In a recent post about a webinar I hosted on making your best business case for a new ATS, I made it clear if you can’t show how your organization can add revenues or cut costs, you’re probably out of luck.

Your business case must make it clear that you can solve real business challenges and generate a significant ROI. Otherwise, other projects will be funded and you’ll be left with, well, that crummy old ATS.

How does this work in actual practice? Here are a few real-world examples to inspire you:

First, be sure your business case identifies business objectives, explains how current systems prevent meeting those goals, shows how obstacles can be overcome, and — most importantly — demonstrates a great ROI.

Making an employer brand shine: $1.6 million at stake

One objective might be to improve your candidate experience. At one company, it was awful —  with a poor mobile experience and no integration with social media. It took 14 clicks to just apply for a job (after creating a separate account!)

That turned off plenty of talented candidates who felt that any company that required yet another username and password was, well, on its way the corporate graveyard to put it mildly.

So the requirements included ditching all of those cumbersome processes to deliver a more engaging experience.

With approximately 100,000 applicants per year, third-party research showed that roughly 50 percent of candidates (about 50,000) were also either customers or prospective.

Data also showed that 50 percent of applicants felt they had a poor candidate experience, representing approximately 25,000 potential or existing customers – and that 32 percent of those (about 8,000) were likely to disengage from the brand.

So the ROI was based on retaining revenues by improving the candidate experience.  Research revealed that average annual revenue per customer was $200, so delivering a poor candidate experience could easily result in up to $1.6 million in lost revenues from 8,000 lost customers.

Keeping that revenue? A pretty significant ROI for taking action on a new ATS that could easily meet the requirement for delivering an engaging candidate experience.

New solution saves $400,000

In another case, a rapidly growing company needed to boost recruiter productivity to meet soaring demand for talent.

The current systems weren’t used by hiring teams because processes were cumbersome and too much effort was required to enter data manually. Other processes, such as approvals and interview scheduling weren’t even integrated into the system, resulting in even more needless effort and time. Hiring managers simply don’t use an ATS if it isn’t intuitive and easy to use.

So when defining requirements, the business case for a new ATS included delighting hiring teams with more intuitive and useful tools to integrate scheduling, approvals, and other functionality into a seamless experience that could boost hiring productivity.

The essential of making the business case – the potential ROI – showed great promise.

Research revealed that about 40 percent of a recruiter’s time was spent on administrative and data entry tasks. With 20 recruiters and an average salary of $100,000 ($2 million total), that time amounted to $800,000.

The research also showed that deployment of a more modern talent acquisition suite would cut that administrative time in half – equaling $400,000 or the equivalent of four full-time recruiters!

It’s all about the money

Remember, getting approval for a new ATS requires ROI. Show key executives the money. When you frame your business case that way, you’re far more likely get your request approved.

Learn more in our webinar on best practices for building a business case for a new ATS.

Face it — when you ask for money for a new technology you need, you’re competing with others in your company equally passionate about their need.

Don’t take it personally. That’s just business. To get funding, you’ve got to make an excellent business case.

After all, in addition to competing with other projects, you need to overcome objections common to all funding requests — the perception of the real cost of making a change, and bias that it may not be worth the investment.

How do you make the best business case for a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS)? That’s a topic we covered in a webinar, “How to Build a Business Case to Replace your Old ATS,” which presents five key steps to success.

That webinar, which I co-hosted with Tony Lopez, Head of Talent at Illumio, makes it clear that one concept trumps all – money.

Shocking, I know! But if your business case doesn’t center around either saving money or making money, you won’t get very far. Making your case based on concepts like recruiters hate your current system? Forget it. That’s a non-starter. So follow these five steps:

1) Identify business objectives

Let’s be clear. Business objectives are problems you’re trying solve, not features you want. Sure, you may want access to efficient tools for uploading resumes, but that’s not a business goal. Eliminating duplication of data entry to save money? Now that’s a business goal.

Link problems to objectives in a way that resonates with key stakeholders (IT, finance, hiring managers, etc.) to get the attention of C-Suite execs. In Illumio’s case, for example, the business objectives focused on eliminating duplication of effort and making sure data was accurate.

