HOW RECRUITING TECHNOLOGY WILL

CHANGE HIRING IN 2016 (AND BEYOND).

Originally appeared in Recruiting Daily 12/28/15.

While the Federal Reserve recently decided to raise interest rates for the first time since the
financial crisis, they cited job growth as a key driver for their decision.
As the New York Times explained in their analysis of the Feds decision, among the Feds
roles are maximizing employment and moderating inflation, and with unemployment rates
quickly receding to pre-recessionary levels, the move to raise rates indicates a widespread
optimism that job growth will continue in 2016 and beyond.

In November, the total non-farm payroll was estimated to have grown by another 318,000
jobs, the 63rd consecutive month the private added jobs, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics; additionally, the BLS estimated unemployment to have decreased to just
5% overall in Q3 2015, an economic bellwether thats decreased the 19 out of the last 21
quarters, a trend thats also expected to continue into 2016.
As the economy continues to pick up steam, the biggest challenge facing employers of all
sizes, and across all industries, continues to be their ability to find and hire the talent they
need to survive and thrive in the constantly evolving world of work.
With the U.S. labor market already more or less at full employment (economically speaking),
2016 should see more employers forced to leverage more innovative recruiting tools and
talent technologies to power their hiring process and win whats becoming an increasingly
competitive war for top talent.
The Future Is Now: Top 4 Recruiting Technology Trends to Watch in
2016.
In a buyers market, where demand far outstrips supply, how effectively these organizations
leverage software to set themselves ahead should make or break their recruiting
success in 2016. While weve already seen SaaS and similar recruiting technologies more
or less alter the talent landscape, looking ahead, all I can tell you is: you aint seen nothing
yet.
Fasten your seatbelts its going to be a bumpy ride for those recruiters who arent ready
for whats new and whats next. Heres how talent acquisition and recruiting pros can
transform recruiting through technology in 2016 (and beyond).

1. CRM is the New ATS.

Almost 70% of recruiting organizations report to currently utilizing some form of

Applicant Tracking System (ATS), and theres a good reason for theubiquity of this
technology throughout the talent acquisition landscape. Thats because their core
functionality namely, documenting applicant records and associated hiring activity is a
critical task thats not only a core HRIS capability, but also a necessity in many cases for
compliance under laws like OFCCP or EEOC.
In many cases, ATS also serve as an effective way to keep tabs on a candidates
recruitment history, their associated activity, and contact information or professional history
for both active and passive candidates, serving as a system of record thats often the only
place to find recruiting related information at many employers.
While the information in these centralized databases can be invaluable, the problem with
this data is that the information contained in an ATS becomes outdated extremely quickly
and therefore, its future value inherently limited.

For most applicant tracking systems, its just in time, all the time. And its time that changed.
When companies come across promising candidates with the kinds of experience, expertise
and skills that might be a good fit for future positions or align with a respective employers
recurring recruiting needs, ATSs do an incredibly poor job, however, of enabling recruiters
to actually manage, nurture and engage with any candidates in their databases who might
be right, just not right now.
Due to this inherent weakness in ATS functionality, in 2016, I expect to see more companies
look to fill this capability gap by adopting Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)
systems explicitly for this purpose.
With the advent of CRM technologies in talent acquisition, well also see the emergence of a
new role in recruiting: the rise of the dedicated recruitment marketers, whose sole jobs will
be to run targeted campaigns, nurture leads and develop passive candidates who already
have an established recruiting relationship with an employer. High tech meets high touch
should equal high performing organizations something well start to really see in 2016.
2. Engagement Is the New Sourcing.

Ask most recruiters today where they spend most of their time, and theres a good chance
its the massive time suck that is sourcing.
Yet, at the same time, while were spending more time than ever on sourcing, conversely,
finding people has never been easier, from job boards to social networks to CRM tools and
people aggregators becoming increasingly prevalent. The challenge, largely, is no longer
finding talent its engaging them.

Because if you can find a candidate, theres a good chance your competitor can, too
which makes getting a candidate to even respond to your recruiting related messaging (or
open jobs) has become increasingly difficult. And its a much larger problem in recruiting
than ever before, a trend that looks to continue in 2016.
In terms of making the process for engaging candidates more efficient and effective,
there are two talent technology keys every employer should consider:
1) using algorithms and other matching technologies to do more sourcing, and 2) involving
hiring managers earlier in the process, effectively partnering with them throughout every
stage of the talent attraction cycle starting with identifying and sourcing top talent.
By decreasing or delegating the massive amount of sourcing responsibilities most recruiters
find themselves tasked with, theyll be free to spend more time engaging top talent and
building the kind of relationships needed to transform a passive seeker into an active
candidate and, ultimately, your next hire.
3. Interviewing Goes Virtual.

Its no secret that for multinationals and mom and pop shops alike, all businesses are
becoming increasingly global and interconnected in a new world of work that transcends
geographical borders, boundaries and cultures (corporate or otherwise).
While the rise of global business has mostly impacted enterprise employers and large
enterprises over the past decade or so, in 2016, even small ,emerging companies will have
to handle the challenges of having multiple teams spread across multiple locations and
functions. Couple this with a tightening labor market, and in the coming year, we should see
many employers step up their talent acquisition efforts to focus on remote workers or
locations.
This trend will lead to the broad based adoption of video interviewing technologies, with
this category finally moving from the margins to the mainstream. Some companies may be
able to do this by using low or no cost services such as Skype or Google Hangouts.
Others, however, will look to specific video interviewing software or ATS/HCM systems
with integrated video interviewing features or functionalities to adopt a more candidate
friendly, integrated and low cost approach to screening and selection.
4. Recruiting Metrics Grow Up.

Weve
been talking aboutpredictive analytics and big data for a while now, but after whats
become more or less unilateral agreement on the importance of these recruiting precepts,
2016 will be the year recruiting moves from theory to action when it comes to hiring metrics.

With CEOs, hiring managers and business leaders increasingly looking for deeper analytics
throughout their business, its imperative for recruiters to provide meaningful metrics and
actionable analytics into the talent functions overall process, efficacy and bottom line
results.
More refined hiring metrics mean getting a better look at where bottlenecks exist, which
hiring managers or recruiters are the most effective, and whats really working in recruiting
and whats not.
These new analytical capabilities mean that increasingly, hiring departments will be able to
better benchmark and baseline their hiring results and drill down deeper into the data that
constitutes hiring success.
Until recently, recruiters have been evaluated almost exclusively on outcome metrics like
time to fill or cost per hires; the problem is that focusing too much on the sheer number of
butts they can pull through the hiring funnel and into seats ignore important controls
regarding quality of hire, candidate engagement or respective recruiters overall impact on
organizational recruiting or retention.
In the same way its become standard to measure sales and marketing teams against
overall business performance and bottom line, in 2016, expect recruitment organizations
and talent acquisition functions to start seeing a shift from transactional to strategic
performance metrics and increasingly, the entire hiring team will be judged by the broader
context of the real value their real work really drives instead of a bunch of soft numbers and
fluffy formulas that too often pass for data driven recruiting.
Thats going to change in 2016. Consider yourselves warned.
Im excited to see for certain what 2016 brings even educated guesses could be wrong,
but these are my best bets on how the talent technology landscape looks set to change over
the year to come. No matter what happens next, I promise you that this year will bring a ton
of innovation and change to talent acquisition and ultimately, both recruiters and the
candidates & clients we serve are going to be better off for it.
One things for sure: 2016 is an incredibly exciting time to be in this industry. Because when
it comes to whats new and whats next in recruiting and technology, turns out, the future is
now.