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As a result, many recruiting leaders have had to implement add-ons and modules to close the significant gap left by an outdated ATS.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• 1990s: You expect your employees to visit an outdated employee referral page on the company intranet to constantly see what new jobs are open and think through who they might know.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.

In recruiting there are winners and losers. It’s a zero sum game. Top candidates are recruited by multiple companies and quickly make decisions about where to go. One company will win the best candidate and the rest will lose. Multiply that effort times the number of people you hire each year and you quickly realize you’re in a fierce competition. It’s why they call it a “War for Talent.”

While the “war for talent” has been around since 1997 when the phrase was first introduced by McKinsey & Co., we’re seeing the results first hand of the early winners and losers in the battles that have ensued. They’re showing up in the form of a whole host of disruptions to old businesses once considered the stalwarts of enterprise.

Consider for a second that Kodak was founded in 1888 and is now a skeleton of it’s old self after it emerged from bankruptcy, surviving primarily by selling off decades of intellectual property. It’s failure to adapt and shed its core film business at a time when camera technology moved to the smartphone spelled its demise.

The taxi business in San Francisco is all but gone thanks to Uber and Lyft and is rapidly eroding in every city those two companies enter. Airbnb is now, by a measure of hotel rooms, the largest hotel company in the world. Elon Musk just announced Tesla’s new Powerwall, a lithium-ion battery (starts at $3,000) that stores the sunlight generated from your solar panels, taking you completely off the power grid. Musk has essentially come out with the iPod of sunlight energy storage, meaning that the Powerwall will only get smaller, cheaper, and store more energy over time. Even something as seemingly mundane as a thermostat has entered the digital age with Nest (now owned by Google).

Nobody is immune. Every company is at risk of being disrupted in the digital age. And the pace at which disruptive technologies are being introduced is staggering and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Start Acquiring Talent Like You Acquire Customers

Historically, recruiting has been delivered under the broad umbrella of Human Resources. The problem with this outdated approach is that recruiting is nothing like the rest of HR. Why? HR has traditionally been a tactical back office function with a primary focus on service delivery and cost reduction. HR is not a zero sum game. HR isn’t poised to be in the trenches to win battles everyday like recruiting is.

As a CEO or head of sales and marketing, what do you do when you want to acquire more customers? You spend more money of course–you ramp up the sales team and buy more advertising to build more opportunity pipeline. What do you do when you want to compete for hiring better talent? Do you figure out how to spend less money? No. Like sales and marketing you should spend more on recruiting and employer branding. And therein lies the fundamental problem. It doesn’t make sense to think about nor position recruiting under a cost reduction focused function. Sales and marketing doesn’t report into the CFO or CHRO so why would recruiting?

The view on recruiting needs to change if you’re going to win the war for talent. The winners have already started to think about and operate their recruiting functions like sales and marketing, in some cases pulling recruiting out of HR all together. Take Google for example. By most people’s standards they’re the best corporate recruiting function there is. Many would attribute that to their powerful brand, something that exists outside the recruiting sphere of influence. Think again. They have 1 recruiter for every 58 employees compared to the industry average of 1 recruiter for every 577 employees. And that’s just recruiting headcount. According to Laszlo Bock, head of people at Google, they spend twice as much as the average company on recruiting. Recruiting is not about saving money at Google. It’s about hiring the best people at all costs.

In the digital era where innovation and creativity have already trumped productivity as the key business driver, talent acquisition has never been more important. Of all HR functions, recruiting contributes the most impact to revenue and profit. In 2012, Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation People Management Association conducted and survey and found that the impact of better recruiting at high capability companies over low capability companies was 3.5x on revenue and 2x on profit. In short, the better you are at recruiting, the better your revenues and profits are over your weaker competitors by a significant factor.

Technology: You Can’t Run Recruiting Likes Sales and Marketing in the Talent Suite

The legacy underlying technology in place to support hiring in an organization is the applicant tracking system. These were systems designed in the 1990’s, purchased by HR, and driven by a need to automate compliance. They were never designed for strategic talent acquisition; helping you source and attract the best talent, engage talent on any device or medium of their choice, and collaborate across the enterprise so that everyone involved in hiring is engaged to quickly vet and close the best candidates.