2) Show how current technology prevents meeting objectives

Make it abundantly clear why you need to replace your current system. Otherwise, you’ll likely be stuck with what you have.

Tony explained that his business case showed how current systems would not keep up with future needs. System integrations would become far more expensive and less effective at creating a candidate experience to allow Illumio to attract great talent to drive business success.

3) Identify factors in making a switch

Think about all the stakeholders that you need to address. Remember, recruiting is service delivery — to recruiters, internal team members, and candidates. Every issue you need to address will impact a combination of these stakeholders.

Put yourself in the shoes of each stakeholder. Think like a salesperson so you can identify the impact of your proposal regarding daily life. Demonstrate how happy candidates, happy hiring managers, and happy recruiters will deliver more value at less cost.

4) Identify system requirements

Next, map requirements to stakeholder needs. Show how you are delivering solutions for each of these groups and what core functionality is essential to these solutions.

As Tony explained in our webinar, you must demonstrate impact to bottom line profits and the top line goals. His advice? Be very specific. Less is more. Focus squarely on key requirements to keep your business case simple and easy to understand.

5) Demonstrate ROI

Finally, calculate potential ROI for your business case. Depending on what problems you are solving, ROI could be cost savings, increased revenue, a total cost of ownership (reflecting training and upgrades), or a mix of all three.

For example, legacy ATS users often find that system upgrades grow increasingly expensive and require new training at excessively higher costs. It also makes sense to use third-party data to validate your ROI expectations whenever you can.

So there you have it – a five step process for making the best business case for a new ATS. Tony and I covered a lot more in our webinar, so be sure to watch it for more examples of how we’ve both used this proven approach.

When CIOs evaluate ATS solutions, many say they want best-of-breed features across all HR functionality, but when it comes to recruiting they simply “check the box” and move on. Yet more CIOs now pay much closer attention to talent acquisition – not surprising given than 61 percent of CIOs say finding skilled IT professionals is a challenge.

Consider this: Companies that adopt best practices and processes for recruiting generate 3.5 times the revenue than peers that have not. Without specific tools built with recruiting in mind, you’ll end up with a mediocre solution at best.

Want proof? All it takes is one simple challenge.

I’m only going to ask you to complete a routine task to prove my point, but before I do, it’s important to recognize that recruiting differs from other HR functions. You see, while most HR functions are internally facing, recruiting is externally facing. That has a huge impact on processes and technology.

Most of the time HR systems are used to help managers accomplish tasks such as completing performance reviews or setting goals — areas where managers have control over their teams. Recruiting is quite the opposite, more like marketing and sales where there’s no control over people and thousands of candidates to deal with.

In addition, recruiters must work with multiple external vendors – perhaps dozens – to perform assessments, generate background checks, create advertising, manage social networking, and more. The rest of the HR realm is more focused on internal record keeping.

Taming a messy process through streamlined best-of-breed tools.

Given that recruiters need to work with external information, the data gets messy because it’s inconsistent from source to source. A Monster.com profile, for example, is structured differently than a LinkedIn profile and your recruiters have no control over that structure.

Other HR functions can be standardized — for example forms used for performance reviews. There’s no such standardization for recruiting, and most ATS solutions don’t recognize this.

To see how this can screw up a recruiter’s day, think for a moment about how search functionality works. Google indexes the entire web. That’s one messy job! Facebook, on the other hand, controls formatting of profiles so they’re consistent.

The search challenges are completely different, yet nobody expects to use Facebook to search the web. But using a traditional ATS for recruiting is exactly like using Facebook to search the web – relying on a tool never designed with that need in mind.

Remember, recruiters perform in a sales-oriented role. They need to find candidates using data that’s messy and inconsistent. That doesn’t work at all without best-of-breed tools specific to those needs. And those tools are woefully missing from most ATS platforms.

Don’t believe me? Take me up on my challenge:

Access your current recruiting module. Now find five candidates already in your database you can shortlist for a hypothetical Senior Developer position you need to fill, then kick off two assessments and background checks for each.

