The global trend of high inflation and low unemployment has been particularly acute in Germany.  Impacts from the war in Ukraine include supply chain disruptions and high energy costs. As talent acquisition leaders seek to win over scarce talent against this economic backdrop, they’ve been thinking more creatively about improving the candidate experience and using technology to streamline recruiting.

To better understand German hiring trends, I sat down with Dennis Böcker, Vice President of DACH at SmartRecruiters. As the regional lead for SmartRecruiters, he is responsible for 60+ employees living in Germany and he actively engages with the local talent acquisition community by participating in both intimate executive roundtables and large-scale events like Zukunft Personal.

Building relationships improves the candidate experience 

“Right now, companies understand that proactively building candidate relationships is an important piece in the whole recruiting lifecycle,” Dennis said. In Germany, hiring timelines are longer than many other nations due to employment contracts and Works Council (Betriebsrat) approvals. In more optimistic times, people were eager to change jobs, but the current economic climate has made people more risk-averse. “Potential candidates might not be ready to leave for a few years,” Dennis said. “When companies stay in touch by updating them with valuable information that makes the company more interesting, they build relationships for the future.”

Globally recognized name brands like Metro, Continental and Sixt are finding it harder to attract talent. “Big brands are getting creative,” Dennis said. “They can no longer rely on candidates to come to them.” Offline advertising with QR codes is one approach; another approach is using a CRM to communicate with candidates. “The CRM is where marketing, sales, and recruiting come together,” said Dennis. “In challenging times, people need trust, and trust is built through relationships. A relationship is built on communication.” When the CRM is linked with the ATS, every interaction is trackable, helping companies justify the ROI of recruitment marketing activities and optimize their spending over time.

Optimizing systems for the current market

Setting up the technology to accommodate the new market demands has become a new focus for companies. “Mature companies have made a clear cut between internal HR systems and external recruiting,” Dennis said. “Endless recruiting add-ons to an HR suite do not provide a strong foundation for the future.” 

Among all generations, there is a growing expectation that business technology should be as easy to use as consumer technology. “Recruiters don’t want to jump between five different solutions and copy and paste candidate data all the time,” Dennis said. After all that extra administrative work, he said, “they can still end up without any numbers for useful analytics.” 

German businesses with a global presence face the challenge of implementing consistent processes across regions, many of which require different tools. PACCOR, a global packaging manufacturer based in Germany, implemented SmartRecruiters in 17 countries and saw the benefits of using an integrated recruiting system almost immediately. Marcel Rütten, their former Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding, said in a customer story, “we can view the process from the time someone visits a job ad or our career site. We know 99% of our source of hire, the performance of every team member, and can see the bottlenecks per job family or location.”

An open mindset for the future of recruiting

I wanted to know what German companies that choose SmartRecruiters have in common. “They have an open mindset,” Dennis said. “There is an openness to building relationships, taking a creative approach, doing more than just administrative recruiting. They are open to change because they recognize the need to do something different than they are currently doing.”

German SmartRecruiters customer Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH is a great example of acting with an open mindset. Their Talent Attraction team worked closely with IT to integrate SmartRecruiters with SAP, Works Council requirements, SSO, and Tableau. After a huge reduction in administrative upkeep thanks to these integrations, Claudia Model, Manager, Talent Attraction, National Media & Tech at Axel Springer SE said in our customer story, “It’s fun to work on new solutions and integrations with IT, HR, and hiring managers.”

If you’ve ever met Dennis—or anyone on the SmartRecruiters team—in person, you’ll understand that it’s possible to have fun taking on technical challenges when you work with the right people. Dennis likes to keep in touch with customers after they sign on with SmartRecruiters. “Every single time, they will tell me, ‘the people made the difference,’” he said. “This is something we can be proud of.” 

It’s not only candidates that companies need to build relationships with, but also their technology partners. Dennis added, “In the end, everything is about relationships.” No matter where you live, in these times of great change, trust is a s

To get started on opening your mind to what SmartRecruiters can do for you, check out our German website or sign up for a free demo.

The post How German Companies are Getting Proactive about the Candidate Experience first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

The contagious global uncertainty of the last several years has a unique flavor in the United States: political polarization, a reckoning around race, rampant layoffs in tech, and bank failures. At the same time, unemployment is low and some industries are experiencing a talent shortage. Economic fears mean that many talent acquisition leaders are being asked to do more with less – and justify everything through metrics, which they may or may not have.

Against this backdrop, I wanted to get a fresh take on what’s going on in the recruitment tech landscape in the United States. It turns out that sales leaders have a strong line of sight into what’s not working; companies seek a new solution when things become untenable with the old one. One surprising finding of my conversations with SmartRecruiters’ two North American sales leaders, Armando Villa, Vice President, Commercial Enterprise Sales, and Patrick Harris, Vice President, Enterprise Sales, is that early-stage sales conversations can be like therapy sessions.

Armando, who happens to be the son of a therapist, said, “before getting into the tech evaluation, people need to talk about their challenges. What makes them happy, what makes them frustrated? Once we’ve built trust, we can find a common thread to work together.”