That’s quickly changing as the old guard of leading applicant tracking systems have been gobbled up by the big ERP’s making way for new, more innovative, and disruptive hiring systems. You’d think that was good news for companies and heads of talent. However, post consolidation these same ERP’s are now pushing the unified “talent suite” which includes recruiting alongside performance management, learning, succession planning, and the list goes on and on. But a quick look under the hood and you’ll see that it’s the same applicant tracking technology recruiting needs to get away from if it’s to finally be run like a sophisticated sales and marketing machine. It completely misses the points made in this article about why recruiting needs to be managed differently. In short, it’s recruiting for HR not recruiting for the future survival of the business. The recruiting technology you choose needs to drive the strategic changes needed to source, attract, and hire the best people.

As I shared, in recruiting there are winners and losers. If you want to win, now is the time to start thinking about recruiting like sales and marketing while deploying leading technology and having the same mindset about acquiring talent as you do customers. The clear alternative is to lose in recruiting and ultimately lose your company to the competition.

When you think of a salesperson, you might think of a relentless professional who persuade others to buy things they don’t need. But salespeople are more than that. Stereotypes aside, salespeople use effective strategies to increase business.

Recruiters are like salespeople. Both need to find new opportunities, build relationships, and close deals. Here are 4 ways recruiting is just like sales:

Identifying needs

Once a relationship has been established with a potential customer, salespeople evaluate business opportunities from both sides. They assess the needs of their own organization and the needs of the customer to make a partnership that will benefit everyone involved. That way, they take care of the needs of the customer and themselves simultaneously.

Recruiters also identify the needs of the employer and potential employee. You must know what skills and experience the organization requires, and be able analyze candidate to find the one who best fits the role. When assessing the needs of candidates, is the culture right for them? Will the job fit their lifestyle? Otherwise, you risk wasting your time on a candidate who won’t work out.

Lead generation

Sales starts with leads. It’s the first step of the sales process, and salespeople are always on the lookout for new prospective consumers. They actively bring in new customers through a variety of channels including advertisements, emails, direct mailings, trade shows, and more.

In the same way, recruiters should actively seek new potential candidates. Job seekers find employers and opportunities in multiple places from different social media outlets, to professional networking sites, to general and industry-specific job boards.

Have a presence and market your employer brand on these many different channels to fill your talent pipeline and bring in new leads for your open positions.

Relationship management

Salespeople don’t just collect leads — they pursue them. After generating leads, the next step is to contact those potential customers and start building a relationship. Strong relationships turn leads into customers and new business opportunities.

In recruiting, strong relationships turn passive professionals into candidates and candidates into new hires. Build relationships with promising professionals through email, phone calls, and social media.

In addition, you should be nurturing leads and building relationships with all of your applicants, even those you don’t intend to hire. You don’t have to do much, but letting applicants know where they stand will go a long in way to create good relationships and generate more leads.

Candidates who are treated well throughout the process will be more likely to recommend you to professionals in their network. In addition, a 2014 survey conducted by Software Advice found that 60 percent of respondents will only apply to companies that have more than a one star rating on Glassdoor. Communicate often with applicants to generate positive reviews and more applicants in the future.

Closing

The close is the most important part of the sales process. If salespeople can’t close a deal, they’re not worth much to their organization. They know what the customer wants and how to leverage their wants and needs to make the sale.

Closing is just as important in recruiting. If you find the perfect candidate, but they turn down your offer, all your hard work means nothing.

Know what your candidate wants, draft an offer that will appeal to them. If the candidate wants to negotiate, listen to what they have to say and consider their suggestions. If they call or email with concerns or questions, respond as soon as possible. Throughout the process, reassure the candidate that they are the right fit and you are excited to have them come aboard.

Good salespeople are effective, and so are good recruiters. Using strategies from the sales process can better help you find and secure the candidates you need.

What do you think? What other sales strategies translate to recruiting?

