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.

With around 80 locations across the US, Canada and Europe, Equinox has become the benchmark for high quality gym and fitness clubs around the globe. Central to the companies philosophy is creating bespoke experiences with their customers, providing ample face-to-face time with highly trained expert professionals.

Hiring success for this kind of human-centric business is therefore of critical importance. The employees and their knowledge are the very product Equinox is selling and to achieve this they need to find and hire the best people and best experts possible.

Equinox uses a decentralized system which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who may often carry out many other activities on a daily basis.

How To Ensure Consistent Excellence?

Although this approach provides the flexibility local managers need to keep their branches staffed, it also comes packaged with some inherent challenges. Most importantly is the concern a highly decentralized approach will suffer from a lack of consistency in the long-run.

The high quality standards customers have come to expect are central to Equinox’s brand and business. Several, or perhaps even a single, poor hire in one branch could potentially cause ongoing brand problems, especially considering they primarily court luxury customers with high demands.

Another issue concerns the tools Equinox needs to fulfil this hiring goal. The core strength and value of the company comes from the knowledge of its trainers and professionals in relation to their chosen speciality. It’s unlikely this professional knowledge will be possessed by full-time recruiters and hiring managers. Therefore, it makes sense for Equinox to allow its trainers, nutritionists and instructors to be involved in the hiring process. For this to be effective, they need to have access to an easy to use platform that economises their time. After all, the last thing an Equinox trainer wants to do is spend hours trying to work with clunky software in a backroom.

Turning Your Experts Into Hiring Managers

To solve this problem, Equinox joined SmartRecruiters in 2013. Here’s why they haven’t looked back:

• SmartRecruiters has collaboration as a keystone of the platform, allowing hiring managers from across the country to conveniently discuss candidates. This was particularly useful for Equinox, since knowledge from other branches could be brought into the hiring process if it was not available locally.
• The platform is also incredibly flexible and mobile, allowing trainers-cum-hiring managers to recruit on the move, saving them vast amounts of time and allowing them to concentrate on other daily responsibilities.
• The use of SmartRecruiters’ customizable scorecards allows for a consistent assessment process to be used across the company. This ensures local managers, while having the freedom to work on their own, also adhere to the high quality standards demanded.
• All of these factors, combined with SmartRecruiters’ support for social media and one-click-applications, results in a great candidate experience which supports the brand Equinox wishes to project.

After teaming up with SmartRecruiters, Equinox quickly saw an increase in applications — to the tune of 45 percent. Additionally, they saw an increase of 9 percent in terms of new hires, while 80 percent of individuals who saw a job posting applied to it.

To find out more about how Equinox found hiring success with SmartRecruiters, check out the full case study, Equinox: Hiring The Best Personal Trainers For Every Fitness Club.

This is a contribution from Tomáš Haviar, a Recruiter at Bynder Orbit – a creative content management software provider.

In many organizations, recruitment is reactive. Businesses only start seeking people once a glaring hole in the company becomes apparent instead of preemptively seeking people as part of a business strategy.

Yet, people are key to reach any business goal. Take the following three objectives for example.

• Build a new workout app.
• Market footwear to the right audience
• Put on a world-class event to showcase your new SaaS platform.

The necessary ingredient to accomplish any of these objectives is people – people with the right skills and at the right time.

Your business strategy could fall apart if you don’t have the right team which means recruitment can’t be an afterthought. 

Recruiters know that finding the right talent isn’t as easy as just posting a job advertisement so here’s what you need to know to turn your hiring process into a proactive system that grows your business.

Make recruiters your partners in strategy.

Involving recruitment in your key business strategy decisions is beneficial for creating realistic budget and time expectations.

Recruiters can help you figure out whether the people you need to make your business strategy a reality are available in the recruitment market at the moment. If they are not, then recruitment can also advise on how long it might take to recruit those people, and therefore how long it will take to put your business strategy into practice.

Let’s say your tech company wants to create an app, then you will need IOS and Android developers. If there is a shortage of IOS developers and Android developers in the market at the moment, then you will have to set longer and more realistic deadlines for the creation of the app.

Your recruiter can also let you know how much finding and hiring these developers will cost and if they are out of your price range you can reconsider how vital the project is to your overall business strategy.