The crisis of trust

In these times of polarization, there’s no more important word than trust. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, “business is the sole institution seen as competent and ethical; by contrast, Government is viewed as unethical and incompetent.”

Business is a stunning 53 points ahead of Government on perception of competence and 29 points ahead on ethics. 

When it comes to enterprise technology decisions, the search for trust takes many forms and comes with many risks. Companies may get sold a great story on a new solution and find the implementation or post-sales support lacking. That’s why buyers tend to rely on ratings or analyst reviews from TrustRadius and IDC, and look for customer references and case studies that prove that the experience on the inside is as good as the view from the outside.

Systems contribute to mistrust

TA leaders are looking for new solutions for good reason. “Companies run into limitations with their applicant tracking system,” said Patrick Harris. “Often it’s over-customized, or people in different places are using different systems. There’s no standardization and it’s hard to get good reporting.” That reporting is critical to enabling leaders to get that elusive seat at the table and justify the cost of their investments to the C-Suite. “When everyone is doing things differently, there’s no way to benchmark or find data that you could leverage to make better decisions,” Patrick continued.

The Hiring Success Business Assessment is one tool companies can use to get a take on where they sit on the continuum of talent acquisition maturity. “It comes down to people, process, and technology,” Armando explained. “Do they have the right people in place? Can the people do the jobs they’re being asked to do? Are their processes the most efficient for where they are today? And is the technology stack in front of them doing what it needs to do?” Too often, he sees companies with hiring processes that exist “because we’ve always done it that way,” without any current thinking behind them.

Applying technology to problems without adjusting the people and processes is a danger zone. And even when they get the people and processes right, it can be hard to manage the tech. As recruitment tech stacks have burgeoned, there’s a new desire to consolidate systems. “It’s not that they don’t need or get value out of their systems,” Patrick said. “It’s that it’s too expensive and time-consuming to connect all of them.”

Connected systems build trust

In today’s complex TA landscape, new solutions pop up all the time to solve old and new problems. “Companies truly believe they need multiple systems to get what they need, from talent attraction to post-onboarding,” Armando said. “There is no one size fits all. I’m a firm believer that there’s more than one way to get to the right answer.”

SmartRecruiters approaches this reality by offering a core recruitment system that comes with pre-configured integrations to a marketplace of solutions like sourcing, assessments, and background checks. “When you bring everything under one roof,” Patrick said, “you have a single source of truth.” Reporting that covers the whole recruiting funnel allows companies to diagnose roadblocks and adjust budgets and processes when needed. “When everyone’s working in the same system, you’re looking through the same lens,” Patrick said. “Nothing gets lost in translation. You can make better decisions.”

A baseline of data facilitates the transparency that builds trust and creates a foundation for experimentation. In today’s fast-changing market, moving from reactivity to proactivity is a key component to achieving hiring success. “SmartRecruiters provides you the opportunity to pivot and change and adapt more quickly to take advantage of whatever’s happening in the market,” Patrick said. “A flexible system allows you to get in front of trends.” 

The business opportunity to lead with trust

As we navigate through future challenges, the need for greater trust and transparency isn’t going to go away. “Business must lead [in trust] and continue to do so,” say the experts at the Edelman Trust Barometer. How does a business lead in trust? By offering candidates a streamlined process, by fostering transparency among their teams, analyzing accurate data, and building relationships with partners they can trust.

It turns out that the talent acquisition “therapy session” Armando mentioned helps break down the barriers needed for strong business partnerships—on both sides. “Trust is best built through vulnerability and honesty,” said Armando. “It’s a two-way street. I encourage companies that are evaluating vendors to ask us tough questions. Everyone needs to sleep at night knowing they made the best decision for their company.”

If you’re looking for some tough questions to ask, check out our RFP template. It contains over 350 questions you can ask recruitment software vendors to make sure you’re getting the most out of your systems. And you can trust that we’ll answer all the questions on your custom RFP too.

The post How U.S. Talent Acquisition Leaders Can Build Trust in Volatile Times first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere have a unique fascination with countries in the Southern Hemisphere: their seasons are reversed and storms flow in the opposite direction. But are the people and their economic concerns any different just because their summer solstice is in December? To get a take on hiring trends in the Australia-New Zealand region, I sat down with Rich Lewis-Jones, Regional Vice President, APAC at SmartRecruiters. Rich and I share the same December birthday, but he gets to celebrate it in the sunshine while I suffer in the cold and dark.

It turns out the current Australian economy isn’t all sunshine and cuddly koalas: similar to Northern countries, Australia has been hit with high inflation rates, unemployment, and a labor shortage. However, the underlying factors differ: during tight COVID lockdowns and layoffs, the borders closed and immigration stalled. “Lots of people had no choice but to leave because they were on sponsored visas,” Rich said, mentioning talent shortages in industries like manufacturing, hospitality, engineering, and healthcare that depend on foreign labor. “Now hiring is hyper-competitive and Brand Australia is making an effort to encourage people to move here again,” he said.Talent attraction amidst a talent shortage

The effort to attract talent starts with top-of-funnel recruitment marketing activities. “The labor shortage accelerated the need for companies to get creative on where they are attracting talent from,” Rich said. “It’s no longer just about going to transactional places like agencies or job boards. Businesses are working harder on their employer value proposition (EVP) and building intelligent career sites that offer personalized content to increase conversions. They’re connecting candidates to relevant content posted on blogs and sites like GitHub and Reddit. They’re building talent communities through a CRM. Offline, they’re using QR codes.” 