You have 30 minutes. (Don’t worry. I’ll wait.)

…

Not so easy, huh? And even if you find a candidate to hire, can you complete an offer for approval in the next 10 minutes?

SmartRecruiters clients work this quickly and easily every single day. That’s because they didn’t simply check the “recruiting” box when evaluating a new ATS. And they know that recruiting is far more essential to business success when the competition for top talent is so fierce.

If your ATS wasn’t up to my challenge, don’t worry. Help is on the way. Just get in touch with us so you can take advantage of best-of-breed talent acquisition right away.

Think about this: recruiting is the only public facing HR function. They interface with millions of candidates each year. and all of those candidates matter. According to 2015 research by The Talent Board:

33% of candidates with a negative experience intended to share the news publicly via social media.

41% of candidates who had a poor overall experience intended to take their loyalty elsewhere.

The user experience on your career site is a case in point – it has a direct impact on how people feel about your company. The stakes are even higher if you’re a B2C company where any candidate is just a few clicks away from being your next customer. Like it or not, the CHRO has an obligation to support the brand and provide a candidate experience that properly reflects it in the market.

Here are the symptoms you need to be aware of in regards to a career site that turns away candidates and customers:

Over the last five years there’s been a surge in companies purchasing “talent network” software. The popularity stems primarily from companies with an old applicant tracking system (ATS) or a recruiting product provided by their:

• Human Resource Management System (HRMS)
• Human Capital Management (HCM) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Talent Management Suite

(This Includes products from Oracle, IBM, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.)

These legacy systems never kept up with the rest of the consumer web on user experience. Left with a career site stuck in the 90s, it’s no wonder employers have looked for solutions from vendors servicing this niche.

In theory it sounds great. These vendors promise a modern career site that checks the box for mobile and social. However, when you take a step back and look at the job application journey, a very different story emerges.

BAIT AND SWITCH

The candidate starts their journey on your new, slick, mobile optimized career site, likely from their mobile device (in a 2014 study by Kelton Research 70% of candidates said they wanted to apply via mobile phone). The candidate searches for jobs and find the one they like.

So far so good.

But now things get wonky. They click ‘Apply’ and a pop up page appears asking for their name, email address, and resume (oftentimes more). At this point the candidate thinks they’re applying for the job when in reality the company is just capturing them as a ‘lead’ before redirecting them to the next page; the dreadful job posting on their ATS. Often times this step actually discloses to the candidate that they haven’t actually “applied” but they’ve merely “joined their Talent Network”. As if the candidate is supposed to know what that even means.

Careerbuilder

Jobs2Web/SuccessFactors

MOBILE? SORT OF

So far the candidate experience has worked well on the phone. The career site is mobile responsive so they’re feeling good about the experience. Now that the candidate has filled in the Talent Network form they click Next. Are they done applying?

Nope, not even close.

This is where it gets ugly. Because where you just sent them – the lame, unbranded job ad on the career site your ATS provided you – doesn’t work on their phone. Not to mention you now require them to create a username and password (who needs another one of those?) and they can’t use a social profile like LinkedIn instead of their resume. Who stores their resume on their phone?

Redirected to Oracle’s Taleo ATS

In a world where the human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish this is where 60-80% of them abandon the process (according to recent research by Careerbuilder and iMomentous). But WAIT! you say… thank goodness for my Talent Network because I now have their name and email address. Which brings me to the next point.

SPAM

Thanks to your talent network you’ve captured the candidate’s name and email address before they bailed out on your wonky talent-network-redirected-to-ATS experience.

Congratulations, you can now harass/spam their email address until they either unsubscribe or finally go back and complete their application when they have an extra 30 minutes while sitting at a desktop computer.

And recruiters wonder why they’re forced to go outbound to search for quality candidates. Your career site isn’t optimized to support a quality inbound applicant flow. It’s clear that while trying to solve for one problem – a bad career site provided by the ATS vendor – a new problem surfaces.