In my last column, I shared 5 Ways to Recruit Like a Marketer and highlighted content marketing as a key deliverable. We know research shows that 69% of candidates wouldn’t accept a job with an organization with a bad reputation and as employers are getting more creative with their hiring strategies, content marketing will play a primary role in building brand awareness. Focusing more specifically on content marketing, here’s how leading organizations and talent acquisition professionals are recruiting like marketers:

1. They have strategy. Anyone can produce content but to succeed it has to tell a story that begins with your company’s culture. Getting it right is no mean feat. To quote Deloitte, ‘company culture can be your competitive advantage or your Achilles’ heel’. Define your message with HR and develop a content marketing strategy based on your audience persona that sets the tone for everything you post.
2. They tell a story. Prospective hires want to know why working for your company is meaningful, interesting and aligns with their aspirations. People want to work for a business whose values they believe in. Use behind-the-scenes insights into a typical day in the office to highlight the benefits of working for your organization. Include updates on what’s important to today’s job seekers, such as, community initiatives, career development opportunities, employee recognition and flexible working.
3. They have a blog. A regular blog must offer solutions, add value and resonate with your readers. Create credibility in your sector with topics relevant to your target audience with ‘tips to’ or ‘how-to’s’. Demonstrate your authority by tapping into current trends. Keep it well-structured with bullet points and conclude with a call-to-action to encourage visitors to comment, subscribe to regular updates or find out more about your organization. Be consistent, decide how often you’re going to publish, whether once or twice a week (ideal), once a fortnight or even once a month. Once you’ve made your decision, stick to your schedule.
4. They are social. Share content on your LinkedIn company pages and social media feeds with links back to your careers site. First impressions count. Passive talent must encounter a consistent brand message and regular flow of content. Encourage employee buy-in to share content too, the more engaged and involved they are the more eager they’ll be to promote your cause. One word of warning – avoid job post overkill. A perpetual stream of vacancies yells ‘desperate’ and is guaranteed to send qualified candidates elsewhere.
5. They reuse, repurpose and repost. If you generally create articles, think about how the content can be adapted and repurposed to fit other formats. For example, take the information in your blog post to create slide presentations, videos, infographics, a series of tweets or invite your audience to discuss your content in a webinar. So-called ‘evergreen’ content with a longer shelf life containing useful tips and advice can be reposted over a longer period of time. Your blog statistics will identify your most popular posts.
6. They create talent communities. Develop targeted campaigns on social media that are interesting, relevant and timely to attract candidates with the skills and qualifications your company needs. Curate your content into a weekly – or bi-weekly – e-mail or newsletter with your latest blog, notifications of upcoming webinars and sharing relevant company stories to engage talent and create a community tailored to your business needs. With a readily engaged audience, it will be much easier to recruit the next time you have a specific need.
7. They track success. Tracking your engagement, audience reach and growth through metrics will help to build a more effective content campaign. Content marketing in recruitment, like any other strategy, needs to be regularly reviewed and adjusted to ensure a steady flow of qualified candidates into your pipeline. Get it right and your content strategy will attract passive talent to your brand, help to build trust and enhance your employer brand.

What content marketing strategies are the most effective for attracting qualified candidates to your pipeline?

The job market is improving, and professionals are taking advantage of new opportunities. About 75 percent of working professionals surveyed by LinkedIn in 2014 would consider switching jobs if the right one came along. In this new hiring environment, job seekers can afford to be choosy about their employer. 

As a result, recruiting is shifting, and employers need to focus on appealing to job seekers during the hiring process. Instead of just posting a job, you need to market and sell that job.

Here are a few ways to think of recruiting as marketing and transform your hiring process:

Branding

In marketing, your brand is everything. It defines the company and helps form opinions about the company. In recruiting, your employer brand is everything. The employer brand defines your workplace, the company culture, and lets job seekers know what to expect.

Branding is one of the most important pieces of successful recruiting. Among executives and HR professionals surveyed for a December 2014 Brandemix report, 80 percent said they believe employer branding is effective.