This burst of creativity is facilitated by the connected ecosystem of technologies that make sourcing attribution possible. “In SmartRecruiters, you can track your whole top of funnel,” Rich said. “We act as a single source of truth.” That means candidate data from job boards can be compared against readers of a GitHub post by the CTO or visitors to a recruiting event. Companies get an immediate sense of what’s working and what’s not, a theme echoed by SmartRecruiters Australian customer Kincare. By setting up custom sources and tracking IDs with SmartRecruiters open APIs, KinCare can easily see which job boards net the most hires. The insights on what channels work best and where allow them to optimize sourcing channels, reallocate budget in real time, and spend more efficiently.

A hiring ecosystem drives value

The efficiency gains from a connected technology ecosystem go beyond spending. “Recruiters don’t have to leave our system,” Rich said, “but can continue to plug in best-of-breed solutions as new challenges happen and new categories emerge.” Productivity gains on top of non-existent integration fees make SmartRecruiters a compelling choice for increasingly cost-conscious Australian businesses.

“The average company is using between 5-10 integrations,” Rich said. “If they’re using an HCM recruiting module, they have integration activation costs, annual integration maintenance costs, on-going configuration costs, and the cost of a full-time consultant. A talent acquisition suite like SmartRecruiters can significantly lower their OPEX (operating expenses) by eliminating those fees.”

Rich is a big fan of justifying technology expenditures against core hiring success metrics and their contribution to OPEX. In one recent winning pitch, he built a case that showed the value back to the business if the company increased hiring velocity, net hiring score, and budget. Both a minor adjustment and the best-case scenario yielded substantial cost savings by getting the right people in the door faster.

“Businesses learned the hard way that talent acquisition teams are the core of a business,” Rich said, echoing SmartRecruiters’ founder Jerome Ternynck’s perspective in his book Hiring Success: How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent. “TA teams keep people coming in, help hire quality talent, and help retain talent.” Technology that helps them do their jobs better helps the business overall by providing a great experience. 

“Experience is key for everybody,” Rich said. “It’s not just candidates and recruiters. It’s about employees getting a good experience on internal mobility, it’s about managers being prompted to be able to do their job in the most effective way. Most hiring managers don’t like hiring. When we make it as easy for them as possible to get people in the door, we impact the bottom line.” 

The friendliest people in the world sitting at TA’s table

As it turns out, making it easy for people is core to the Australian ethos. “We’re some of the friendliest people in the world down here,” Rich said. “But we have very high expectations on communication. It’s a culture of high touch.” When companies use technology to create a high-touch recruiting experience by nurturing candidates with automated processes that communicate next steps in the hiring journey, they’re embracing the Australian way. 

The emphasis on relationships extends to the TA community and its events and meetups across the major cities. Talentpalooza and the Internal Talent Awards are a few of the places you’ll find Rich and other folks from SmartRecruiters. “Everybody knows everybody,” Rich said. “They all talk to each other. When there’s something positive, it’s like a pinball machine with all the good balls going off.” 

The good balls right now include hiring teams getting their due. “I just love to see talent acquisition teams having more of a voice and not just a seat at the table, but maybe their own table where CEOs want to come and sit,” Rich said. With a core recruiting system that gives them actionable data that offers real business value, Rich said, “More and more, the C-suite is not just coming to sit, but saying, ‘how can I help you out? How much do you need?’”

The post Australia Hiring Trends: Delivering Value in a Tight-Knit Ecosystem first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

With so many ways to get recruiting wrong, how do you get it right? The growing influence of talent acquisition suggests that investing in recruiter training is one way for organizations to set themselves up for success. Josh Bersin listed “Cherish your recruiters” among his top trends for 2023.  He wrote,

Stop seeing them as just salespeople, and more as trusted advisors who can help decide if a candidate fits your culture, and arm them with powerful tools for sourcing, assessment, and selling you as a brand.

Josh Bersin in HR.com

We agree! Here are four reasons why investing in recruiters is a good idea.

