iCIMS Hire Expectations™

Early in my career, I was a developer and one of my first projects was to work with the HR team to build an candidate management system in Lotus notes. I started by having meetings with recruiters, then recruiting managers, then hiring managers and finally leadership. Each of these groups had different needs, request and demands. Leadership eventually overruled many requests that were made by recruiters and I was able to start building the new tool for the recruitment team. I spent several weeks designing and building out what I thought would fit based on their requests. We had meeting after meeting to redesign, tweak and address new issues that came up. Several months later, I had this monster of a database with candidate applications, work flows, and all kinds of other bells and whistles. I then moved on to a new billable project. 

A few months later, I was sent several change requests but unfortunately I was on a new project. And, the internal project took a back seat to the billable one. The company was forced to put a new developer on the candidate management project who was unfamiliar with the background of the project or why things were designed the way they were. Recruiters left and new recruiters, who wanted more changes, came in and eventually the once completely customized candidate database, meant to meet the needs of the recruiters, was outdated and needed lots of updates and changes in order to keep up with the quick changing HR industry.

In retrospect, the thought of “Build vs. Buy” seems like an easy one and here is why.

1. Using internal resources seems like a great idea but usually after a developer rolls out the project they are not nearly as accessible to make needed changes. If the developer is on another project you may be assigned a new developer to make the changes. Therefore, you must either wait for the new developer to understand how the software works and what you would like it to do now or worse, you must stay in limbo waiting for your original developer to find the time to make those changes. In that time, you may be losing valuable candidates that could make a significant impact within your organization.


2. The recruiting industry changes fast! Look at a couple of years ago; we had a shortage of candidates and wanted easy applications as to not deter candidates from applying. Nowadays, there are so many candidates that recruiters are often overwhelmed; therefore, the application may need to change in order to weed out candidates that aren’t a good fit. The industry is getting more and more complex. Further, integrated background, drug and assessment testing are available. Electronic job distribution and sourcing tools that will post your job to multiple job boards in real-time or search multiple job board databases at once are available. There are integrations to payroll systems, onboarding, succession planning, compensation, and performance management. And, now video interviewing and mobile solutions have even emerged. This could be entirely too much for any developer to keep up with, without being dedicated to the project.


3. Cost, yes cost! According to salary.com the average cost of ONE web software developer is right around $71,000 per year. That is just one resource. A candidate management system with all the bells and whistles would not even come close to that cost.

   

4. If your company needs to report on EEO and OFCCP, this could be really difficult with a home grown system.  A true candidate management or applicant tracking tool has these pieces built in and can run real-time reports if they were ever needed. Not being able to accurately report on these could result in steep fines by the government or worse the loss of your government contract.

Candidate management systems with tools such as applicant tracking have come a long way in the last few years and have a team of people behind them to ensure that the system is on top of all state and federal government regulations. They also are constantly trying to stay on top of where the industry is going and creating best practices for current customers. They hold user groups to ensure that each of their customers is being heard, and their development requests are being put into place. They are fighting to stay ahead of the game and either win or keep your business; all for less than half the cost of a web software developer.

So really, it just makes sense to avoid building!