If we’re really honest with ourselves and this talent network thing, maybe the disclosure we provide candidates should just say:

Sarcasm aside, how is this acceptable in a world where anyone can book airfare and check into their flight from a mobile phone in less time than it takes them to apply to a job? Do you think your CEO or CMO would run a potential customer through a similar process? No, because they never want to write advertising checks their website can’t cash.

Would you complete a purchase on your mobile phone with this kind of experience? Not a chance. So why is it ok for HR?

In a crowded and disruptive world where brands fight each other tooth and nail trying to break through the noise, HR isn’t doing marketing any favors. CHROs should take a lesson from CMOs and understand that they can’t treat candidates any differently than they would potential customers – they’re often times one in the same.

Stop kidding yourselves that your 1990s ATS is OK. Or somehow that your all-in-one HRMS or Talent Management Suite is going to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing.

They won’t, the space moves too fast.

In this day and age getting left behind means losing ground to competitors on your ability to acquire the most important driver of your company’s growth – talent.

Thankfully there are more modern Talent Acquisition Suites that natively solve for this like SmartRecruiters and others. With them, you can stop throwing good money at bad experiences, and actually deliver a socially connected, natively mobile candidate experience that properly reflects your brand and values. That’s a big, important win for any CHRO and CMO alike.

It’s a new year and that means it’s time to learn from the successes and failures of 2016 by setting a fresh strategy for 2017. That means matching what you want to accomplish internally, against possible external market forces like technology shifts, behavioral shifts, supply and demand shifts, and more.

Which of these factors will help or hinder you from reaching your goals? Based on research and feedback from hundreds of SmartRecruiters customers, below are the most important things to consider as you formulate your strategy for 2017:

AGILITY

Markets like stability. The Brexit Vote and The Election of Donald Trump may create uncertainty and volatility in the market. People will wonder what the results from these two unforeseen events will bring. So be prepared to be agile in your strategy. Outlooks will change from month to month and quarter to quarter as businesses try to place their bets accordingly. That might mean hiring spikes in one month followed by quick and reactive slow downs the next. If you’re running recruiting at a multinational company, expect this to be even more pronounced as the European and emerging markets may feel the most impact. 2017 could feel like a rollercoaster ride, so brace yourselves and be prepared to shift at a moment’s notice.

MILLENNIALS

In 2015, they became the largest population in the workforce and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. Put aside the cultural differences and understand that this is the first generation of digital natives: they were born connected to the Internet on handheld devices. What this means is that they expect the technology they use in the workplace to be as user friendly as what they use in their personal lives. So when they visit your old career site that doesn’t work on their phone and asks them to spend more than 10 minutes applying to a job… you’ve lost them. Make 2017 the year you closely examine your digital apply experience and make the move to the 21st century.

DIGITAL MARKETING

The drum beat that “recruiting is marketing” has been played for years now but it still seems like only the top 5-10% of recruiting leaders are embracing it. In 2017, venture outside your HR/recruitment world and attend some marketing conferences and webinars to learn from the pros. The world of marketing is moving fast and the cost to play like the big boys is coming down considerably.

Recruiting conferences, while generally pretty good, merely scratch the surface for what’s possible in how you optimize your digital footprint for employer branding and candidate lead generation. The Marketing Insider Group published a great 2017 calendar of marketing events here. Go to at least one of them and then consider the strategies they’re deploying in the context of recruiting, then make a habit of it. You’ll be thankful you did and it will do wonders for your career in the coming decade.

COLLABORATION

We’re hearing a lot about “hiring manager engagement” these days. Maybe it’s not a surprise given that when Bersin by Deloitte published their “High Performance Talent Acquisition” study in 2014, they found the highest impact on high performance recruiting was collaboration with hiring managers. In fact, it was more impactful than all the remaining findings in their study combined.

In 2017, make a dent in improving how you work with hiring managers, paying special attention to where you can become a strategic advisor rather than an order taker. Strategic advisors educate their hiring managers on the market conditions, where the best talent is, how much they should make, how long it will take to find someone great, etc.

Strategic advisors also hold their hiring managers accountable, so measure their engagement and responsiveness so you can easily and quickly identify where there are bottlenecks. Of course having the right data makes all the difference in the world which brings us to the last point.