Improve business outcomes. A Josh Bersin Company study found that companies that invest in their recruiting team are 4 times more likely to be leaders in innovation and 4.5 times more likely to achieve high levels of customer retention. That’s a compelling reason to invest in your recruiting team!
Expanded skillsets increase agility. The current decade has shown that change is the only constant. In just a few years, we’ve gone from mass pandemic layoffs to a talent shortage during the Great Resignation and back to mass layoffs again. When recruiters have a wide variety of skills in their toolbox, recruiting organizations can adapt more quickly to market changes. A diversely-skilled recruiting team can switch between activities such as sourcing, employer brand development, or assessment strategies as needs arise. Broadly-skilled recruiters who are experts in all things hiring become trusted partners to the business and add long-term value to your organization.
A positive influence on candidates. Recruiters are on the frontlines of your employer brand; they’re selling your employee experience to potential candidates every day. A dissatisfied recruiting team can influence candidates in subtle ways, while a disorganized hiring team can influence candidates in not-so-subtle ways. Investing in recruiters and elevating their position in the organization helps everyone align around a positive hiring experience–which should translate into a positive employee experience because the right people are in the right jobs.
Strategic positioning for talent acquisition. Empowered recruiters empower their leaders with current market trends, insight into candidates’ mindsets, and data that can both uncover roadblocks to meeting business goals and chart a path to business success. A strong recruiting team shores up a team leader, strengthening the value of their seat at the table.

4 Keys to Investing in Recruiters

What does an organization that invests in its recruiters look like? We spoke with Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, to come up with four key criteria of organizations that invest in their recruiting teams.

Time for upskilling. If recruiters are at 100% capacity, there’s no time left for training, experimentation, or open discussions that could lead to better processes and insights. Recruiters’ capacity needs to be taken into account before implementing any training program.
Ongoing training. What, exactly, do your recruiters need to learn to stay up to date? And what do individual recruiters want to learn? Whether it’s a monthly training session on a new area of recruitment or access to the latest classes on LinkedIn Learning or Social Talent, recruiters are at their best when they feel empowered to learn and discuss what they learn with peers. At Doka, a global formwork and scaffolding company, quarterly trainings help keep recruiters up to date.
Career pathing. As with any role in your organization, recruiters need to know about options for advancement. Career path options will help direct their learnings—and development check-ins will keep their newfound skills with you instead of without you at another company.
Access to modern tools—and the ability to experiment. Advanced recruiting organizations pilot new tools when new situations arise and sunset old tools when they become too cumbersome. Investing in a flexible ecosystem for hiring enables recruiters to adapt to the market so that they can ensure a great candidate experience while attracting the most qualified talent in the current age, not an age long past.

Essential Skillsets for Recruiters in a Strategic TA Function

Expertise with activities such as sourcing, employer branding, and interviewing are a given in recruitment. Allyn Bailey drew our attention to three additional skill areas that will help your recruiting team shine in their ability to become strategic partners to the business. A seat at the table for a talent acquisition leader hinges on a recruitment team that’s good at these three things:

Assessment process. Candidate assessment is the heart of the recruitment process. Exploring new ways to assess candidates through screening questions, AI- and game-based quantitative assessments, and capturing qualitative answers to interview questions helps recruiters strengthen their company’s ability to hire best-fit candidates. 
Data expertise. Leading with data is a requirement for any strategic talent acquisition function. Recruiters need to be able to report on their own activities, contextualize results, and determine the next steps in an informed way. Those newer to reporting may need to start with understanding what data they need to collect to make decisions, how to collect that data, and how to manage that data effectively. Read 6 Steps to a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy to learn more.
Talent analytics. Analytics backed up with labor market data allows recruiters to look across industries, skillsets, and locations to identify sources of talent. This type of intelligence is vital to operating a strategic TA function because it helps leaders come to the table with data-backed insights that can buck long-held assumptions.

A high-functioning recruiting team is just one aspect of leading a strategic TA function. For a deep dive into all the components, download our latest ebook, created in partnership with Allyn and the SmartRecruiters Hiring Success team.

The post Where To Invest in Recruiter Training Now first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Leading a team through a major technology implementation is a career milestone. Implementing a new talent acquisition platform often involves months of preparation and focused coordination of internal and external resources.

Every day, the customer service managers and implementation consultants at SmartRecruiters are busy helping one of our customers get up and running—or helping them evolve their hiring practices to adapt to new conditions. Some of these customers are so happy with the results that they take the extra step of telling their company’s story with SmartRecruiters in hopes that others can learn from their journeys.

If you think the challenge at your company is insurmountable, let the talent acquisition leaders whose stories are shared below prove you wrong. Their can-do spirit helped them achieve wins that included building a TA system from scratch, transforming high-volume hiring, attracting and retaining new talent, and supporting the success of people initiatives. If they can do it, you can too! 

You Can Start From Scratch

When Marcel Rütten joined PACCOR, a global packaging manufacturer, as the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding, the company had no system of record for recruiting. With careful planning, he used the time before SmartRecruiters went live to understand hiring practices in PACCOR’s 24 locations in 17 countries so that the company’s configuration and employer branding could be more effective. In PACCOR Builds Mature Recruiting Ecosystem in Less Than One Year, Marcel summed up the experience this way: 

[SmartRecruiters] gives recruiters and hiring managers everything they need to fill positions and track performance across channels.

 We have increased the maturity level within the whole organization so that everyone is capable and can use every available function. We have full transparency about our needs. We have a clearer picture of our target groups and what we need to say to them from an employer branding perspective. And we know what we need to budget.

Reporting on the full picture of hiring is a must for talent acquisition to have a seat at the table for talent decisions. Marcel’s thoughtful work in that first year set the stage for even greater maturity at PACCOR as the years progress.

