The recruitment conundrum solved with experience (and software)

In the human resources sector, technology has made leaps and bounds from its early days when a simple database (perhaps replaced running on an Apple II) replaced the personnel manager’s Rolodex. In some ways, there’s too much IT helping HR professionals source, hire, and manage their people. That’s led to different, competing systems that don’t necessarily work together well. It’s not uncommon for teams to use separate platforms to post open positions on different channels, like the company career site, LinkedIn, Indeed and so on.

After that, another software package or two might handle setting up interviews, gathering resumés and arranging interviews. Onboarding, payroll, and HR then need a different set of applications and services, plus there are the ongoing issues around keeping staff engaged with the company during the critical first few months.

In short, technology in HR is very powerful, but because it’s disjointed and operated in silos, its effectiveness is very limited. Running a recruitment exercise becomes a significantly resource-intensive process. What’s more, there are plenty of stats out there that show poor employee and candidate experiences contribute significantly to staff turnover and poor results. Many of those negative experiences can be traced right back to HR departments being unable to work efficiently using the tools that should, by all rights, be helping them in their daily work.

Part of the issue for recruitment stems from the fact that many HR platforms are devised not by industry experts, but by technologists who create solutions that are not necessarily a good fit. We spoke recently to an industry executive leader whose background is recruitment and whose company, Hireology, is a technology company built on specific experience working day to day in recruiting and human resources.

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Adam Robinson founded Hireology after 20 years of experience working with recruitment divisions at big companies, sourcing and screening applicants for high turnover industry sectors like automotive dealerships, care providers, and hospitality. By 2010, he’d built software that managed the full recruitment cycle for a range of clients — and those clients kept asking if they could buy the application for themselves. Hireology was born.

Now operating as a SaaS, the Hireology platform helps solve many of the problems associated with recruiting staff today — in a market where, Adam told us: “It’s not uncommon for a qualified applicant […] to have five, six, ten or more opportunities on the table. So, employers just don’t have the leverage that they had. And I think we’re in that [situation] for quite some time.”

Very high-end executive search always used to be a highly competitive area, yet today the same types of competition between employers now operates in core talent — at mid-salary levels, or for skilled hourly positions. Employers, therefore, must be doing something different to get the good people over the threshold and into the business. In what Adam calls the “applicant economy”, it’s a tough call.

Changing it up begins with multiple channels, which is where traditional technology not specifically designed for the purpose begins to multiply, and those data silos start to appear. “It’s just not enough to go with LinkedIn and hope it works out. You’ve really got to take in all the approaches. [Hireology] starts moving with companies’ employment “brand,” like their own organic hosted career site. [We ask] are you putting your best foot forward when applicants come to research on your site? Is your career site configured to look great on mobile? Is it being indexed properly by the search engines? Is the content there reflective of the culture, the ‘what’s in it for me?’ culture? [Does it go] beyond just the bullet points about the job description?”

The Hireology platform can pull stats and data from all the channels a company uses for recruitment, so decision-makers can see the analytics that tell them which channels are working best for them. It may be that the user is shown it’s worth sponsoring a job opening on a well-known site or social channel — and Hireology makes that process easy, right from the same interface. In fact, the platform can be used to create new channels, too. It can now power employee referral programs that incentivize existing employees to refer the right candidates to new roles.

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Even after getting the right candidates, smooth and professional communications during the next processes are seen by prospects “as a reflection of the quality of the management of the firm.” Putting over the quality needed presents the organization at its best, and that’s much simpler for Hireology customers:

“You get tight turnaround times. [Candidates] submit a resumé, they hear back right away. The follow up is crisp and professional, and timely. It’s easy communicating via SMS and not email — all the things that an applicant in today’s market wants to do. They want to move fast, they want to have their time respected, they want to learn about the company and know a quality experience. That’s what our platform empowers our customers to do.”

Every candidate knows that each stage of applying for a position is an opportunity to see if the company is a good fit for them: impressions of professionalism count. That’s especially true during key moments like an interview, an employee’s first day, onboarding activities, team introductions, being set up with required tools & technology in the workplace, and so on. Get it wrong, and what happens? “You spent all this time and effort to get them on the payroll, and then they turn over in the first six months, because you don’t have the internal support system needed for them to be successful,” Adam says. “A huge part of what we do is help our customers with technology in elevating the quality of their hiring and onboarding process.”

At the end of the day, recruitment is a business process undertaken by both parties in a potential contract. “The core concept here is that jobs are products, you think of it like any other product in today’s market: you have to be exceptional and retail that product. Think of a job as a product, and you think of your applicant pool as a consumer base. The questions that you need to be asking are…are jobs marketed with the features and benefits that this consumer base is looking for?”

Independent research has shown that new employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years. It’s figures like that which should make this aspect of a new employee’s experience a priority on its own. The opportunity Hireology presents covers off that need and goes much further too — right along the full recruitment journey.

When the technology tools that HR uses are disjointed, then the marketing of roles, standardizing onboarding, and keeping staff in the long-term all get to be very difficult to achieve, time after time. The irony is that no software developer ever wrote code to waste a company’s time and money — but the unfortunate truth is that it’s what’s happening now, in companies across the country.

Hireology was constructed by experienced professionals at the sharp end of HR, and it shows. It solves the pain points inherent in the recruitment functions of all types of industries, industries that need good staff, and it does this from one platform. End to end, it covers marketing, comms, onboarding, engagement, relationship-building, and more.

You can learn more for yourself about Hireology from the company’s site, or go see for yourself with a demo. Adam Robinson’s experience (and the team he’s built) come from recruitment but come to the table with technology that’s engineered for recruiters. Instead of piecing together hiring tools piecemeal, you owe it to your organization to check out Hireology’s all-in-one solution for yourself.