An additional advantage of including a representative from your recruitment team in your business strategy meetings is that the recruiter can gauge the direction in which the organization is moving, and can start the recruitment process with the future of the company in mind. This means that when the organization does firmly decide on a business strategy, the necessary recruitment process is already underway.

What exactly can recruiters do with this extra lead-time?

Recruiting for in-demand positions takes time. It’s not just a case of writing a job description for your career site. The best talent is usually passive. So it’s important to nurture your desired candidates and slowly build up their interest in your company. That way, once you are ready to hire, you have a full pipeline of interested candidates.

There are a number of ways to begin nurturing your ideal candidates:

• Look for the kind of events your ideal candidates go to and go along to them. This is where recruiters can meet their ideal candidates in a less formal setting.
• Before you start talking about interviews or job offers, invite ideal candidates to the office for a coffee or beer, just to show them what the company and its culture are like.
• You can also promote your company and its culture through website content. This could be as simple as a blog post on the company blog on ‘6 reasons why working for Bynder will change your life’.

These are long term strategies with high rewards. The sooner the recruiter can be brought into the business strategy, the sooner these techniques can be put into practice and the rewards reaped.

The second installment of our Feature Spotlights from our Fall Product Release is here. Today we unpack our Slack App integration which allows Hiring Managers and Recruiters to engage all departments in the hiring process by bringing important information to them on the platform where they already work – in this case, Slack.

One complaint that is common among Recruiters and Hiring Managers is that it’s hard to get departments outside HR to engage in the hiring process. One reason for the poor adoption rate of hiring practices in other departments is because other departments aren’t using the same platforms as the Recruiters and Hiring Managers.

It makes sense that a Hiring Manager or a Recruiter would be on the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite all day fielding Candidates but a Software Developer probably isn’t doing most of their work or communication within the SmartRecruiters platform. But, if they’re on Slack they’re already in the SmartRecruiters Ecosystem.

Now team members don’t have to be on our platform specifically, to be part of our Ecosystem. That means the full power of SmartRecruiters can be delivered to the platform where you already work and communicate – and for most work teams that platform is Slack.

We believe hiring is a team sport and our Slack App helps get the right people on your team.

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Now you can go to the SmartRecruiters platform and enable Slack (slide 1). Once Slack is enabled, it’s easy to export candidate information to coworkers. Just create a channel by clicking ‘open hiring team channel in Slack’ (slide2). And you’ll see the channel appear in your Slack (slide 3). Then simply export the Candidate’s information (slide 4). Once the channel is set up you can invite your colleagues to contribute (slide 5).   

Once the information is in Slack, it will be easy to locate. SmartRecruiters’ links will automatically ‘unfurl’ so no one is scrolling up and down trying to guess which link is which. Unfurling is a Slack term which essentially means a link will appear with a basic preview instead of a long string of letters and numbers which clutter a conversation and make it hard to locate information.

Think of the difference as if you were going to post a photo of yourself winning a 5k  online but instead of your photo showing up on your feed there was only an HTML script. Would anyone click on that script to see the photo? Probably not. So when you showed up to work the next day, you would wonder why no one congratulated you on your victory. The reason, of course, would be is that no one would have made sense of the random link you posted.

If you want to communicate important information you need to make it accessible.

You don’t want to show up to an interview and realize that your Hiring Team didn’t receive the relevant information about the Candidates because either they aren’t monitoring the platforms to which your posting or the links you shared have ended up in a jumble.

Let’s say I’m a Hiring Manager who is deciding on 6 candidates to interview for a Junior PR position from 20 Applicants. I know that whomever I hire will end working closely with my VP of Marketing and also with the Product Manager so I want to make sure I get them involved in the process at an early stage. I’m looking at their schedules for the coming week and both are jam packed so instead of delaying the hiring process by trying to meet in person, I can create a Slack channel with all the relevant information. My super busy marketing VP and Product Manager can review updates on their phone between tasks and I can fill the position sooner.

A week passes I have an initial phone interview with 6 applicants and then my VP of Marketing and my Product manager have video interviews with 3 that I’ve narrowed down. From Those 3 we bring in 2 for a final face to face interview. Before the meeting, I’m able to quickly review again all the notes from our Slack channel and find the final 2 resumes quickly through the unfurled links that are already on the channel so I come to the meeting with their individual profiles fresh in my mind.

