chapter seven

The Power of Extensibility

The ATS you ultimately decide upon will best fit your recruiting and hiring process needs. However, take a step further and think about what else you might need to elevate your TA function. Sourcing? Recruitment marketing? Candidate Assessment? Onboarding?

In fact, 83% of recruiters indicated that they take a multi-solution approach to attract higher quality talent; however, 64% still believe they do not have the right digital tools in place to make their job easier. “Today’s strong economy is increasing the overall demand for talent, so recruiters are under tremendous pressure,” said Bob Melk, Chief Commercial Officer at Monster. “That underscores the need for an integrated recruitment strategy spanning the entire candidate lifecycle—from employment branding to social recruiting and engagement tools.”

For every step of the recruiting process, there are a number of tools to help you succeed. Based on your company’s needs, you may need a variety. The illustration sourced by Harver below represents a broad look at the current recruitment technology landscape and available solutions in the market.

Recruitment Tech Stack

recruitment tech stack

Sourcing

  • ClickIQ allows you to reach candidates on job boards and social networks.
  • VONQ uses data to pinpoint the best media channels to promote open jobs.
  • Joveo is a click-to-hire tool for advertising across job boards, search, social, and display.
  • CareerArc helps you recruit employees and build employer brands on social media sites.
  • Recruitment Edge allows you to search for candidates with specific skills.
  • HiringSolved automates candidate matching to find the most qualified job seekers.
  • TalentBin is a talent search engine that finds candidates where they’re active online.

Recruitment Marketing

  • Jibe helps engage candidates with personalized career sites and an optimized application experience.
  • Smashfly lets you revamp career sites and make the most of recruiting events.
  • Beamery helps nurture passive candidates and build attractive marketing engines.
  • Phenom People lets you create personalized career sites and manage the entire candidate pipeline.
  • Our own platform, SmartRecruiters, has a built-in CRM that enables you to organize large recruitment campaigns or pipeline for evergreen positions ensuring that whenever you’re ready to hire, a pool of qualified candidates are at your fingertips.

Screening and Interviewing

  • Hireability scrapes CVs and extracts relevant candidate data.
  • Textkernel parses CVs to match qualified candidates with open jobs.
  • SparkHire helps screen job candidates with on-demand video interviews.
  • HireVue leverages AI and video to gain helpful candidate insights.

Skills Assessment Tools

  • Criteria Corp offers a variety of web-based aptitude, personality, and basic skills tests that assess a wide number of traits and abilities.
  • Harver allows you to build a custom candidate experience with videos and interactive gamified assessments.
  • Hundred5 pre-qualifies candidates by using different filters in the job application process.
  • Pymetrics matches qualified candidates to opportunities with neuroscience games and bias-free algorithms.

Onboarding

  • Click Boarding combines form management and onboarding tasks into a flexible and engaging solution.
  • BambooHR allows you to create welcome emails and automate new hire paperwork.
  • Enboarder creates personalized onboarding and learning experiences for new hires.
  • Talmundo offers a unique pre-boarding and onboarding solution that engages employees early on in the process.

SmartRecruiters is connected to nearly 70% of available recruiting point solutions in the global market, offering our users near-limitless innovation. There is no “perfect system” that meets the needs of companies of every size, industry, and business model, making platform extensibility a key feature for any modern talent acquisition suite. Today’s vast recruiting technology market enables you to build a recruitment tech stack tailor-made to meet your unique needs and challenges. While this may appear intimidating, delaying the process only costs your business in the long term.

Choosing a New Solution: Risks Versus Rewards

Making a Plan of Action

It can seem daunting to collect all the information needed to begin the process. Here are some ideas to get started:

  • Talk to at least one person— ideally a handful of people—from each team that uses your recruiting tools (including hiring managers) to get honest feedback.
  • Speak to colleagues at companies in a similar industry/of a similar size to learn what tools have been effective for them.
  • Attend recognized industry conferences (HR Tech, Unleash, Hiring Success, etc.) and learn from the best!

You may be thinking what many TA practitioners thought before you: what we have now isn’t working, but it would be even worse to start over. The reality is that when you sacrifice great for good you’re compromising your ROI. Better hires could be made and goals could be hit faster, both of which deliver hiring success and translate to financial gains for your company.

Also, consider that this doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You can upgrade your tools in stages, prioritizing areas where you’re feeling the most pain, or you predict will have the biggest impact. At SmartRecruiters, we created a guide on how to prioritize recruiting technologies based on where you are and what type of transformation would offer the most benefit to your organization.

When you have your action plan ready and know which upgrades will best improve your team’s productivity and candidate experience, it’s time to assess vendors as you review the market.

Selecting a new ATS may require you to shop around and compare products. What’s important is that you choose your technology with care by finding a product that helps your team streamline its workflow, hire with more accuracy, and find the talent that your company needs to succeed.

Hiring Success in Action Expanding the Recruitment Tech Stack to Attract Gen Z

restaurants iconRestaurants
employees icon85,000+ Employees

Earlier this year, the world’s largest fast food restaurant chain sought to improve their recruitment marketing campaign in order to attract more Gen Z candidates. They partnered with SnapChat and SmartRecruiters to carry out this initiative. They called it a “Snapplication,” a simple, 30-second Snap that was then sent as a talent lead directly to relevant talent communities set up within the SmartRecruiters Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) product. The company then launched a recruitment marketing campaign in Canada that allowed the Gen Z demographic to record themselves through SnapChat and apply for a job during a one-day virtual recruiting event.

The system then routed the Snapplication to nearby stores as actual job applications for screening and interview scheduling. As one of the largest employers of youth in the country, the fast food enterprise successfully captured their target candidates’ attention with this innovative application process. The campaign went viral, and the company received nearly 10,000 Snapplications in 48 hours—enough to fill the talent pipeline at 1,200 stores throughout Canada and resulted in over 1,100 new hires.

Tech Stack to Attract Gen Z

10 Key Takeways

  1. Ongoing partnership and communication with your technology provider allows your business to continually optimize and improve through the transformation process.
  2. Long-term project adoption should include efforts around maintaining strong user adoption, training new employees, and identifying new opportunities for deeper engagement.
  3. If the customer relationship is not proactively managed following launch, user adoption can drop significantly, resulting in lost productivity.
  4. Working with external products or systems separate from your main TA solution hinders data collection and accurate reporting, which detracts from overall ROI.
  5. Consider annual training sessions to keep new and current users up-to-date on basic training, best practices, and updates from the latest product releases.
  6. Customer Success Managers should be leveraged as strategic advisors who can help guide your team on how to adapt as your business grows.
  7. Check in on your overall progress by revisiting your metrics to assess if you’ve successfully leveled up your capabilities, or if more investment is required.
  8. Predictive analytics can mean the difference between a reactive hiring strategy and a proactive hiring strategy—choose a TA suite that can capture and analyze this data.
  9. Platform extensibility is an important feature to look for in a modern talent acquisition suite, as you might discover that you need additional tools for sourcing, recruitment marketing, assessments, onboarding, etc. to enhance your TA function.
  10. When you sacrifice great for good you’re compromising your ROI—don’t settle for technology solutions that can’t deliver what your business needs.