DATA

It’s common knowledge now that companies that rely on data driven decisions significantly outperform those that don’t. Start off 2017 with a clear idea on what data matters the most to impacting performance and then measure, measure, measure. At a high level, here are some ideas:

1. Sourcing Analytics: understand in real time what sourcing and marketing channels are working so you can optimize the top of your recruiting funnel.
2. Pipeline Analytics: understand your process conversion rates and time in stage/step so you can build a predictable and repeatable talent acquisition machine.
3. Forecasting Analytics: your value is derived from whether jobs are getting filled on time, so that the required employee capacity is in place for the company to hit its goals (this is most obvious in sales recruiting). Understand your hiring plan and how you are performing against that plan in terms of % of fills on time.

I know there are many more than what is listed above, and we’d love to hear what you’re thinking about as you enter 2017. Please share in the comments section below!

In case you’ve been living under a rock these past few days or can’t come unglued from your post election Facebook feed, you may have missed that Amazon just announced the opening of a grocery store without a checkout line. Let me repeat that: the opening of a grocery store without a checkout line! The simplicity and power of that statement is magical.

Here’s the thinking and strategy: the biggest waste of time in shopping is the checkout process. Remove that part of the experience and you’ve completely disrupted the grocery store market. It’s easier said than done of course. There’s some serious tech underneath the hood. Amazon calls it “Just Walk Out Technology”, a mash up of computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion. You can watch their demo video here.

But how does this relate to recruiting? A little disruption can give you and your team big returns in finding and hiring the best talent.

The biggest disruptions ultimately solve very basic but widespread problems. Uber is another example. It ultimately doesn’t really matter if Uber or your local taxi company drives you to the airport. But Uber made the user experience better by providing an app, a map, and eliminating the frustration of payment at the end. By making the process much more efficient and engaging, they’ve enjoyed explosive customer adoption and growth. I suspect Amazon Go will experience the same as they open more stores.

In the context of recruiting, your “customer” is the candidate and the hiring teams you support. Just like the checkout line and paying for a taxi, disruption can happen at very basic but prolific pain points in the hiring process. When you solve those problems you too can experience explosive levels of “customer” adoption, engagement, and satisfaction.

Interview scheduling is a perfect example of an opportunity to disrupt. It’s an extremely painful, inefficient process for recruiters, coordinators, interviewers, and candidates alike. If you make that process more efficient and enjoyable, your customers will be far more engaged and happier, which ultimately makes your life as a recruiter much easier and more productive. There are a host of inefficient points in the recruiting process that are ripe for this – getting interview feedback from hiring teams, ordering background checks, putting together offer letters and getting them signed, etc.

Too often when we’re looking for a new ATS, we prioritize what we perceive to be the shiny new tools. Take a lesson from how Amazon, Uber, and others disrupt markets and solve, at disruptive levels of usability, the basics that affect the most important people – your customers. When building your requirements start by identifying all those points of inefficiency in your process and make those a priority over everything else. You’ll end up having built a solid foundation with the building blocks from which to grow, innovate, and prosper for many years to come.

Remember, at the end of the day, Amazon Go is still a store and Uber is still a ride to the airport. They just do it so much better than everyone else and their customers love them for it.

Hosted at Chicago’s McCormick Place, this year’s HR Tech is going to be as exciting as ever. The show itself should prove again that HR tech is hot, as investors continue to pour money into the talent acquisition space. Not only that, it will showcase some amazing innovations around how employers can leverage technology to better find, engage, and hire talent.

So as you shop for new Talent Acquisition tools, below are five key requirements you should look for when looking for a new Applicant Tracking System. So buckle up, enjoy Chicago, and hit the show floor to find your next piece of recruiting software:

CRM

Candidate Relationship Management is where the heavy lifting is done and a majority of the recruiting value is added to your business. Put simply, it’s where technology supports a company’s ability to better source and attract top talent. CRMs became popular in the mid and late-2000’s as add-ons to the legacy Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) like Taleo and Kenexa Brassring. With today’s modern ATS, CRM is no longer an add-on – It’s native to your system’s architecture, workflows, and User Experience.