We as a hiring team are torn because both candidates are so great! So we add the VP of Global Operations to our channel to weigh in. They are able to locate the links to the candidate’s profile and Resume without a problem and even though they’re en route to a conference they’re able to give us their input right away because Slack sent them notifications and we send an offer!

With everyone involved, we know we’ve made a good hire and me, as the Hiring Manager, can rest easy knowing that I’m not onboarding someone unsure of whether they’ll be a good fit with their team.

When we look at it from the Candidate side it’s better as well. They are joining a team with which they’re already familiar. Imagine walking to a new job not knowing anyone – that’s scary and stressful! Now imagine starting a new job where you’ve met with the team and gotten to know the work culture – that’s exciting!

SmartRecruiters believes that hiring success can be a matter of form when you engage all the resources at your disposal, namely the colleagues who have a stake in the new Hire. Bring the information to them and make it easy for everyone to engage. They’re already in the ecosystem with Slack – they just don’t know it yet.

Before any relationship can be made stronger it must first exist – it’s important to have a recruiter on staff. Some companies are smaller and can fold those responsibilities into the Generalist/Coordinator role, however most companies are bigger than that and need to invest in a Corporate Recruiter position. Corporate Recruiters are more engaged and aligned with the organizational culture which allows them to focus on the quality of the candidates versus quantity.

The Recruiter and HR team should meet formally within the office to work on recruiting and staffing plans AND there should be some informal interaction – such as coffee? I can tell you, everyone likes to be taken out for lunch, dinner or just coffee – it’s a great way to engage your team and strengthen relationships.

2. Define Who Does What

In a team dynamic, it’s important to clearly define the roles of each team member. Same rules apply with Job Recruiters and HR. You don’t want the HR generalist doing the recruiter’s duties and vice versa – not that they can’t cover for each other from time to time – but assigning duties drives consistency and a better overall experience.

For instance, who does the initial screenings? Who recommends the candidate to the hiring manager? When and who does the salary negotiations? And what about the face to face interviews – who conducts those? What recruiting software will you use? (That could be a great collaborative effort by the way – the recruiter and the HR representative should both interview the candidate, possibly even as a panel interviews.) These things need to addressed and assigned so there are no redundancies, confusion and unprofessionalism.

3. Create Recruitment Strategies Together

Now that you and the recruiter have a good working relationship and you’ve designed the workflow process – (applicant trajectory) – now you have to create the most effective strategies for recruiting – talent acquisition – staffing – whatever you prefer to call it. Here are your options:

Social Media Recruiting – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest; all social networks with hundreds of millions of users in which you can use to engage and reach a new talent community.

Job Boards – Maybe you prefer a more traditional approach to recruitment marketing. Posting jobs to Indeed, Monster, Careerbuilder, and the tons of niche job sites can get the right eyeballs on your job openings.

Fairs – Jobs fairs, career fairs and college fairs; sometimes the older methods work just as well as some of the newer methods.

Database Search – when you want to hunt for new talent, the data base search is a good way to get a list of qualified names.

3rd Party Recruiters – Do you need them? At what terms? If so, discuss how you are going to manage recruitment agencies.

Hybrids – Try mixing it up a bit or as we like to say “The Remix.” Change it up a bit; mix and match strategies – you never know who you will find searching for a good place to land. By mixing any of the above options, strategically you are creating a company culture that makes you a desirable employer.

4. Share Analytics (Data!)

Analytics, that’s data. Yeah data may not sound sexy but we need it; it tells us what we need to know (if it is presented in a comprehendible form and we take the time to listen to it). This just makes sense, in order for your recruiting process to work; you have to know what doesn’t work. You have to ask questions. You have to ask the hiring manager, “Are you seeing the type of talent you need to see? Or are there adjustments that need to be made? Should I open more recruitment marketing channels?” You have to use performance evaluations to see if the candidate is performing well, and if they quit you need to conduct exit interviews to determine if there was something that you could have done to retain that employee.

Some companies send recruitment surveys out to candidates during and after the recruiting process – so there’s that option. A good recruiting software will already give you a lot of data about where the good candidates are coming from. You need data to support your recruiting process and show areas of improvement and effectiveness.