Create a strong employer branding by sharing your company story, values, and the office culture. Give job seekers an inside look of what it’s to like to work with you and what is most important to the work culture.

Content marketing

Branding isn’t limited to promoting the company on social media. The best marketers provide useful information and interesting content to their target audience. Content marketing is key to grabbing customers’ attentions and building a strong following. Content builds awareness for the brand, drives traffic to the website, and turns visitors into customers.

Content marketing can do the same for recruiters. Provide job seekers with information they’re looking for. Post job search tips, career advice, and industry news and share other articles that would interest the professionals you want to hire. Content will drive candidates to your website and help to build trust and rapport before they talk to anyone from the company.

Personas

Marketers carefully study their audience to understand their attitudes and behaviors in order to create the right messages. They create detailed customer personas that profile their typical target audience member, detailing their wants, needs, and everyday problems.

To reach the right job seekers, you need to know everything about them. What motivates them? What are their goals? What do they value in a workplace? Draw up the persona of your dream candidate for the job and then target them, based on their wants and needs.

The funnel

Marketing aims to reach customers with the right message at the right time to influence their decisions. Marketers follow consumers through the marketing funnel, which tracks their stages through the buying decision process. At each stage, different messages can help push them to the next stage until they eventually decide to make the purchase.

In recruiting, you need to reach different candidates in different ways throughout the recruiting process. For example, your posts on LinkedIn should aim to get passive candidates interested in your company, whereas on your website, your message should aim to lead interested applicants to apply.

Conversions

Marketing efforts mean nothing if leads don’t convert. It’s all about the conversions. Recruiting efforts don’t matter if you don’t hire the candidate. You need to lead the candidate through the application, interview, and decision process.

Send personalized communication to build relationships with promising professionals to build a talent pipeline. Let the candidate know what to expect from the hiring process and communicate with them the entire time.

By adopting a marketing mindset, you can better target the job seekers you want and recruit top professionals.

What do you think? What other marketing tactics can recruiters use?

The competition for talent continues to heat up. According to Manpower’s 2014 Talent Shortage Survey, 40% of US employers experience difficulty filling jobs. As the power in the job market shifts from employer to candidate, understanding job seeker trends enables organizations to fine tune recruitment strategies and provides leverage for prospective candidates.

Here are ten trends every hiring manager and job seeker needs to know:

1. Job boards remain popular: Job boards are the initial ‘go-to’ for job seekers and according to LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Trend Survey produced the highest quantity of hires in 2014. Quantity doesn’t mean quality (Zappos famously ceased to post on job boards last year) so discerning hiring managers must screen resumes carefully. To stand out from the crowd, job seekers should tailor resumes to their targeted vacancy.
2. Mobile first: Today’s candidates look for vacancies on the move. Kelton Global Research revealed that 86% of job seekers begin a job search on their mobile. Employers with mobile optimized sites will benefit as job seekers veer towards organizations offering a straightforward ‘1 click apply’ facility on their careers site.
3. Social recruiting diversion: LinkedIn is usually the first choice for recruiters but it’s no longer a case of one ‘source’ fits all. Job seekers have profiles and hang out on many sites. Where talent ventures, hiring managers follow. For candidates, the focus is on maintaining a current social media profile to attract the attention of employers and recruiters.
4. Talent communities: Research released by The Talent Board reinforces the importance of talent pools in the candidate experience. Today’s job seekers target employers who nurture online talent communities and communicate consistently throughout the hiring process. Unhappy candidates vocalize their experience on Glassdoor, not just employees.
5. Keywords dominate: Initial job searches are based on keywords, increasing pressure on employers to create compelling, keyword-rich job posts. Job seekers who want to attract the attention of employers and recruiters must embed relevant keywords in online profiles.
6. Employee referrals: As talent gets scarce, employee referrals will become a primary source of quality hires. Serious candidates are adopting a more strategic approach which includes the development of a well-connected professional network as an integral part of their job search.
7. The perpetual job search: A Right Management survey revealed that 86% of professionals planned to look for a new job in 2015 with the majority constantly open to explore new opportunities. While compensation is important, as Google’s head of HR pointed out, work has to be meaningful too. Employers must provide a culture that matches the aspirations of today’s job seekers.
8. Passive recruitment: So-called ‘stealth’ searches will continue to feature in global hiring strategies and impact the job search. LinkedIn suggests three quarters of professionals passively seek a new job, almost matched by the 72% of US employers who recruit passive talent.
9. Outsourcing gains ground: A 2014 Elance-oDesk study revealed that 34% of US workers now freelance in some form. Employers can leverage this trend by outsourcing specific fixed term projects to independent contractors. In turn, entrepreneurial job seekers create the work/life balance they desire.