Collaboration

Let’s not forget that the legacy ATS was built to run a compliant hiring process back when Human Resources was called the “Personnel Department”. In those days the real recruiting work was done by third party staffing agencies. As employers built internal recruiting teams, the function evolved into something much more strategic (even changing its name to “talent acquisition”) with specialized roles around research, sourcing, and coordination. Talent Acquisition has become a high-value service delivery department that requires intense collaboration between hiring managers, interviewers, coordinators, sourcers, and recruiters. The modern ATS will leverage native collaboration tools to add speed to the hiring process and ensure consistent quality in your hiring decisions.

A Marketplace

How many third party vendors do you need to integrate to run your performance management process? Probably none. However, recruiting is different. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of vendors today adding serious value and competitive advantages at every stage of the recruiting funnel. Sourcing tools, advertising channels, assessments, video interviews, background checks, and the list goes on. Leveraging these tools to optimize your hiring process is the right decision for your organization. However, not integrating them into your ATS slows everything down and causes recruiters and hiring teams to get overwhelmed. The modern ATS makes consuming these tools as easy as downloading apps on your phone. They should have a marketplace with hundreds of these vendors pre-integrated and a seamless part of the user interface.

A Platform

Salesforce.com, the world’s leading CRM system, became the sales and marketing OS when they launched the “Force.com” platform. At that point, it was game over for companies like Siebel and Oracle, and they never caught up. It was a moment of strategic brilliance in the history of B2B software. HR tech is catching on. The modern ATS should be an open platform with published API’s (ask to see the vendors developer site) that allows it to easily connect to other cloud applications. They’ll also have a developer program that allows you to build your own apps on top of it. Even if you don’t plan to develop your own apps, or have the resources to do it internally, the cost of doing so is coming down so don’t rule it out. Having a true platform should also tell you something about the ATS vendor’s foresight and vision.

Usability

User experience has quickly risen to the top of the list for most company’s requirements. It matters a lot: a shift to strategic talent acquisition falls flat on its face when the hiring teams won’t use the hiring software. The future of your workforce won’t stand for applications that clearly look like something their grandparents used, require hours of training, don’t work on their phones, nor have an accompanying native mobile app. And the candidates you want to hire have a lower attention span than a goldfish. Therefore, you have to provide them with an easy way to apply from any device and using whatever social profile they choose.

Have a great time walking the floor and be sure to stop by the SmartRecruiters booth #1636 where we’ll be giving away Amazon Echos and Trackrs, and giving demos that highlight all of the above. And as an added bonus, we’ll all be in Chicago when the Cubs start a *possible* historical run to the World Series – even if you can’t buy a ticket to the live game, go watch one at one of Wrigleyville’s famous bars like The Cubby Bear or Murphy’s.

See you in Chicago!

HR has made great strides in getting a “seat at the table”. Why? One reason is that CEOs consistently rank finding top talent as critical to the future of their businesses. They need a strong business partner “at the table” to drive the company recruiting agenda. But having a seat at the table means knowing your success numbers in the same way sales, marketing, and finance leaders do.

While more sophisticated talent acquisition departments may have hundreds of reports around recruiting – along with the business intelligence tools and analysts to support them – they tend to be the minority. So to help the rest of you get that coveted “seat at the table”, here are three key metrics that will link your recruiting work to the bottom line, and give CEOs a stronger reason to invest in your TA department.

1. Sourcing Metrics

A company’s recruiting budget is usually spent on headcount first followed by sourcing and marketing tools, channels, and programs. Candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing is a decent chunk of anyone’s recruiting budget.

Because you’re spending a lot, you need to understand the effectiveness of each of the channels you’re using: your company career site, job boards, LinkedIn Recruiter seats, niche sites, referrals, alumni networks, etc. You need to understand how these channels work for what types of jobs and locations so you can optimize your budget accordingly.

