The world of recruitment has rapidly evolved from print ads and a rolodex of contacts to a host of tech-enabled tools that have transformed the recruitment experience. And this transformation has occurred so quickly that acquiring a recruitment tech stack is now business-critical.
But with so much recruitment technology on the market, and more launched all the time, how do you know what is worth investing in? What makes great recruitment technology? Other than a brilliant product that works well and solves a problem in the recruitment space, this is how we define great recruitment technology…
Great support
Recruitment technology that works – whether that’s greater automation, attracting candidates, improved communication, and so on – is clearly important but everything that supports that technology is also vital. If you don’t receive the right training, onboarding, service and support with your tech, it won’t be fulfilling its purpose and could even be making things harder for you. You can have a great piece of technology but if there isn’t the support system to train you how to use it effectively and efficiently, or help when you hit snags, that technology won’t get used or at least not used to its full capacity.
In this regard, the client services team behind a piece of tech can make or break it. Getting the right training at the very beginning is essential to ensure the whole team understands how and when to use it to get the very best from it. A quick and responsive support service that can help with any issues or questions in a timely manner is just as important. Any downtime on a piece of recruitment tech that you rely on to operate effectively can impact the candidate experience and client relationships.
Seamless integration
Understandably, busy recruitment businesses want their technology to be ‘plug and play’ but that isn’t always possible. Great recruitment technology should be immediately usable up to a point but if you want to integrate the technology with your existing systems, you’ll need to get two or more of your suppliers to talk to each other. And this where it can all unravel. You can have two really good providers, two market-leading products in their own right, but there is a huge amount of work from both sides in integrating two tools and that takes time and energy and sometimes simply doesn’t work well. You almost have to create a new product every time you run an integration because one has to work inside the other and it needs to be made to fit within your current eco-system.
If, for example, your CRM isn’t seamlessly integrated with your tech, the candidate journey will be negatively affected. To avoid this, the tech supplier needs to have both a great support team and developers that are experts in integrations, whether that’s with a CRM, ATS, job board, website, or another piece of recruitment tech. One of the huge benefits for Wave clients is that we have both a multi-poster and a website design and build product and so obviously they talk very nicely together, plus you don’t have to liaise with different suppliers.
Fulfils a need
As recruitment industry doyenne Louise Triance eloquently put it in an upcoming Talent Matters podcast, “don’t get swayed by shiny things.” With so much recruitment tech on the market, it can be easy to think you need everything but you really don’t. In fact, that could prove to be actively detrimental if your new piece of tech doesn’t work seamlessly with your existing processes. No matter how great it is on paper, if the recruitment technology that you are considering doesn’t work well with the tech and the processes that you already have or if it doesn’t drive your processes with greater efficiency, it won’t be great recruitment technology for you and your business.
Before rushing to invest in a new piece of tech, always ask yourself how that product will benefit your recruiters, your processes, and your business. What are you trying to improve and what tech do you need to achieve that? Perform an internal audit of your processes and establish where the inefficiencies lie. If you can find a piece of recruitment technology that addresses those issues and solves them, it is probably worth investing in.
As future-proof as possible
No organisation has the resources or the inclination to change their recruitment technology at the speed that new pieces of tech are launched so it is vital that the right technology is invested in. That means having clear goals and objectives and choosing a tech stack that drives those. It also means researching how well your tech will age and/or adapt to rapid changes. Anything that saves time through automation or allows for intelligent decisions and strategies through big data should stand the test of time.
Essentially, what makes good technology great is when it goes above and beyond the technology itself. Having a clever piece of technology can be transformative for your business but without the right support, a seamless integration, longevity and a real need for it, it can be a proverbial chain around the neck.
Great technology makes your processes simpler and more efficient, freeing up recruiters’ time to focus on the human element of recruiting. Any technology that gives recruiters more time to communicate with candidates and clients is a win – as long as it works well and seamlessly integrates with current processes.