5. Respect 

In speaking with some recruiters, I’ve learned that sometimes what tends to happen when a company brings a recruiter on board is that person becomes the “dumping ground.” They get all the grunt work passed down to them, things that were not part of their essential job duties – they become the assistant’s assistant. Not cool. The recruiter should be viewed a part of the HR team that handles certain aspects of the recruiting process and not the low person on the totem pole.

The HR manager needs to make it clear to all department leaders and staff members that the recruiter is part of human resources and will manage the daily functions of the recruiting process. The HR manager should also make sure the recruiter has all the resources they need to succeed, such as user access with the appropriate administrative rights and privileges into the applicant tracking system and other networks.

Ultimately, recruiters and human resources professionals are on the same page and want the same things. So it’s vital to communicate and work together to ensure the company’s talent is inspired, engaged and happy. Satisfying those internal customers (hiring managers, directors, supervisors) and external customers (candidates) is an extremely important task that requires some team work.

Chris Fields is an HR professional and leadership guy who blogs and dispenses great (not just good) advice at Cost of Work.   Image Credit Ely Tran.

As business practices adapt to workforce’s new generations, more companies will adopt a collaborative hiring processes. The group, instead of a single manager, will be the decision makers. I’m not saying buy in from leadership doesn’t help (it does); management should set the expectation and guidelines. However, the success of current employees drive the acquisition of new employees. To overcome the time commitment and locality limitations of hiring, having a good hiring system should be the first order of business.

“You need to have a collaborative hiring process,” said Steve Jobs. But not just because Steve Jobs said so. Hiring as a team will create a more encompassing picture of what talent is needed and a more accurate evaluation of the talent that enters, as well as, ultimately increase business output.

How the Collaborative Hiring Process Improves Business Output:

• The interview process is more effective.  His or her potential colleagues better understand the demands of the job and can cull out strengths or weaknesses.  Because more work environments are team-oriented, the collaborative group will have personal incentive to find and hire the most qualified candidate for the position.

• The orientation process is streamlined.  A new hire that comes aboard following a collaborative hiring process already knows his or her new co-workers.  And the team has an expectation of the skill set the new hire will bring to the table.  The lag that occurs from when a new hire enters orientation to when they are up and running on a project is diminished thus increasing productivity.

• Colleagues are more engaged in their work.  When leadership empowers and trusts staff to make major business decisions, they take more ownership into outcomes.  Engaged employees have higher productivity and bring a creativity and problem-solving to the table.  Best of all, they are more likely to grow along with the company.

• The likelihood of the dreaded Mis-Hire decreases.  Mis-hires can cost a company 3-4 times their annual salary.  They drag a team or department down and can initiate more turn-over from frustrated co-workers.  Productivity drags and, depending on how long it takes for leadership to acknowledge their mistake, you will be back at the starting blocks of the hiring process all over again.  Collaborative hiring increases the likelihood that your company will hire the right person with the necessary skills and personality to work with the team.

While the collaborative hiring process is a highly effective method of improving the quality of your hires, I have experienced an instance of the practice gone awry.  As a member of a hiring team for a senior leadership position, the CEO led the way through most of the process. I was brought into an interview team the morning of the final interview between two candidates.  One was from the city in which we lived.  The other had been flown in from half way across the country.

The first interview was the out of state woman who had a great resume of experiences.  She was looking to relocate to our region and it seemed like a great fit for the organization.  The local interviewee had the opposite effect on the hiring team.  Red flags emerged throughout the entire interview and she didn’t have the skills or qualifications necessary to do the job.

The team presented its interview assessments to the CEO who was not pleased.  It was then we as a team realized she already wanted to hire the local woman.  Despite our group’s consensus and expressed concerns, the CEO decided to hire her anyway.

In six short months, the new vice president was a fast sinking ship. Deadlines were missed; balls were dropped and long-standing partnerships were damaged.  She didn’t have the right skills to do the job, and she didn’t work well with the team.  Within eight months, the CEO was back to the drawing board to find a replacement and the team was burnt out from picking up the slack.

The moral of the hiring story:  trust in your employees and don’t micromanage for effective collaborative hiring.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. When she talks, people listen.