HR Tech to Support Your Recruiting Pipeline

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recruiting and staffing | social media recruiting | Michelle T. Johnson | Peter Alkema | Steve Boese | HR Technology

Social networking and e-recruiting are already methods that many businesses integrate into their staffing operations today. This will only increase as technology advances and recruiting professionals get hip to tools such as iPads & iPhones.

HR Today speaks with Steve Boese, HR tech blogger and Instructor at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Michelle T. Johnson, a Diversity blogger and author of The Diversity Code; and Peter Alkema, Head of HR Technology at FNB, a large South African bank. This interview discusses what the risks, challenges and need-to-know information for HR professionals are surrounding recruiting and human resource technology.

HRIQ: What human resource technologies are currently enhancing your recruiting pipeline?

Steve Boese: One of the things we’re seeing a lot of in the technology space, in addition to the corporate applicant tracking modules and tools, whether provided by your corporate system of records or a third party solutions, is the integration of enterprise recruiting efforts with external social networks.

I’ll give a couple of specific examples. Some tools have hit the market in the last couple of years that do a number of things to try to leverage social and professional networks for employees for the purpose of generating referrals. Corporate recruiters can share job information with employees that are already on the staff, and employees on staff can look to their network (whether they are on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter). There are tools on the market now that perform automated matching technology and algorithms so they suggest to the employee who might be a really good match for a potential job opening. The tools also facilitate the employees sending out that referral message.

Finally, some tools on the market now provide the enterprise and the centralized HR and recruiting function with the ability to manage and track the success of some of these social network based recruitment and referral efforts.

Peter Alkema: In South Africa we have e-recruiting technology known as iRecruitment… we have found it’s a very useful add-on that allows recruiters both internally and externally to manage supply and demand of vacancies and the acquisition of talent by posting vacancies on a portal that links to our internal database of open positions within the company. We found it to be quite a successful source of talent, although questionable is the quality of the candidates that we get through that online recruitment system. While quantity is high, I think quality is something we still need to work on.

HRIQ: I’m sure that there are both pros and cons to receiving an influx of resumes?

Michelle T. Johnson: Let me jump in on a con. My expertise is on diversity—and when I say diversity I don’t mean just racial and gender diversity, but all kinds of differences and all kinds of ways that people come into the workplace. What’s always been of a little bit of my concern about the fact that we’ve become so quickly and thoroughly a technology-driven society is the element of jobseekers left out in the cold when they aren’t on LinkedIn. Many have resumes and CV that rival what you would see online. There’s that element of people who, maybe because of their experience or the industry they’re in, are just not going to show up as well through technology as they would through traditional methods of meeting people.

HRIQ: It’s true that a lot of us have the tendency to think that these social media and mobile recruiting capabilities are attracting a higher echelon of tech-savvy employees, but we neglect to recognize that this is creating a sort of “digital divide” that’s keeping certain applicants from getting their foot through the door. Do you have any suggestions for managing that and leveling the playing field?

Steve: I’ve seen some technologies that have helped to bridge the divide a little bit inside the enterprise. When you’re doing high volume recruiting with lots of applicants, to have any kind of efficiency at all you’ve got to have candidate capture right into your database. Whether it’s an applicant tracking system, a separate recruiting database that you’re maintaining—it’s difficult at that scale to manage any offline or paper based process.

Say your company is presenting at a career fair at a booth, and you’ve got a lot of candidates coming in with paper CVs or resumes. You can deploy simple iPad based applications to capture that data right on the spot and help facilitate the candidates data into the database while still accepting their credentials in the form that they want to participate in.

Another one I’ve seen allows the recruiter or staffing professional to take a picture of the CV using an iPhone. This particular application, SocializedHR, will actually scan and parse the resume, putting the fields into a very lightweight applicant tracking system. You can still accept that paper resume from the candidate, perhaps a student if you’re doing college hiring, and still manage to fold them into your data-driven processes that recruiters want to use downstream.

Michelle: That’s good to hear. Honestly, from my perspective, it’s not the people who are coming out of school that I worry about. It’s people who are currently employed in fabulous positions, but if they lost their jobs and had to find one tomorrow, they would be as lost as someone arriving here from Mars.

HRIQ: This is a question for Peter. You’re running HR operations in a large company. What type of quantitative tools and metrics do you use to manage this massive pool?

Peter: We have an excess of 50,000 candidates in our talent database. Competitively speaking, we are certainly in the game, as far as talent is concerned. But the difficulty is sourcing the good from the bad as people take the sort of “shotgun” approach and apply for jobs they are not qualified for. Large corporates struggle with this as much as any other company. So the challenge for us is to switch on far more quantitative selection criteria. Steve mentioned the algorithms and CV parsing, and it’s question of converting that data into some sort of analytical information that you can then apply rules to, and make sure that you float the really strong CVs to the top.

The other question is the field we’re recruiting for. Even if you have in place a common platform with common processes, you still need to specialize the way you manage that talent, because each area of the business is going to have specific rules and assessment criteria. Looking for a Senior Actuary is going to be very different than looking for a Java Programmer. We are not there yet. We have not solved that problem. It is one that we’re grappling with at the moment. What we have to celebrate at the moment is this massive pool of talent that is available to us, which we now have to mind. But it’s a start, and better that than nothing coming through at all.

We have very tentatively stepped into social media recruiting and put a number of jobs on a Twitter feed. But as Michelle pointed out, not everyone is going to be on Twitter, so we have to target the people that would be with the types of jobs they’d be interested in and qualified for.

Round table interview conducted by Alexandra Guadagno, Editor for Human Resources iQ. To listen to the audio from this interview, visit the HR Today Podcast Series.

Contributor:   Alexandra Guadagno

Alexandra Guadagno is the Editor for Human Resources IQ, an online community sharing HR best practices. 

Before Human Resources IQ, Guadagno developed business strategies and worked with front-line employees as a business manager at a retail fashion giant. From this experience, she developed an interest for working with HR professionals and began reporting on the issues and trends facing the industry. Guadagno has written for Asbury Park Press of New Jersey and has also worked as a freelance journalist for the Two River Times , covering topics ranging from the arts to wage equality issues.

Guadagno holds a BA from Rutgers University with a major in Journalism and a minor in Cultural Anthropology. She began her journalism career by co-founding the global youth news website ItsOnBad.com, where she wrote business and technology news stories for fellow students.

Contact her at alexandra.guadagno@humanresourcesIQ.com

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