You Can Transform High-Volume Recruiting

Frasers Group is a UK-based company that operates iconic brands such as Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Frasers, and FLANNELS. The company hires thousands of retail associates during the holiday season and throughout the year. Its previous system was outdated and not purpose-built for recruiting. Here’s what Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent Acquisition, said in Frasers Streamlines High-Volume Hiring with Automation in SmartRecruiters: 

We found it quite appealing that we could configure the [SmartRecruiters] system to suit all the different needs of what is, in essence, a sprawling estate: 22 countries, 30,000 employees, and 3,000 users of the system.

In the first year with SmartRecruiters, Frasers set a record of 20,000 new hires in one year. Adam added:

It was a game changer to have the templated job profiles, automated messages in our branding and tone of voice, and calendar integration. With the automation inside SmartRecruiters, we can move through high volumes of information from a high volume of candidates in a systematic way.

A great candidate experience is a hallmark of a strategic talent acquisition function. The automated and templated responses help Frasers maintain its reputation in a competitive hiring environment with candidates who are also likely to be customers.

You Can Improve Retention

When Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management, joined Colliers EMEA, a global real estate services and investment management company, SmartRecruiters was already in place, but adoption had slowed since its implementation. Once he started digging into the metrics in partnership with his SmartRecruiters representative, “the lightbulbs started to go off,” he said in an interview. Over time, the data he brought to the table provoked discussions and moved the needle on behaviors that supported better hiring and ultimately improved retention. 

In conjunction with enhancements to its employer brand, Colliers experienced “a massive uplift in candidates,” Ben said in How Colliers EMEA Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. The company began to attract talent from outside its conventional sources. The expansion of skillsets led senior executives to think differently about who Colliers hires, how they hire, and what the company could do to nurture that talent once they turned into employees.

The focus on hiring new types of talent resulted in a big win: Colliers EMEA saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. Ben’s experience sets an example for all TA leaders on how to maximize their seats at the table to achieve an overall talent-centric outcome.

You Can Support People Initiatives

Sustainability

Informa, a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge group, puts a big focus on sustainability. To understand how the company’s credentials as a sustainable business factored into the choice to apply, Ben Wielgus, Head of Sustainability, set up specialized screening questions in SmartRecruiters. In How Informa Uses SmartRecruiters to Measure Sustainability Campaign Success, he said:

Because SmartRecruiters allows us to put the same questions to each candidate and rapidly deploy them to get results at scale, we’ve been able to get a much better understanding of how much our candidates care about sustainability, and how much of a difference it’s making in their choice to come to us.

DEI

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is another hiring topic on everyone’s minds, and CityFibre wanted to pave the way for more women and people from diverse backgrounds to work in its tech-focused roles. In CityFibre Hires for Diversity with SmartRecruiters, Richard Hutchinson, Head of Resourcing, explained the company’s data-driven approach:

We used [SmartRecruiters] Report Builder to create a DEI-focused report which helps us develop our attraction strategy, drive recruiter and hiring manager action, report on performance, and engage with our business stakeholders to present accurate and real-time insight into our DEI challenges and results.

Talent acquisition demonstrates its true value by supporting the direction in which the business needs to evolve. With accurate and actionable recruiting data, companies can make progress on even the most challenging goals.

You Can Start Today

What these leaders have in common is a desire to do the right thing: provide an exceptional candidate experience, deliver top talent to the business, and analyze the results of their efforts. They’re on a journey of continually growing their strategic leadership skills as market conditions change. 

In support of your journey, we’ve created a resource to guide you to getting—or making the most of—your seat at the table. Download the ebook today.

The post 5 Real-Life Examples of Talent Acquisition Leadership first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

The role of talent acquisition has changed substantially in the last few decades. Long viewed as an administrative function, recruiting was seen as a cost center, and systems were built to support this mentality. 

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that the old model and old systems no longer work in a candidate-driven market. Recruiters need to be marketers, data analysts, and organizational enablers all-in-one. And TA leaders need to ensure that their teams have the technology to support this expanded role so that their companies can compete in an ever-changing marketplace for talent.

Data from the recruiting tech stack gives TA leaders the ability to become strategic partners to the business – valued participants in the evolution of a company’s talent strategy. But how does one navigate this sea of solutions for everything from a core applicant tracking system to point solutions for background checks and assessments?

In a conversation with SmartRecruiters Hiring Success experts Dave Novak, Engagement Manager, and Jared Best, Regional Practice Leader, I explored the topic, “What can talent acquisition leaders ask of their technology that will help them obtain and maintain their seat at the table?” Some of those ideas are summarized in our ebook,   A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function. This article takes a deeper dive into five key points in the ebook’s eight-point Technology Checklist.

1. Empower Recruiters

“If you don’t have the right technology, your recruiters spend a lot of time doing administrative, non-value-added work,” said Dave Novak. “Recruiters should be focused on talent: sourcing talent, talking to talent, negotiating with talent, hiring talent. If they’re spending too much time filling out spreadsheets and coordinating schedules, they’re not maximizing their value proposition to your organization.” 

