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Our Essential Guide to Better Recruiting

November 1, 2018
 
iCIMS Staff
3 min read

 

For the first time ever, there are more job openings (7 million) than Americans (6.5 million) actively looking for work. Competition for talent is fierce, and power has shifted from employers to candidates. So, what do employers need to do better, or differently, going forward?

Over the past week we convened clients including Uber, Goldman Sachs and Intuit; analysts from firms like Gartner and IDC; and technology partners like ADP and First Advantage, to identify what is working and what we need to fix. We had a rich discussion, and here are the most important takeaways:

Fix the Candidate Experience

Recruiting has far more in common with marketing – targeting, engaging, building relationships, inspiring, tracking, and wining people – than back-office HR systems, which are designed for payroll, benefits, compensation and employee training. Yet, recruiters at the world’s largest global companies are often required to use a jack-of-all-trades human resource platform. They need a dedicated, easy-to-configure recruiting and candidate relationship management (CRM) platform to integrate the very best software and support a comprehensive approach to recruiting.

For our part, iCIMS is partnering with Google so our clients’ job openings receive critical exposure and candidates will be taken directly to relevant positions on their career site, bypassing the middleman job boards. To make things easier for job seekers, we plan to introduce a new candidate application technology next year – called Passport – so candidates can manage their applications across iCIMS customers as well as their privacy and data.

Think and Act Like a Marketer

Replace the ‘post and pray’ mentality with a thoughtful and measured recruitment marketing program. Identify qualified candidates – including current and past employees, along with customers – create a database, and engage passive candidates with a peek inside the things they care about like company culture, vision, research, perks and open roles.

Stop Settling. Use the Very Best Software Designed for Recruiting

Recruiting has far more in common with marketing – targeting, engaging, building relationships, inspiring, tracking, and wining people – than back-office HR systems, which are designed for payroll, benefits, compensation and employee training. Yet, recruiters at the world’s largest global companies are often required to use a jack-of-all-trades human resource platform. They need a dedicated, easy-to-configure recruiting platform to integrate the very best software and support a comprehensive approach to recruiting.

Use Data to Drive Decisions and Improve ROI

Despite spending almost half of their recruitment budget on candidate marketing and advertising, many organizations have very little insight into what actually works. In contrast, Hertz uses portal data about which job postings performed the best, spikes and dips in traffic to their career site and click-to-apply rates to make better hiring decisions. Hertz’s Senior Director of Recruiting, Camilla Langenderfer, shared that one of their top challenges was lack of data to measure where they were succeeding and failing. Today, they use insights from their recruitment platform to reduce their time-to-fill by a week, save in employee overtime costs and increase their candidates’ Net Promotor Score.

Next year, iCIMS will be launching Attract to provide employers with content management technology to build compelling career sites that engage passive candidates. As part of our solution, we plan to incorporate Google search technology and programmatic advertising capabilities, so employers can post – and measure the effectiveness – of job ads right from within their applicant tracking system, decreasing their ad spend significantly.

It’s an exciting – and vital – time to be a recruiter. The adoption of new technology – like texting, Google for Jobs, programmatic advertising within the applicant tracking system, CRM to build a pipeline of talent and predictive analytics – means that we can dramatically improve the experience for candidates, while attracting the best talent to drive business.

 

 

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