How To Get Talent Acquisition Right

Shaun Ricci

October 17, 2017

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Are you getting talent acquisition wrong?

Effective talent acquisition is about getting qualified candidates in front of decision-makers relatively quickly, but for various reasons this just isn’t happening.

getting talent acquisition right

Many studies indicate over 60% of applicants to a given job aren’t qualified.

Understanding the “why” of less-than-optimal talent acquisition is more nuanced, but here’s one place you can start. In a survey of 1,500 recruiters and hiring managers, their biggest turnoff about the hiring process was the time it takes to screen irrelevant resumes.

In fact, 43% of recruiters said they would “black list” those candidates from other roles in their ATS.

It seems that one of the major frustrations is simply the time involved on the hiring and recruiting side. Time is the most valuable non-renewable resource we have, and at work, time isn’t always your own. You are often called into meetings or needed to put out fires.

Talent acquisition professionals want to do more value-add work around building relationships, connecting with candidates, or setting long-term strategy, but they can’t because of demands on their time.

And one of those largest demands is the screening process, which becomes frustrating because so many resumes just don’t qualify.

How can we fix this time issue?

Introduce better tech

Technology and recruiting have had a spotty relationship, in large part because the ATS have been used badly for candidate experience.

On the backend, most ATSs aren’t “smart” systems. For example, it’s traditionally been hard to find old candidates or engage with passive ones.

Thankfully, that’s changing pretty quickly.

Newer smart software are powered by artificial intelligence, meaning they can increasingly learn what makes people effective in a given role.

Coupled with their ability to scan through resumes significantly faster than a human being, AI-based recruiting software is decreasing time-to-hire while increasing candidate quality.

That’s the sweet spot.

Will adopting more tech mean recruiters losing their jobs?

Ideally, no. The promise of any technology is to take your human talent and re-channel tasks and deliverables, while letting the software handle the more tedious parts of a role for you.

Effective companies should transition recruiter screening time into more value-add tasks around strategy-setting, outreach to new candidate pools, meetings with hiring managers to better understand new job roles, and interviewing.

What about diversity? Wouldn’t an algorithm keep picking the same types of people?

AI-driven hiring has the potential for increasing diversity from what we’ve seen so far.

What are some of the big KPIs that can be achieved with better tech?

Some of the main ones would include:

Is the future of talent acquisition all about AI?

It’s about a mix of concepts including AI and automation, a focus on candidate experience, breaking down silos, and freeing up recruiters’ time for valuable tasks.

I just attended the HR Tech Conference and AI was definitely the theme of the day. The fact is, AI is becoming increasingly normative in business and HR and recruiting can’t afford to get left behind.

We need to research, understand, and embrace these technologies as productivity boosters and be thoughtful about how they’re changing how we practice talent acquisition.