An Aptitude Research survey found that only 48% of recruiters are satisfied with their technology, compared to 78% of TA leaders. This disconnect shows how important it is for TA leaders to choose technology that makes recruiting easier, not harder.

2. Foster the Candidate Experience

“A hallmark of a mature TA organization is the acceptance that the candidate is at the center of everything they do,” said Dave. “It has to be a synchronous experience for the candidate and the employee who comes through the system. The ideal scenario is that your talent acquisition processes provide a realistic preview of how your company operates and what it’s going to be like once they get hired.” That includes everything from your talent attraction methods, career site, interviewing experience, and onboarding process. 

Reducing the number of clicks in an application and connecting systems with automation improves the candidate experience and drastically reduces the time to fill. KinCare saw a 60% reduction in candidate drop-off when they reduced the time to complete an application from 17 minutes to 3-5 minutes.

3. Engage Hiring Teams

“Another hallmark of a mature TA function is that your organization engages with the hiring process,” Dave said. “When your system invites engagement, people use it consistently, which enables you to tell a story with data.” With more visibility into the impact of their behaviors, “hiring teams can get excited about building an awesome interview process,” he said.

KinCare experienced a growth in organizational trust once they implemented new hiring software. Ben Rynja, Head of Talent Acquisition at KinCare said, “It’s become more of a collaborative environment. When you’ve got transparency, you’ve got trust. Trust was no longer an issue.”

4. Lead with Data

“Good talent leaders need to make data-driven decisions, said Jared Best, “but many are  handcuffed by not being able to report on the full picture of the TA funnel.” Echoing Ben Rynja’s experience, he said “Data allows leaders to hold not only their teams accountable but also their partners in the business.” Jared also mentioned how important data is in the journey to being viewed as a strategic partner rather than a cost center. “Data can help you better position your story around where the gaps are in driving equal partnership from the organization,” Jared said. “It helps you justify additional resources and investments because you can explain the past performance and forecast scenarios about the future.”

“Reporting has to be pragmatic and accessible for the organization,” Dave Novak added. “Sometimes the data is there, but it’s not presented in a way that people can easily understand it.” Read our post 6 Steps to a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy for tips on how to get started on leading with data.

5. Adapt to Changing Recruiting Practices

A system’s level of technical flexibility—with the help of open APIs—helps companies adapt to change. Recent examples of the need for flexibility include the pandemic-induced pivot to video interviewing and new salary transparency laws in many states. “Your platform should be nimble,” Jared said. “You shouldn’t need an entire HRIT team to support you.” Today’s strategic teams typically have a TA ops resource rather than a big HRIT team that takes months to make updates. A platform that supports self-service and has built-in integrations enables changes to be made in days rather than months. 

When a talent acquisition team is seen as flexible and responsive, they’re better positioned to maintain their influence within an organization. For example, CityFibre relied on SmartRecruiters to ensure its DEI initiative was carried through the recruiting process, earning the company an award along the way. And Informa found out how to weave its company-wide sustainability initiative into its messaging to attract talent. 

There’s no end to the creative ways that talent acquisition can be involved in company-wide people initiatives. For a deeper dive into understanding how to get and maintain your seat at the table, download our ebook today. Read this post for a sneak peek at the contents. 

The post 5 Ways Technology Helps Talent Acquisition Maintain its Seat at the Table first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

In the post-pandemic world, the rules of hiring fundamentally changed—along with the expectations for talent acquisition. When businesses struggled to hire during the rebound from the pandemic cutbacks, the star of talent acquisition rose from its historical position as a cost center in many organizations. Talent acquisition had its seat at the proverbial table, but when recession fears took hold, TA lost its place amidst layoffs and hiring freezes at some companies.

Talent needs to be center stage for businesses to adapt and thrive in 2023 and beyond. To do this, talent acquisition needs to maintain its seat at the table—or step up if it hasn’t already. Trends like flexible work, DEIB, and workplace automation have all made employers think differently about who and how they hire. 

A cost center that speaks in the language of speed and efficiency does not offer the strategic perspective organizations need to hire effectively amidst rapidly changing employee and candidate expectations. When talent acquisition earn a seat at the table for strategic talent decisions, businesses are more likely to reach their full potential.

According to the Josh Bersin Company, companies that leverage the right recruiting strategies are

5X more likely to delight customers
30X more likely to engage and retain employees
35X more likely to innovate effectively.

Leveraging the right recruiting strategies is not just the job of talent acquisition teams; it’s a job for the whole organization. 

A Seat at the Table Defined

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, has spent decades at the forefront of global talent acquisition. In our latest ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function, Allyn says,

“Having a seat at the table means not just being involved in decisions directly related to talent acquisition, it means providing input into all decisions that have a talent lens to them.”

If a talent acquisition leader wants to get a seat at the table, they must move from the perception of their function as a cost center to a strategic function. Allyn says,

 “A strategic TA leader is a trusted partner who can come to the table with information that tells business leaders what’s happening in the market, what’s realistic to assume, and how their decisions will impact the company’s ability to capture and keep talent.” 

