, the Boston Consultant Group found that companies who make the investment to assure they’re recruiting the best talent earn three times the revenue and two times the profit of their peers.

With the world is moving at an ever-faster pace, candidates aren’t compelled to fill out long applications. With one-step-apply features on sites like LinkedIn, many expect to send their CV with the press of a button. A recent CareerBuilder study found “the more in-demand a skill set, the less likely a job seeker with that skill set will jump through hoops.”

Thus Recruiting has had to turn itself inside out, and put effort not only on intake, but acting more like a marketing department, attracting potential candidates to their organization before the usual process is underway. In a survey of SmartRecruiters’ Marketplace partners, 30 percent said recruiting marketing tools were what they were most likely to invest in this year.

While slow, some organizations are waking up to the problem more quickly than others. According to a recent IDC survey, 23 percent changed ATS solutions in the past 18 months —and another 22 percent plan to make a change in the next 18 months. But this doesn’t necessarily mean going for a complete overhaul.

Many still turn to a Recruiting Point Solution (RPS), specialized software that supplements the shortfalls of an organization’s blanket ATS. Many companies look to RPS to “plug holes” in their aging ERP package, and though this might seem like a quick fix, the problems associated with having an RPS and an ERP can be numerous. Instead of addressing fundamental problems in their HR software, companies end up doubling-up on recruiting programs, and overpaying. Additionally, many ERP’s operate as individual entities, making transferring data between a company’s ERP and its band-aid RPS an IT nightmare.

For companies willing to leave ERP behind, there’s best of breed (BoB) – systems organized like a digital lunch buffet. Companies pick and choose relevant software across all fields of HR – talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce management. This allows companies to ditch their expensive and overly configured ERPs for a conglomeration of sleek, targeted systems. Some BoBs, like SmartRecruiters, also offer a marketplace, an integrated collection of third-party technology that provides an easy platform for companies to continue to integrate into modern systems. Beginning with the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite, an engine that gives hiring teams the newest tools for recruitment marketing, applicant tracking, and onboarding, companies can continue to acquire top-of-the-line HR software that encompasses functions like payroll and onboarding. The benefits of BoB don’t stop there.

The SmartRecruiters Marketplace is fully integrated within a single system, allowing data to be transferred seamlessly between programs as if it was a single ERP platform, with a range of third-party services organizations need to keep ahead of the curve in today’s war for talent. In the SmartRecruiters Marketplace survey of where this year’s big spends will occur, tools to address self-scheduling, onboarding, and analytics were only outranked by methods to address diversity hiring – essential to be seen as forward-thinking and inclusionary in 2018.

Additionally, the pick-and-choose aspect allows companies to slim down their HR systems to only what they need, saving resources that would have previously been wasted on an overpriced ERP.

BoB systems are a multi-faceted solution to a multi-faceted problem, providing a platform for companies to choose specialized HR software from industry leaders, all integrated into a single BoB system.

Recruiting Tech Options — ERP or BoB?

• ERP models are all-inclusive Human Resources packages, a blanket software aimed at integrating all of a company’s HR needs onto a single platform. Unfortunately, many of these behemoths base their programs on outdated technology; and, due to the production of all HR software being delegated to a single team, many features of ERP’s, especially those based around recruitment, lack the features present in a more specialized Talent Acquisition Suite.
• ERP models often specialize in managing specific aspects of HR like payroll, benefits, and performance management, while other features, mainly those centered around recruitment, feel tacked-on, in order to present a complete HR package to the market.
• Many companies look to Recruiting Point Solutions (RPS), in order to “plug holes” in their aging ERP package. The problems associated with this can be numerous. Instead of addressing fundamental problems in their HR software, companies end up doubling-up on recruiting programs, and subsequently overpaying. Additionally, many ERP’s operate as individual entities, making transferring data between a company’s ERP and its band-aid RPS difficult and time-consuming, creating a disconnect between the candidate and hiring team.
• Talent Acquisition Suites bring the integration of all-inclusive ERP’s and the modernity of RPS’ into a single package. Designed to target one specific aspect of the hiring process, TAS’ are at the forefront of technological innovation. TAS’ track job candidates from the moment they show interest in a position, through to the end of the hiring process.
• Due to its modernity, a TAS will be able to integrate with job-posting sites like Monster and LinkedIn, allowing a company to advertise positions, review applications, schedule interviews, and make hiring decisions seamlessly, all from a single platform.
• SmartRecruiters is constantly updating their software in order to stay cutting edge. “When you buy an off-the-shelf ATS, it’s out of date as soon as you buy it.” (Tracey Allison)
• Although ATS systems have become the industry standard for Talent Acquisition, Aptitude Research found that 51 percent of companies are employing multiple ATS systems, and only 20 percent of companies are satisfied with their current ATS.
• The SmartRecruiters Marketplace allows companies to pick-and-choose their HR software from industry leaders, all of which is fully integrated into the same same system.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) were originally designed in the late 1990s to automate job seekers’ applications and for employers to track applicants. After leading corporate talent acquisition throughout my career, I know far too well that the ATS hasn’t evolved to meet the requirements for a competitive approach to recruiting today. As a result, many recruiting leaders have had to implement add-ons and modules to close the significant gap left by an outdated ATS.

