35106886You’ve heard it before, but even though it’s become so overused it’s almost a cliche, the fact is that hiring is broken – and the evidence is everywhere.

From resumes overloaded with self-reported (and therefore, fairly worthless data) to job boards overloaded with outdated, unappealing or unreadable postings, you don’t need to dig too deep to find proof that looking for work is often more work than it’s worth.

The problems with hiring today are more than mere frustrations: they’re serious obstacles that stand in the way of a company’s success.

If you want to produce a great product, you need great people. If you want to create an efficient, well-run organization, you need great people.

But great people tend to be already employed, heavily recruited, and hard to hire. According to a recent Deloitte study, businesses are pouring more money than ever into talent acquisition, yet they still can’t find the right people fast enough to satisfy their needs.

That’s the way it is now, but not the way it has to be. Enter a smart, technology-fueled approach to talent acquisition: Hiring Success Management (HSM).

Why Every Company Needs Smart Hiring

cost-of-a-bad-hireThe need to hire smarter has never been greater. For most companies, the hiring process is complex, expensive, and time-consuming. In fact, recruiters today spend approximately 80% of their time on low-value, non-strategic, menial tasks that don’t speed up the hiring process.

If you can’t hire fast, you can’t grow your company. You can’t ship on time. You can’t keep up with – and hopefully stay ahead of – the competition. And most important, you can’t innovate or develop new products without the brainpower needed to conceive them in the first place.

But even though you need to hire faster than ever, you can’t do so at the risk of choosing the wrong person for the job. The cost of a bad hire is huge: on average, these “F Players” cost organizations at least three times their annual salary, according to a recent Dice report. And that’s not even counting the huge hit to company morale, productivity and reputation that comes along with these recruiting mistakes, too.

HSM: Recruit Smarter, Not Harder. 

Screen-Shot-2015-04-29-at-11.15.58-AMA typical talent acquisition solution requires manual data entry that’s subject to human error and contains siloed information that’s quickly out of date.

Talent acquisition employees are overburdened with the unrealistic task of wading through an immense (and ever-growing) amount of prospect and candidate data.

Recruiters spend most of their day doing low-value, menial tasks like manually sourcing prospective candidates, reviewing resumes from job board databases or spending hours sifting through social profiles.

This requirement takes time away from recruiters’ ability to focus on the human side of hiring and important strategic work like building a rich talent pipeline, nurturing relationships, and creating a strong employer brand.

Luckily, we’re at a tipping point. Where previously the influx of data and technology has actually made recruiters’ job more difficult, we’re now seeing a transformation due to the emergence of ‘Smart SaaS’.

By combining data science, consumer-friendly technologies, and predictive analytics, Smart Software-as-a-Service (Smart SaaS) is fundamentally changing software as we know it. And when it’s applied to recruiting, Smart SaaS revolutionizes the game and fuels Hiring Success Management (HSM).

With HSM and the power of automation, there are solutions that can sort through millions of resumes and job sites, so recruiters and hiring teams no longer have to. Prospect profiles are automatically updated – even when prospects move, change jobs, or add new skills. Data science and predictive analytics can forecast when someone is likely to make a career move and proactively alert recruiters. And behavioral analytics and machine learning can help the software get smarter the more it’s used.

How HSM Transforms Talent Acquisition

KeepItSimpleStupid-1440x900As hiring software gets smarter and takes over those tedious tasks that make hiring such a painful process, recruiters can reassess their priorities and shift from processing transactions to driving real strategy (and value).

They can stop scouring job boards, stop searching for and entering contact data, and even stop manually scheduling interviews. They can also stop losing nearly three-fourths of their prospects because they’re simply too slow to hire.

Instead, HSM lets hiring teams and recruiters do what they do best: focus on those high-value, strategic, personalized activities that require a human touch: relationship-building and high-level planning.

HSM makes hiring rewarding again. It transforms a recruiter’s role from scavenger to strategist, drives better results, speeds up the entire hiring process and makes it more effective, and ultimately makes companies more successful.

And according to a recent report by The Aberdeen Group, 94% of companies think talent acquisition is critical to their ability to execute on their business strategy in 2015 and beyond. No Applicant Tracking System can do that. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that smart hiring just makes sense.

Sheeroy Desai 057About the Author: Sheeroy Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Gild; with over 25 years of experience, Sheeroy is a technology industry veteran who has guided a number of innovative companies in transforming markets to deliver exponential growth. Gild is Sheeroy’s third startup, which he co-founded with Luca Bonmassar.

Sheeroy is responsible for driving the company’s strategy, vision and culture. Sheeroy was a founding member of Sapient (NASDAQ:SAPE), a global services company that helps clients transform operations, marketing and technology. Sheeroy served as Sapient’s Chief Operating Officer from 2001 through 2007.

Sheeroy started his career in 1987 at Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), a pioneering systems integration firm focused on client-server technology. CTP went public and was eventually acquired by Novell. Sheeroy holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. When not working Sheeroy enjoys biking, skiing and cooking.

Follow Sheeroy on Twitter @Sheeroy or connect with him on LinkedIn.