The journey to becoming a strategic leader—someone who gets invited to meetings because it’s widely known that they have valuable information and perspective that can help the business make high-priority decisions—is varied and complex. It requires that a leader shift their mindset from being an order-taker to someone who provides data-backed insights.

The journey to becoming a leader of a strategic talent acquisition function is not always easy. Allyn asked, “If  you don’t have a seat at the table today, why not?” The reasons could be a blend of personal and organizational factors. She recommends that leaders get clear about why they want that seat and what they might do with it once they get there.  

To help leaders along this journey, we spent hours interviewing Allyn and two members of SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success team: Dave Novak, Engagement Manager, and Jared Best, Regional Practice Leader. In those conversations, we uncovered a path for leaders to become more strategic and get the seat at the table they deserve. Our insights are condensed into the ebook  A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function. 

Below we list highlights from key sections of the ebook:

Strategic Talent Acquisition Maturity Model

For each level shown in the maturity model above, the ebook offers example scenarios so that you can assess your company and start forming your own North Star vision. To get a real-world picture of how one organization moved to greater maturity, read The Incremental Journey to Talent Acquisition Transformation at Colliers EMEA.

Strategic Talent Acquisition Maturity Model

For each level shown in the maturity model above, the ebook offers example scenarios so that you can assess your company and start forming your own North Star vision. To get a real-world picture of how one organization moved to greater maturity, read The Incremental Journey to Talent Acquisition Transformation at Colliers EMEA.

Know Your Why: Reasons to Build a Strategic TA Function

The benefits of getting a seat at the table fall into three areas: to help your organization, support your team, and grow your own career. We expand on each of these areas and provide reflection activities in the ebook so that you can move ahead with inner confidence.

Know What You’re Signing Up For: Barriers to Becoming More Strategic

In our discovery conversation, Allyn Bailey said, “Leaders need to assess their organization’s ability to absorb them into the conversation.” She spoke of the time it takes for organizations to change and said, “Pay attention to the signals that you’re making traction. People will be asking smarter questions and start to repeat words that you’ve inserted into the conversation and adopting them as their own.”

The ebook lists eight common barriers with potential solutions and includes a reflection activity for your company’s situation. For inspiration, read our success story with KinCare which describes the growth of organizational trust after the implementation of SmartRecruiters.

The Path to Getting a Seat at the Table

Our Hiring Success experts have observed many organizations going through the stages of building a strategic function. We can’t emphasize enough that it’s not just a shift for the individual leader; it’s a shift for the whole organization, and it requires many conversations. This section outlines six stages that you can expect to go through.

The Building Blocks of a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function

A strategic TA leader oversees seven critical components of talent acquisition. Your company may be more invested in some than others. Here you’ll find a list of signs of under-investment and high investment. Looking at the list can help you get clear on where you need to start so that you can generate a small win and develop a plan to address larger issues.

How to Change the Narrative to Become More Strategic

Being perceived differently means talking about different things. In the case of talent acquisition, it means understanding what the business cares about and bringing valuable information to the table. “The biggest thing a leader can do is change the narrative,” said Jared Best. “Move away from talking about transactional data and focus on data that ties back to organizational objectives.” This section offers three strategies to do just that, plus a reflection activity.

People Support for Your Seat at the Table

As a strategic leader, you will need the help of not only your team but also others within the organization. Here you’ll find a list of 10 key roles on your support team and their responsibilities.

Technology Support for Your Seat at the Table

Your recruiting tech stack may or may not be optimally configured to support your strategic priorities. To help you clarify what technology concerns you may need to address, we created an 8-point technology checklist for building a strategic talent acquisition function.

We’d love to say that there’s a magic wand you can wave and have a perfectly functioning TA team that attracts and hires the best candidates, facilitates recruiter productivity, and engages hiring managers—while increasing employee retention and profits. Instead, we live in a complex reality, and we hope this guide will be one resource to help you get to where you want to go.

The post How to Get a Seat at the Table for Talent Acquisition first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

How does a company’s talent acquisition function tie in with talent management? And can talent acquisition (TA) move the needle on transforming an organization’s overall talent strategy?

That’s the remit Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management for EMEA, was presented with when he joined Colliers in 2020. The company had already implemented SmartRecruiters two years before, but its hiring practices were still inconsistent across its 119 offices and 42 countries in the region. “Everyone got excited in the first phase of SmartRecruiters implementation, but in the second year, usage dropped off,” Ben said.

In a quest to hire better people, improve retention, and help employees develop their careers in Colliers’ decentralized talent framework, the company embarked on a holistic effort to transform talent management. “Talent acquisition was one pillar of a broader group that was put in place to drive greater levels of consistency and maturity in talent management overall,” Ben explained.

After digging into the data, Ben and his team saw gaps in the company’s adoption of SmartRecruiters. Once he connected with his SmartRecruiters representative, the lightbulbs started to go off.  “I quickly realized that the power of the system is its simplicity,” he said.  “It’s easy to use. But when you combine that with the relationship and the ability to discuss and analyze the data, it enabled me to understand where we needed to go strategically.”