Whether you choose to learn more about these or other job search trends in 2015, it’s clear that for many industries and organizations recruiting continues to be both a top priority and challenge. What other trends are you seeing?

In my last column I provided 7 tips for mobile recruiting. It’s obvious that we use our phones for everything from online shopping to driving directions, our mobile devices are there for us. It’s replaced our camera, camcorder, alarm clock and more.

The popularity and convenience of smartphones makes them a powerful tool for recruiting too. Job seekers are attached to their phones and other devices, and use them in their search for new positions.

Mobile recruiting has come a long way over the past few years, and still has room to improve and grow. Here’s a look at the evolution of mobile recruiting and where the technology is heading in the future:

The Past

• Back in 2007, mobile recruiting was a crazy concept. Cell phones were becoming the norm, the first iPhone was released, and Twitter was rising in popularity.
• In the beginning, mobile recruiting was all about better connecting with busy candidates. With mobile, employers could send text message alerts to let job seekers know about open positions, send emails with candidates on the go, and boost their social media efforts.
• As more people began using smartphones, employers could use QR codes to drive job seekers to their company or career websites.
• Some companies took advantage of the opportunity by creating job search apps. CareerBuilder released their first job search app in 2008, and others soon followed. Job seekers could now search for jobs at any time, any place from a device they almost always carried in their pockets.
• Although job searching from mobile devices was possible, applying for jobs was another story.
• Job seekers needed to switch to a computer to actually apply for the jobs they found on their phones or tablets. Mobile applications were either not available, not optimized for mobile, or too long and inconvenient.

The Present

• As we’ve become more and more reliant on our smartphones and other devices, job seekers are now applying to jobs at any time from their mobile devices. In fact, a 2014 Glassdoor survey of 1,000 employees and job seekers found that 89 percent of those surveyed use a mobile device during their job search, and 45 percent use their mobile device to search for jobs at least once each day.
• Although mobile is popular among job seekers, many employers are still trying to shift their focus to the new recruiting possibilities. In a 2014 survey conducted by CareerXroads, seven in 10 companies surveyed said they rarely used mobile to hire executives, and a similar amount said the same when hiring hourly and entry-level employees.
• Employers who have embraced mobile recruiting are focused on two trends: mobile-optimization and mobile applications.

Optimization

Job seekers expect a mobile site that is easy to read and use from any device. This means companies are going beyond mobile-friendly and optimizing their sites for multiple mobile devices. Employers who fail to do so won’t have much luck attracting job seekers on mobile.

Mobile Applications

As mobile technology advances and becomes more popular, job seekers want to complete every stage of the process, from the search to the application, from their phones and tablets. More companies are embracing the mobile application and finding ways to make the process easier for candidates.

One approach is to enable candidates to use their LinkedIn or other social profiles to complete sections of the application. Others are creating simplified applications that job seekers can easily complete from their devices without getting frustrated.

The Future

• Until now, the focus of mobile recruiting has primarily been on the candidate. The future of mobile recruiting is all about creating seamless programs that make the process easier for both job seekers and employers.
• More organizations will adopt the use of mobile on their career sites and job applications, and provide candidates the mobile experience they deserve.
• Mobile technology will also give recruiters a simpler way to review and sort candidates, communicate with their top picks, and work with their hiring teams to choose the best person for the job.
• That’s what we’ve done with with our mobile recruiting app for hiring teams. The platform enables everyone internally to work more effectively together–to better find, engage with, and hire top talent.
• Only time will tell if job seekers will be using their Apple watches to apply for jobs in the future, but mobile will continue to evolve to provide job seekers and recruiters a more convenient and effective way to complete the hiring process.