Sadly, this can be a hassle for companies as they hustle to manually cobble together data from multiple systems each year. This is all just to see what worked and then plan accordingly for the next 12 months. Unfortunately, this is not agile enough to be effective. In other words, you’re wasting money – maybe a lot of money – by blindly investing your advertising dollars until you get to see how it worked at the next anniversary of your reporting cycle. Our data science team has this data across over 750 SmartRecruiters customers – and you’d be surprised by the results. Millions and millions of dollars are wasted every year on sourcing and advertising that was never going to perform well in the first place.

Alternatively, when you have a recruiting software platform that is connected to all of your candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing channels combined with hiring teams using a consistent, quantifiable candidate scoring model (like a 5 star rating system), you can now measure both the volume of candidates entering the top of your funnel and the quality of those candidates. And by having access to that information in real time there’s no more wasted budget.

2. Pipeline Metrics

These metrics tell you how well your process is working: what’s the throughput in your hiring process? What are your conversion percentages from one stage to the next, and how long does each stage take? You’ll also want to see this data divided by department, division, location, hiring manager, recruiter, etc. For example, if you have a stage in your hiring process where you hand the candidate off to a hiring manager to review, it’s important to know if those candidates sit in that stage for too long. If so, it can unnecessarily slow down your process and make you less competitive in the market.

With this information, you can start to implement and measure an SLA across hiring teams. The trick, of course, is to make sure that all stakeholders in the hiring process – recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers – have access to the applicant tracking system (ATS) to provide their feedback. You’ll also want your ATS to be intuitive and simple to use. Why would you want a cumbersome interface to become a burden on the user (or on your training team)? Without that, you end up where many are today: with what I call “zero days to fill” syndrome – the actual hiring process happens outside your system, via excel and email, where it can’t be measured.

3. Hiring Plan Metrics

These metrics tell you how well you are doing against a forecasted, budgeted hiring plan. Are you meeting the hiring goals set forth by the business, and are you reaching those on time?

An overall time-to-fill number is interesting, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The key is to properly forecast how long it will take to hire someone in the first place. Ultimately, harder to fill roles naturally take longer. You’ll need to understand when your company needs those people in place in order to meet the business objectives. This is what the CEO and CFO want to know because this is precisely where revenue intersects with recruiting execution. When positions go unfilled for longer than forecasted, teams tend to go out to staffing agencies where expensive placement fees are paid (and it’s hard to justify a TA function when most filled jobs come with hefty placement fees).

However, there is a real cost to the productivity of the business; take your revenue per employee per day (total revenue divided by the number of employees divided by 260 working days in a year) and then multiply that times the number of days past the due date for that new hire and you start to see the impact. Let’s use an example of a company with 1,000 new hires a year and $250,000 in annual revenue per employee. If that company only hits it’s hiring plan on time 50% of the time, and misses it on average by 5 days, the loss of productivity/revenue to the business is $2.4M. If that same company hits the hiring plan goals 75% of the time they pick up another $1.2M in productivity/revenue. That’s a lot of money!

This is also a great metric to help recruiting leaders show ROI for their initiatives and programs, as long as you can demonstrate how and what you need funded to move the needle.

There are endless metrics in any business, but oftentimes it helps to boil it down to just a few. Understanding WHERE we find the best people, how efficiently we PROCESS those people through our pipeline, and whether we are meeting the demands of the business by hiring the talent they need ON TIME tells us quite a bit about how well our talent acquisition function is performing. It also gives us a good idea of where we need to improve it going forward.

If you’re interested in learning more and taking a look at some of the industry benchmark data around these three metrics, contact us here.

San Francisco, CA – In a recent study published by the US Department of Candidate Experience and Employer Branding the department states that 89% of 100,000 job applicants polled in a 2014 study said applying to jobs had become too easy.  While the world’s news is delivered in 140 character sound bites on sites like Twitter and Internet based software has made everything from shopping to ordering food online incredibly easy, apparently people are looking to spend more time and effort on a job application.

“When we looked at the data it was very clear to us that candidates wanted to fill out more forms and visit more web pages,” said Margaret Deacon, Co-chairwoman of the study, “most of them were hoping for longer page load times too.”