SmartRecruiters covered the more tactical pieces of the talent acquisition transformation in our success story, How Colliers Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. That document tells the story of how consistent hiring practices combined with recruitment marketing, a CRM, and the company’s employer branding efforts resulted in a massive improvement in the company’s ability to make direct hires. But behind the scenes, the story is more nuanced – and profound. Yes, you want your company to save money, but you also want to make better hires because those are the people who will be driving revenue for the business in the future. 

Putting all the pieces together that contribute to making better hires requires a shift in thinking among executives, hiring managers, and recruiters across the organization. Here’s how the partnership with SmartRecruiters helped the Colliers EMEA talent acquisition team achieve an organizational mindset shift.

A Vision for Talent Acquisition

The most obvious gap was a need for awareness and education – but the need went deeper than that. “There was a need for consistency in approach, but also alignment to vision and an appreciation of what talent acquisition can deliver.”

With the vision in place, it became Ben’s mission to position talent acquisition as a strategic enabler for the business. “Talent acquisition itself can impact the bottom and top line,” Ben said. “People don’t think like that in many businesses. They just kind of think ‘why can’t you hire me someone? Why is it taking so long?’”

When talent acquisition is positioned at the center of an organization, hiring managers become more involved in making thoughtful hiring decisions. “Recruitment is an enterprise sport,” Ben said. To make true change happen, though, Ben’s team had to educate not just the HR community, but also the senior leadership team. Data proved to be the key to the success of the transformation.

Improving Data Literacy

Data has the power to educate, but people need to understand what the data means and how to ask more questions of it. Stakeholders may be experts in one type of data, but data literacy for talent acquisition is an acquired skill set that evolves over time. Stakeholders needed time to get up to speed and understand the impact of adjustments to hiring practices, and Ben had to slow down his expectations that change could happen overnight. 

Conclusions that may be obvious to an expert take time to land in others, especially if the data indicates a need to adjust old ways of thinking and behaving. After a series of monthly stakeholder meetings, Ben said, “The questions started to change and shift, which meant they were getting comfortable in their understanding.”

If recruitment is an enterprise sport, the work of a total talent transformation is another type of team sport — one that’s supported with compelling reports. “Data proved to be foundational in driving awareness and understanding where our gaps were,” Ben said. “When you talk to people and ask a lot of questions, you start to get interesting answers. You also start to see the big picture.”

Data Facilitates Accountability

Supporting the new vision of talent acquisition for Colliers requires that everyone using SmartRecruiters utilizes the system properly. “The philosophy of ‘do the basics well’ drives a different level of performance,” Ben said. Once utilization started improving, Colliers could see cost savings in terms of reduced agency spending. 

When people are held accountable, they’re more likely to adopt new processes. The immediate availability of data in SmartRecruiters, plus the regularly scheduled reporting meetings helped Colliers’ hiring teams see that their daily actions could add up to a big impact. “What fascinates me about SmartRecruiters is that you can go to the day, the hour, the second of an intervention,” Ben said. “It gives us the ability to understand the trends in our recruitment business, diagnose how well things are working, and identify where the opportunities sit. It’s also really intuitive, so you can’t get it wrong.”

Talent Acquisition Moves the Needle on Total Talent Transformation

Hiring people at a lower cost was just the beginning of the TA transformation at Colliers. Improvements in quality of hire and retention are where the real transformation lies. Colliers had already noted that its employer branding and recruitment marketing helped attract a different caliber of people to the business. The real result showed up downstream: Colliers saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. 

Starting with talent acquisition, Colliers achieved a total talent win: they attracted better people, kept candidates engaged to the point of hire, and successfully engaged them as employees.

People + Technology = Hiring Success

We asked Colliers how to summarize the factors that contribute to the achievement of hiring success. Ben’s first take was, “Ensure the product is simple to use because then people will use it.”  But it wasn’t just the system that facilitated a major change in the way Colliers attracts and manages talent. He explained, “the real value lies in the combination of people and technology.”

Mentioning his SmartRecruiters customer success manager, Ben continued, “As your relationship evolves, you start to talk a lot more about what really matters to your business and begin to formulate a workable strategy.” Sometimes you don’t know what’s possible until someone shows you — and sometimes, you need to know the boundaries of the system to make your efforts successful.

“SmartRecruiters is the best system I’ve used,” Ben said. “It’s a best-in-class system, and it’s backed up by support. That human, interpersonal relationship is really important.” 

Lessons from Colliers

Where your company starts and where it needs to go may differ from Colliers, but these lessons apply to anyone looking to save on recruiting costs, improve hire quality, and increase retention of new hires.

Align talent acquisition with the overall talent strategy
Create a vision for what TA can achieve
Enlist a best-in-class talent acquisition platform
Partner with your technology provider to get the most out of the system
Hold stakeholders accountable with metrics to ensure system adoption
Back up results with regular reporting to stakeholders
Be patient as stakeholders gain data literacy
Connect TA and HR metrics to measure the downstream impact

A full-scale talent acquisition transformation is an evolution – and we’d love to partner with you to get started. 

The post The Incremental Journey to Talent Acquisition Transformation at Colliers EMEA first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.