Based on my experience, as well as networking with other recruiting leaders, here are 10 signs your ATS is stuck in the 90s and you should ditch it for something better. Like now:

1.  Candidate experience and drop-off rates

• 1990s: Your ATS shouldn’t be designed like a retailer site that has a shopping cart, account functionality, or one that requires a username and password.
• 2018: Your ATS takes one click to complete and submit an application (after clicking apply) on your career site.

2.  Employee referrals and turning every employee in your company into a recruiter

• 1990s: You expect your employees to visit an outdated employee referral page on the company intranet to constantly see what new jobs are open and think through who they might know.
• 2018: Your ATS automatically matches your jobs to your employees’ professional networks and proactively markets matches.

3.  Your talent database of applicants, candidates and leads

• 1990s: Performing a search in your ATS leaves your recruiters scratching their head wondering why a software engineer search in Silicon Valley pulls up administrative assistant candidates in New York.
• 2018: You can easily leverage your proprietary database and perform easy, results-driven searches that work.

4.  Interview and selection activities

• 1990s: Hiring in your company is not a collaborative effort and your process is reliant on email updates and voice mails between recruiters, hiring managers, and interview teams.
• 2018: Your ATS naturally engages your hiring teams and is easy to use. It has an app and a desktop version that provides a social feed of all hiring activities, as well as enabling real-time candidate ratings and interview feedback.

5.  Reporting and analytics 

• 1990s: You are pulling information from multiple sources, relying on spreadsheets, candidate self selected source data and third parties to painfully get basic reports.
• 2018: Your ATS is the single source of information and easily provides this information at a program-wide view as well as by job. Everything from job board contracts and agency spend is in one place and guides your best investment decisions.

6.  Corporate career site and marketing

• 1990s: You rely on Marketing and IT resources for any needs related to branding and your corporate career site. You spend most of your time building project plans and attending internal meetings.
• 2018: Your ATS allows you to quickly build or update your corporate career site and instantly deploy a new landing page for specific audiences you are targeting. It also creates search-engine-optomized ads directly from your ATS.

7.  Marketing and distributing your jobs

• 1990s: You use third party functionality to post your jobs, or you are posting them on each site manually.
• 2018: Your ATS automatically distributes your jobs to any job board or network, provides responsive job ad functionality and enables you to manage all of your contracts in one place.

8.  Managing external recruiters

• 1990s: Your process isn’t compliant and external agency or search firm recruiters are emailing candidates directly to hiring managers or internal recruiters, outside of your ATS.
• 2018: All of your recruiters are in your ATS, including agencies and search firms, allowing you to control costs, manage candidate delivery and analyze agency results.

9.  LinkedIn as a sourcing and branding strategy

• 1990s: Your recruiters are required to go back-and-forth between LinkedIn Recruiter and your ATS.
• 2018: You automatically know if a candidate is in your ATS while sourcing in LinkedIn Recruiter. You can also quickly and easily jump from a candidate profile in LinkedIn Recruiter to a candidate profile in your ATS, as well as automatically import LinkedIn profiles and InMail conversations.

10.  CRM capabilities for sourcing and lead generation

• 1990s: Your ATS was designed to track applicants once a candidate applies, but can’t manage lead generation, sourcing, and relationship activities.
• 2018: Your ATS has sophisticated CRM capabilities built directly within the system and you aren’t using another vendor to provide what your ATS can’t do.

This list is just the beginning of identifying pain points that recruiting teams face every day, just by using an outdated ATS. Your recruiting technology strategy shouldn’t include a patchwork of integrations and add-ons just because your ATS doesn’t meet your needs.

Every feature listed here already exists in the SmartRecruiters all-in-one Talent Acquisition Platform. Take a look for yourself to learn why recruiting teams are ditching the ATS for hiring success.

For far too long recruiting technology has not been aligned with hiring success and applicant tracking systems have been designed to do just that – track applicants. As a result, technology providers of these solutions have failed miserably in helping companies engage and hire the best talent in a meaningful way.