What do you think? What will the future of mobile recruiting look like?

Job seeking and recruiting have changed forever. Technology has made a huge impact on talent acquisition in recent years. Long gone are the days of classified ads and sifting through faxed resumes to attract and identify that perfect candidate. Today, job seekers have gone beyond emailing resumes and cover letters and are now sharing professional profiles through social media, applying for jobs through mobile devices, and even submitting video cover letters.

Recruiters have had to adapt to change quickly, and the pace of change is accelerating. There’s a new normal for talent acquisition that requires companies to rethink their strategies, processes, and supporting technology related to recruiting. Successful hiring companies realize that recruiting is like marketing – from creating a brand presence, to attracting candidates through multiple advertising channels, to nurturing applicants by bringing them seamlessly through a talent acquisition funnel.

But why is this so critical? A recent study by the Robert Half HR consulting firm found bad hires can cost companies in many ways including productivity and team morale, with Chief Financial Officers reporting that supervisors on average spend 17% of their time – nearly one day per week – managing poorly performing employees. Hiring the right person the first time is crucial to company success. As such, 93% of CEOs find that they need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent, but a majority of 61% don’t know where to begin. So what can a business do to remain competitive in the battle for the best employees?

HR professionals now need to think like marketers in this new normal of recruiting. Reactive recruiting, waiting until there’s a vacancy, puts companies at a disadvantage. If a company is rushed to fill a spot, they have less time to engage with prospects and are more likely to make a bad hire. On the other hand, waiting too long to fill a position puts strain on other employees who must shoulder the workload, lowering morale and productivity. Or, worse yet, the work simply does not get done and the company’s growth stagnates.

Savvy HR professionals ensure they’re attracting the right talent by displaying a strong and consistent employment brand on their career site, including engaging photos and video, information about departments and employees, and providing up-to-date and relevant material about their corporate culture. This is incredibly important to job seekers as 78% agree that the look and feel of a company’s career site is “moderately” to “highly important” to their decision to apply. Not to mention that an increasingly mobile workforce has come to expect mobile-adaptable user experiences. So, if your company’s career site isn’t delivering a streamlined experience for mobile job seekers, you are significantly reducing your odds of connecting with best-fit talent. And, you definitely aren’t maximizing the valuable recruitment marketing dollars it took to attract traffic to your career site to begin with.

But ask any marketer what the best form of advertising is and they’ll agree: word-of-mouth. And the same holds true when marketing to potential employees.

Take, for instance, National Interstate Insurance Company, a leading specialty property and casualty insurance holding business. The recruitment team identified the current employee base as a source of referrals for quality candidates to identify and court passive, yet quality candidates for future openings. The team engaged current employees in a word-of-mouth marketing campaign to serve as the face of the company culture, attract candidates, and increase referrals. Through the use of specialized software, they created a streamlined referral portal and philanthropic incentive program, and employee referrals became the number one source of hire in 2014 nearly doubling the amount of referrals hired in 2013.

Social media and digital campaigning also are effective marketing-as-recruiting tools. Social media allows recruiters to engage with passive candidates by actively monitoring and posting on their company social media sites. Targeted email campaigns allow recruiters to nurture candidates at each stage of the sourcing and hiring process and send messages specific to a candidate based on their location, preferred job function, and other interests.

Bon-Ton, a department store chain offering a wide array of unique and limited-distribution merchandise from a variety of lifestyle brands, utilized this strategy to build talent pools for turnkey holiday hiring needs. In regions that weren’t receiving enough applicants to fill open seasonal positions, the company launched a geo-focused email campaign to send information about the benefits of working with Bon-Ton during the holidays to both passive and active job seekers in the area. The campaign also featured graphics to showcase the employment brand and background on available positions.

Through this effort, they had a 95% delivery rate and 15% open rate, which resulted in a 10% increase in applicants and another 10% increase in the candidates being hired. Bottom line: It’s a new world out there when it comes to job seeking and recruiting, and your overall talent acquisition strategy still needs to shift toward a dedicated software suite to support  a breadth of new recruitment capabilities.

