As companies struggle to fill their open positions, many are acquiring new talent acquisition technology to help them cope. In fact, according to Korn Ferry, 68% of recruiters surveyed said that investing in new talent acquisition technology was the best way to improve recruiting performance.
But which technology platform is the best for your company? Research indicates that the global talent acquisition technology market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.1% over the next eight years, which only makes choosing the best solution more challenging. Here are five questions to ask the recruiting technology vendors you are considering to help you make the best choice.
68% of recruiters surveyed said that investing in new talent acquisition technology was the best way to improve recruiting performance Click To Tweet
Question 1: Where are you going with your solution?
Keep in mind that you will be going on a journey with your TA software vendor. Now is the time to not only think about your immediate needs, but the needs you are likely to have in the future and ensure that your vendor will be able to keep up.
At MojoHire, we believe the convergence of internal mobility with talent acquisition is inevitable. Record turnover rates combined with a shortage of qualified candidates require recruiters to work hand in hand with the human resource department to consider internal candidates for job openings and to play a role in employees’ internal mobility.
Instead of having talent acquisition teams focused on external recruiting and getting new people into the organization, MojoHire enables a blended approach that positions recruiters as “talent advisors” by examining external applicants, internal talent and even contingent and other types of workers to make the best decision for the company.
While these different types of workers reside within HR systems, they are normally siloed. MojoHire overcomes this situation by looking at talent from all of your organization’s HR data across disparate platforms.
No qualified talent is overlooked, and the best people are identified for each open position. This has the added benefit of elevating recruiters’ roles from “database jockey” to “strategic hiring partner.”
Related reading: 6 Ways to Incentivize Internal Talent Mobility at Your Organization
Question 2: How can your solution help me better leverage my existing HR talent acquisition technology?
The average company has nine different HR technology platforms working simultaneously, but many are underexploited because they are not connected. Given the considerable investments your organization has already made in HR technology, you want to ensure that each new technology acquisition has good ROI and enables you to leverage your existing systems.
MojoHire integrates with any number of HR systems and sits on top of your entire HR tech stack, offering you a unified and ergonomic user interface for mining and analyzing the vast amounts of data you have across all of your repositories, without having to change your existing systems one bit.
It analyzes all of this data like a seasoned recruiter, understanding not only the information stored about talent but also the complex relationships between the different types of information.
This allows MojoHire to instantly present a unified shortlist of the best-qualified candidates for any open req, whether they be internal talent, external applicants, contingent workers, previous employees or contract workers.
Related reading: Clunky HR Tech Stacks: The Struggle is Real, but There is a Better Way
Question 3: Can you demonstrate how your solution will drive efficiency in my recruiting process?
Ask potential vendors for concrete examples of how their solutions will improve and streamline your recruiting process. What performance metrics will it improve, and by how much? Do they have data to back up their claims?
Right now, the sad reality is that most recruiting processes are woefully inefficient. The average time to hire is more than a month, regardless of role. Getting to the best candidates first can make a significant difference in your company’s ability to attract talent. Accelerating hiring velocity is where MojoHire shines.
MojoHire’s proprietary AI algorithms analyze the massive amounts of data across all of your HR systems and instantly surface the best candidates for all open reqs, minimizing – if not altogether eliminating – the search process.
Based on our customers’ experience, adding intelligence and automation to the talent discovery process through MojoHire has resulted in time to hire that is twice as fast and has saved recruiters up to 30 hours per week (65% of their time) by not having to review unqualified applicants, and slashed the time to candidate discovery by 92%.
Related reading: How to Turbo-Boost Hiring Velocity
MojoHire has saved recruiters up to 30 hours per week and slashed the time to candidate discovery by 92%. Click To Tweet
Question 4: How do you help drive adoption and collaboration with your talent acquisition technology?
As you know from previous technology acquisitions you have undertaken, installing the technology is only part of the process; the real challenge is getting people to use it.
Most recruiters can relate to the reality that even though most Fortune 500 companies and a majority of large companies have an ATS, they are so clunky and difficult to mine that they are either underutilized or not utilized at all. The valuable applicant data in there may as well be in a black hole.
Key considerations for the usability and adoptability of talent acquisition technology software include:
- Intuitive user interface: How easy is it to use? How many clicks or steps does it take to accomplish a task?
- Information consolidation: Is all the relevant information displayed in one place, or do users have to jump between platforms to get a complete picture?
- Collaboration functionality: Can hiring managers, recruiters and HR executives compare notes and comments about candidates from within the platform, or do they have to take conversations to another property like email or Teams?
- Upfront configurations: Will the software perform needed functions on day one, or will you need to configure the system first, create “model” profiles and role descriptions and give the solution time to “learn” from your data?
MojoHire saves recruiters a ton of time and effort. Not only does it automate talent discovery (see question three above), but it also consolidates all of a company’s talent data (internal, external, contingent, etc.) behind one user-friendly interface. All stakeholders can see a holistic view of their talent in one place, but they can also communicate and collaborate right there on the platform.
When you consider that the average employee switches between applications more than 1,000 times per day, it is easy to see how much time and effort is saved by adding MojoHire to the HR tech stack.
A bonus of this is that the communication between stakeholders is greatly facilitated since people can see everything on one screen instead of digging through their emails.
Related reading: 4 Ways to Improve Recruiter and Hiring Manager Collaboration
Question 5: Are you using AI ethically in your talent acquisition technology ?
Many talent acquisition technology software uses AI algorithms that use data from past hiring & firing data. They can have unconscious or conscious hiring biases baked into them. Biases are nearly impossible to avoid without the help of technology, and when future talent matches are based on past hiring data, those biases will be baked into the results.
For example, a hiring manager may give a recruiter the résumés of their top-10 performers over the past 10 years and say, “find me more people just like them.” But if they were hired with any type of bias – conscious or unconscious – then the search results may be jaded.
To avoid this problem, MojoHire’s intelligent matching models were built using a massive dataset from public sources. Our solution uses a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) machine learning model to identify entities and understand the relationships between those entities.
The only thing MojoHire considers is the objective facts around a person’s skills and experience and how well they fit the job description. MojoHire’s algorithms also relate their skills to other adjacent skills the recruiters and hiring managers may not have thought of, which is a unique yet important approach.
The error of basing future hires on past data is not uncommon. To continue with our best performers example, other “intelligent” solutions may look at the top-10 performers and see that they all went to Ivy League schools and conclude that this is an important criterion.
MojoHire has been built to understand what types of information can either cause bias or be a result of bias and limits its evaluation of candidates to an understanding of the objective facts around their skills and experience.
MojoHire helps organizations mitigate hiring bias in other ways, as well. Our anonymization feature is one of our most popular functionalities. It “hides” information about candidates that might lead to bias, such as name, photo, gender, location, or education.
Which elements are masked are completely customizable by information type as well as by user type. For example, it can be configured to allow recruiters to see the photos and names, but not the hiring managers.
Conclusion
Asking these five questions of the talent acquisition technology vendors you are considering can help you choose the solution that will best meet your company’s needs over the long term and ensure that you are making the most of your past and future HR tech investments.