“I applied to the job using my LinkedIn profile,” said Stanley Czarpansky, a survey participant from Kenosha, Wisconsin, “It was ridiculous! One click and I was done. Where the hell was the form with all of the screening questions and stuff? It was all over so damn fast.”

Deacon added that the news is good for employers on older recruiting systems called “applicant tracking systems” or an ATS as it’s known in the recruiting and HR industry. She went on to note that candidates also heavily favored using sites on their smartphone that were not optimized for mobile devices.

“It’s become clear that applicants really enjoy using their two fingers to zoom in and out on the page. It simultaneously challenges their eyesight and dexterity, allowing them to showcase some of their core strengths during the apply process,” stated Deacon.

The study concludes by noting that 26% of the respondents never completed their application process because the speed and ease was perceived as “too scary”, noting that they longed for the days of 30-minute online applications and never hearing from anyone at the company after applying.

“I clicked on an ad on Google,” said Marcia Davis of Eureka, California, “and I was terrified. I stared at the LinkedIn button on the job for like 10 minutes and walked away in cold sweats. I couldn’t believe that an employer would have the audacity of making it that easy for me. It’s scary stuff. You know I mean?”

Added Mike Reynolds of Elev8, LLP, a Chicago, IL based human resources consulting firm, “I’m not surprised by the results. These applicants have a lot of extra time in their day. We’re doing them a disservice by giving them back too much of that. It’s scary to think what they’d do with it.”

If you’re looking for a copy of the study, get in line. So is everyone else. If you want to join the No-ATS movement, our 3,000+ customers are happy to have you join them.

I recently made a decision and a career choice, which some considered to be bold. I made a decision to join SmartRecruiters as their Chief Sales Officer. So why did I join? There are really 3 primary reasons:

1. The People
2. The Product
3. The Market Opportunity

People: This is a very talented and incredible team from the top down, with a crystal clear vision and a well defined set of values that everyone in the company rallies behind. Each of the Leaders of SmartRecruiters previously built and scaled businesses into multi-million and multi-billion dollar valuations.  I’ve had the good fortune to be part of some amazing technology growth stories and they always start with great teams of people.  We have that here.

Product: We all know that recruiting is competitive and with any competition there are winners and losers.  With the current pace of technical disruption in the market you cannot afford to be unsuccessful in your hiring. The legacy applicant tracking system was never designed to make recruiting better or achieve any level of hiring success.  SmartRecruiters has taken a completely re-imagined view of recruiting in creating the Hiring Success Platform.  One look at it and you’re blown away by how simple it is to use yet so powerful as an enterprise class recruiting platform.

Market Opportunity: There is no doubt in my mind that the next $1B+ company in the Human Capital Management category will be in the recruiting space.  There’s a reason investors are chasing so many deals in the talent acquisition technology segment. SmartRecruiters President and COO Brett Queener spent the last 10 years growing salesforce.com.  When I met him and Jerome (CEO) we all agreed that there are so many similarities in the current ATS market and the CRM market that Salesforce so successfully disrupted during his tenure. There is absolutely no question that SmartRecruiters represents the next generation of recruiting application and that’s something every buyer in this space is looking for.

Let me close by saying the amount of disconnect between what a successful recruiter needs vs. what they are forced to use in an applicant tracking system couldn’t be bigger. And as talent acquisition’s profile in the enterprise has been elevated over the past 10 years a majority of companies have added bolt on solutions to their ATS in an attempt to meet critical business needs. Examples include solutions for sourcing (CRM), job distribution, mobile candidate interfaces, scheduling, social employee referrals, database search functionality, and the list goes on and on. While there are so many issues with this approach, the biggest fundamental challenge is that the ATS was never really engineered to deliver any amount of success in recruiting.

At SmartRecruiters, we’ve built a Hiring Success Platform that encompasses all of these things plus a lot more, on a single, unified talent acquisition platform that can scale to meet the demands of the largest of employers throughout the world.

If you are ready to stop tracking applicants and start collaborating enterprise-wide to hire great people, I invite you take a look at SmartRecruiters. It might be one of the best decisions you make this year.

Wishing you a successful 2015!