Great companies are built with great people.  Employers need to recognize the importance of having dedicated technologies and marketing strategies in place to gain a competitive advantage for recruiting. Undoubtedly, the time is now for companies to update their talent acquisition processes and technologies to keep up with the evolving behaviors of today’s job seekers.

This article was written by My Say from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

It’s no secret who you hire matters. And in high-growth and emerging companies there are significant business impacts of not recruiting and selecting the right talent. Executives and business leaders are ultimately responsible for talent decisions, and in partnership with their HR teams it’s essential to understand the consequences of not modernizing your strategy and approach to attracting and selecting the right talent.

Join Susan Strayer LaMotte, Principal Consultant and Founder of exaqueo, and Jason Buss, Recruiting Innovation Officer at SmartRecruiters, as they share the best strategies to achieve hiring success in high-growth and emerging companies.

When: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 at 10am PT/1pm ET

During this interactive webinar, Susan and Jason will discuss:

• The common recruiting pitfalls most high-growth and emerging companies face
• Proven strategies and innovative approaches to overcome obstacles
• How to achieve hiring success

Register today!

One of the top recruiting conferences for leaders in Talent Acquisition is underway and day 1 was filled with great content.

Here are the top 25 conference takeaways, twitter style:

1. We can not underestimate the commitment that we are asking candidates make by joining our team. @JHopp12
2. Top 2 recruiting metrics that aren’t measured:  1) Diversity and 2) hiring against demand plans. @SmartRecruiters
3. 31% of TA leaders don’t measure hiring vs. demand plans. Not tracking the business need? How can you measure your success. @RLoRecruiter
4. Analytics that are not being tracked. Quality is so important but nearly 1/2 don’t measure it. @JHopp12
5. Recruiting is the easiest job in the world. Until you get people involved. @artiefeinstein
6. Question to ponder: Do you continually evangelize and educate your team? @AngelaDeClaro
7. Facts = Data, Data = Credibility, Credibility = Trust and Trust = Partnership. @trevorpvas
8. 81% of the time, the ATS rejects candidates from companies. @jjbuss
9. Do you agree with the business on what the problem IS? Half the time it’s a business problem, not a recruiting problem. @huttm
10. False assumptions! Does the best student go to the best University? Targeting Universities self selects! @emilydryzgami
11. Time to fill:  79 to 24 days? Hiring Manager SLAs. @mlackaye
12. How effective are we at capturing powerful stories of our customers and employees to grab the attention of top talent? @AngelaDeClaro
13. Marcy, TA Leader at Publix, on stage telling a great employment story, Great place to work, check them out. jobs.publix.com @ffpratt
14. Tell powerful stories to answer “Why should I join your team?” @mollyw323
15. TA is spending an average of 45% of their time on attrition-limiting abilities to grow. @JHopp12
16. Average time to fill a job is 50 days. @AngelaDeClaro
17. Why do HR pros put up with those ATS systems? @ChaimShapiro
18. TA leaders have a higher opinion than managers think about their recruiters as talent advisors. How are you training your recruiters?
19. Top inhibitors to meeting Talent Acquisition objectives: 1) Workforce Planning 2) Too much time on backfills 3) Business leadership. @JenniferMcClure
20. Avg recruiter fills 100 positions a year. @DearKat
21. Recruiters biggest frustration – hiring manager openness to non-traditional candidates. @huttm
22. #1 reason recruiters are inhibited to be successful:  Lack of hiring manager accountability to make the hire, Feels like finger pointing to me. @RLoRecruiter
23. I dream of persona recruitment with no job ads but we still have managers who want cover letters. @DearKat
24. Story telling is true employment brand work, sadly it is a skill few in HR have @masterburnett
25. Speed and quality are 2 top issues keeping recruiters up at night. @amellerbrock

Stay tuned for more great content tomorrow! And if you’re attending, check out the SmartRecruiters booth (#53) for free music downloads.