Is Your Recruiting Technology Up to Speed?

International MD Peter Linas considers the acceleration of recruitment processes and the need for recruiters to outpace their competitors.

Recruiters are often the first to know when an economy is in recovery; they notice that jobs start trickling, then flooding in, indicating that businesses are investing again after years of austerity.

During the economic crisis several years ago the recruitment industry went through a significant stage of evolution. Social media, smartphones, and the cloud were still recent innovations, but since then advances in technology and a frenzy of adoption, combined with fierce competition in recruitment during tough times, means recruiters have spawned new recruitment tactics that take advantage of the connected, data-driven, online world in which we now live.

Recruitment processes have sped up, not only because of recruiting technology, but also because competition has created an atmosphere where the most strategic and data-driven agencies are those that secure top talent for their clients. There’s an unprecedented focus on real-time KPIs like number of placements, hit rate, and time-to-fill. Business intelligence that turns reams of data into invaluable insights has transformed agencies into well-oiled machines.

This dynamic, where processes and technology create high-quality actionable data that can be used to inform strategy and drive improvements to recruitment technique and tactics is becoming the new standard in the industry. Unkempt Excel spreadsheets have long been used by recruiters as an alternative to custom-made software, but Excel’s days are now well and truly numbered (no pun intended). S Release has helped our beta testers make up to 43 per cent more placements and conduct searches 60 per cent faster than before – and we don’t think there’s an agency out there that doesn’t want to see these increases in performance and be able to make more placements quicker.

One development still taking shape that’s likely to set recruitment tech hearts racing is the shift to mobile recruitment. If you don’t believe me, a Google head honcho recently predicted that mobile traffic would soon exceed its desktop equivalent. Candidates pour so much time and information online through their phones and mobile devices that it’s clearly the next big unknown in recruitment and one we’re leaping into with both feet. We’re already using apps and responsive software to some extent, but we predict this going even further as candidates and recruiters alike become more heavily dependent on their devices.  At Bullhorn, much of what we’re doing is spending time and energy in innovation to stay ahead of the mobile curve and finding ways to bring high-speed recruitment processes to a mobile environment.

Not keeping pace with advancements in technology is a huge risk for any business. This is compounded in recruitment more than any other sector because agencies that source candidates from their recruitment CRM whenever and wherever they need to, faster than the competition, will make more money. Every opportunity to streamline, speed up, and standardize agency processes must be grasped, and technology is the key to this.