The primary reason is enterprise applicant tracking systems were designed over 15 years ago to automate the application process by replacing paper with a computer. While this made a lot of sense at that time, recruiting technology hasn’t evolved at the pace required. And more importantly, it just doesn’t work in a competitive marketplace for hiring great talent.

How do we know it doesn’t work?

• Today, 97% of candidates who are interested don’t apply or don’t complete the application process once they start.
• 95% of hiring managers we speak to don’t use, and don’t want to use an applicant tracking system. They rely on email back-and-forth and a manual process. These managers also complain about recruiting.
• Recruiters find as many workarounds as they can because there is layer after layer of technology to cover up all of the pain points, also known as the frankenstein syndrome.

Four years ago I made a decision a decision to build a single leading-edge platform to actually make hiring easy and more importantly make our customers successful in hiring. And while making customers successful in hiring is a bold statement for a technology provider, it’s the foundation that we have built the SmartRecruiters hiring success platform around.

How do we define hiring success? Simply put, it’s finding and hiring great people. This is accomplished by extraordinary recruiters who focus on a modern hiring process, including:

1. Marketing: Targeting campaigns for active hiring and pipelining, investing wisely based on position and delivering the right candidate experience.
2. Collaboration: Screening talent and selling as a team to get to a quality short list, comparing feedback to make the best hiring decisions and aligning efforts in one group conversation that flows in real time.
3. Insights: Democratizing access to key metrics, Helping hiring teams answers their own questions and optimizing decision making on the fly.

All of this should be done through one platform and ecosystem, where you are in control and compliant. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done for companies that have a recruiting process that isn’t optimized or even worse for those that have had to purchase add-on modules to their applicant tracking system that didn’t work properly in the first place. This is the reality of a bad situation, primarily because there was no real alternative.

The good news is that thousands of companies have already made a decision to abandon their applicant tracking system and declare a commitment to achieving hiring success. And hiring success is more than a marketing slogan, it’s a real statement that SmartRecruiters is here to help companies be successful in hiring. And now today, there is finally an alternative for for the worlds largest companies who want to stop tracking applicants and start hiring great people.

Last year a close friend at a well known and well branded Silicon Valley company invited me to apply for a position which he felt was a good fit for my background since I had worked a similar channel program for HP with several ISVs including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Flattered, I researched the position and naively decided to apply to see what might develop.

The HR portal for this company was smart enough to offer an import of a existing resume from a hard disk! The rest of the one page application had routine contact information along with some HR specific questions on relocation, current job, etc. At the end of the page, I was required to cut & paste a copy of the resume or attach a resume file which should have been a clue of the disaster that was waiting for me. After all which job application would require the upload of the same file twice for a ONE page form!?

I tried to submit my profile and I got an HTML error message that my browsers settings were not supported!! The errors were not specific, so a bit baffled I tried the second time thinking I might have missed something obvious. The results were frustrating. The browser cache was being cleared by this application and I was not able to recover the data I had entered by using the Back button of the browser. I was using Google Chrome.

Now I was getting mad, so I emailed my Executive friend who replied that I should try FireFox as a browser.  But before installing another browser, I thought I should try Microsoft IE since most banks and other federal agencies have standardized on IE and I was certain this would do the trick. I was wrong and after re-entering everything for the 3rd time, I was still unable to create a profile for myself on this Applicant Tracking System! The table below is the summary of multiple attempts using different devices and different operating system that I tried in my un-successful attempt to create a profile on this company’s HR portal!

I gave up after two hours and offered to meet the HR team responsible for this kind of user interface in person to thank them for the two hours I will never get back! l was indeed defeated by the applicant tracking system. Our final remedy was to schedule an appointment for me to use his company-issued Notebook and apply for this job!

The I started wondering how many other job applicants for this successful, well-branded company have such a luxury where their friend would meet them to allow them to use their PC to setup an application profile!?  How many job applicants give up after the first or second try?  Does this application tracking solution cause this company to lose talent?!  How can you measure such a loss !?

The moral of the story for me was that HR Tools such as Applicant Tracking and Assessments are strategic assets that can help a company land awesome talent.  And there is no justification for such an absurd experience in this day and age in Silicon Valley where a job applicant is unable to create a Profile after testing three operating systems, four different browser and three different computing devices!  If HR applications are not your company’s core competence, then you should take it out of the hands of your IT Geeks and outsource it.

David Mortaz, VP of Business Development at IKM TeckCheck, has more than a decade of experience in Business/Partner Development, Sale, Consulting in High Tech, HR, Clean Tech, Angel Investments and Banking. He’s passionate about Social Media Marketing and blogs for Food on his wife’s real estate website. Photo Credit TottenBlog.

SmartRecruiters is everything you need to source talent, manage candidates, and make the right hires.