Our newly found partnership and bro-mance with Ecom Digital has meant we can now bring you the highlights from each event for you to consume, process and even carry on the conversation below in the comments section.  Big thanks to Keith for doing this.  It’s a winning partnership!

Reconverse

Recruiting Technology Technology That Works

By Keith Robinson

As the dually appoint CCO… Chief Content Officer for Reconverse I’m delighted to produce this first blogs, which aims to give an overview of the presentations, and a summary of what was a lively debate.

First though I’d like to name the sponsors without whom running free to attend events is impossible;

Monster, LaunchPad Recruits, Tobias Adam Consulting, Elevate Direct, Jobtrain, Tazio, Silkroad, Avature, WCN, Networx, Papirfly, iCIMS, RMP, Job and Talent, Experteer

The first presentation came from Matthew Scherba of Monster and looked at the world of Semantic Search, in an industry where “matching the right candidate to the right job” is critical, data and the quality of matching that data is “King” semantic search tools can be a great tool in the recruiter armoury.

Monster cloud based solution enables you to host the following data;

Job Postings

Employee Profiles

CV’s

Website visitor details

Referrals

Social Media communities

This will enable you to efficiently;

Search and match your job requirement against your internal talent pool.

Search and match the external talent pool to identify more efficiently “ideal” candidates

Reduce the time and cost to recruit and build a more efficient internal recruiting function.

Next Up was Peter Gold; Peter shared his thought on;

Reality Recruiting – let’s get the basics right, “build a career site and they will come!!” no they won’t, recruitment, at least the attraction element is “marketing” and if you get the basics right you will have a better opportunity of getting investment in the future,

Understand the “art of the possible”, what can be done/achieved if you understand what you want and identify the technologies that can support the delivery of “What you want”. Create time to explore and discover.

His most recent, soon to be published survey amongst recruiter highlights that

81% of CEO’s expect the business to grow.

60% of In-House Recruiters are under pressure to reduce costs.

40% feel that their ATS is holding them back.

53% expect to be investing in their Career Site

The death of the ATS; a question posed by Peter but debate and covered in the second blog; but NO although evolution is needed.

Recruitment is marketing; great quote from Peter, “Don’t let the channel become the destination” or as I put it “the real issue is not the War for Talent but the War for the Ownership of talent”, if LinkedIn for example owns all the talent what becomes the cost of acquiring it?

Finally Peter talk about operational reality and he produced a statistic I’ve seen before but still shocks me 80% that go to a career site don’t apply for the job. He discussed Talent Pooling V Active Sourcing and wrapped by asking “how often to you look at your traffic stats?

The final speaker was resident futurologist Matt Alder.  Matt deliver a barnstormer looking at Mobile, Big Data and Video. The top line was;

Mobile is going to be huge and will become the primary way we will connect.

Touch, Voice and Movement will become the norm is a recruitment communications through innovative technologies like the iPad.

We may change the recruitment process to be mobile friendly.

Big Data is going to be big and the visualization of it will provide MI but also make the data “engagable” he highlighted Mystery Applicant and Cube19.

The issue is; what data do you want? How will you find it and then how do/will you analyse it and finally and for me most importantly, what will you do with the resulting MI?

Matt also predicted that “Big Data” will be the next “Social Recruiting” in that there will be loads of people using it to sell their wares, without a clue what it actually means!

Video in recruitment has finally gone main stream. Although video interviewing has been around a long time it is the whole use of video which is changing.

We have moved from words, words, words to watch, watch, and watch. Video engages, its real and we love to view it on the mobile!!

Watch out for Video interviewing platforms such as LaunchPad Recruits, Tazio, Sonru, Hire Vue and Wowzer BUT many more are going to come along.

A final word from Matt – Flexibility and Speed are Key

Let the debate begin, well it didn’t seem to take a minutes for the round table session to focus on the ATS and it was clear that there is, as Peter’s research highlighted, real issues with the ATS and almost all attending had some kind of issue.

We did a round table and these were the key issues;

Lack of flexibility – but this raised the issue of Cost – cloud based = Lower Cost v Non Cloud but Flexible = Higher Cost. This issue off course impacts on the profitability of the vendor.

Linking to Flexibility is the need to improve the Workflow, make it more agile, simple and improve the user interface. .

ATS’s seem to be built by people who don’t have to use them.

We talk a lot about improving the candidate experience BUT what about improving the Recruiter/Line Manager Experience.

Poor data entry, it was agreed that if you have poor data going into the system then you suffer accordingly.

The ATS need to become much more of a CRM tool and products such a Avature and  Tribepad were mentioned.

So is the ATS dead? Answer was NO because it was agreed that you need a tool to help you manage the recruitment process and bring structure to it. BUT equally it is clear that the end user expects change and improvement from the industry.

The question was asked “Is their one solution to all the recruiter needs” and the answer was a loud and clear one – NO.

Another question posed was “do we blame the tools?”, consensus was no but a discussion was had around  the fact that a “good recruiter” has the DNA of salesperson, they tend to be hunters and often (stereotype)  hunters are not the best people at using reporting tools? Your comments welcome on this one.

Other topics discussed included;

Facebook for Recruitment – very much on the radar and generally accepted that it is excellent for Branding but also agreed that it can be used more smartly for more active recruiting.

Interesting debate on “Will Jobs Exist?” the move towards a more contingent workforce.

Employer Branding, going to become more important and the development of your EVP is critical, it is your “elevator pitch”.

Finding good In-House recruiters, agreed by all that this is a real issue. Again please feedback to us, is this an issue for you?

Finally a great quote from Colin Minto “Address all the problems that the recruiter has today and then be flexible and adapt in going forward in the future”.

Great event.