Key takeaways:
- Strategic tech stack selection: Talent leaders must carefully assess and select the right mix of technology tools tailored to their organization’s needs, ensuring usability and alignment with internal strategies to enhance recruiting effectiveness.
- Integration for efficiency: Prioritize tech stack components that offer seamless integration capabilities to streamline operations, improve delivery speed, and enhance collaboration across different recruitment functions and platforms.
- Effective RFP preparation: Collaborate with relevant stakeholders to craft well-defined RFPs that address specific challenges, evaluate vendor offerings comprehensively, and facilitate informed decision-making for optimizing the talent acquisition tech stack.
Talent marketing leaders need the right tools, applications, and platforms to attract top talent and connect with qualified candidates. But with today’s market challenged by record-setting open jobs and increasing turnover at every level, how can talent leaders optimize tech stack for future success in recruiting?
With companies using more platforms for recruiting and connecting with talent, it’s critical for talent leaders to understand the importance of using an efficient tech stack that not only helps bring in talent but also retains high performers. As shown in a report by Contentful, 85% of employees said they would leave a job because of software dissatisfaction.
As you work to finalize your tech budget for talent marketing, here are some key factors to consider.
Which Tools are Talent Marketing Teams Using?
With a plethora of talent marketing technology to choose from, you should consider which tools are optional for your business and team needs. One of the first steps in choosing the right tech stack is deciding if your recruiters will actually use it, as Tim Sackett, President at HRU Technical Resources, explained to SHRM.
“We are getting to a point where recruiting technology will take most of the administration work out of recruiting, leaving the recruiter to focus on relationship building,” Tim said.
He explained how the size of an organization is a deciding factor in determining which tools are the best for recruiting. Tim described how the differences between systems like Jobvite, Greenhouse, and iCIMS are very few and how legacy systems like Oracle, SAP, and Workday are the typical choices at the enterprise level because of their ability to process over 100,000 applications in a month.
What are some other tools talent leaders are looking at to achieve success? Talent Marketing Board members — all leaders of employer branding and recruitment marketing at billion-dollar companies — recently benchmarked the tools they’re evaluating heading into 2023 and shared some of the tech they deem necessary to pursue.
Charlotte Jones, former Talent Marketing Board Chair at Stanley Black & Decker and Lockheed Martin, shared how having the right technology in place is essential for success.
“I must caveat that any technology should be driven by an internal strategy, which will be unique for every organization,” Charlotte told Undercover Recruiter.
She explained that the essential tools should include a mobile-optimized career website with landing pages, microsite capabilities, retargeting media campaign technology, and a CRM and talent network that allows for efficient email marketing campaigns.
How to Solve Integration Issues
While having a great amount of tools to choose from can be beneficial, it’s also important that your tools communicate with each other to help save time and resources. A report by MuleSoft showed leveraging the right marketing tech stacks with integration can improve delivery speed by 78%.
If your existing tools do not have built-in integrations, it can help to use an application programming interface, or API, to connect software. PeopleScout reported how APIs could help you build custom integrations and connect talent acquisition technology to other systems, including HR tools.
When attracting diverse talent, it can also help to leverage tools that eliminate unconscious biases. But integrating a new system can present challenges to your existing tools.
A report by Lever described how anonymous candidate screening tools like MeVitae, Criteria, and Eightfold could help talent acquisition teams by redacting resumes during the review process. These tools are also able to work with many existing applicant tracking systems to screen candidates.
How Can You Prepare Your Request for Proposals?
Preparing your request for proposal (RFP) for new talent acquisition tools requires collaboration with different business units and communication about why the tools you’re pursuing are beneficial to your organization.
PeopleSoft reported how a well-written RFP should involve all recruiting, hiring, and onboarding stakeholders and how every team should contribute to the requirements gathering phase. Some of the teams who should be involved include human resources, procurement, and IT, which can all provide support to understand which tools optimize the candidate experience and best connect with recruiters’ systems.
Another key step in an RFP is identifying the biggest challenges with your existing tools and how you wish to improve or replace them. Eric Terry, Director of Talent Acquisition and Strategic Workforce Planning at T. Marzetti Company, explained how developing unique and specific questions about the vendor or tool you’re pursuing can help identify the challenges you face.
“When you’re looking at your RFP, ensure you’ve shared enough information to allow the respondents to determine your cost-per-hire. Often, pricing is presented in different ways: cost-per-hire, monthly retainer, cost per interview — which of these make the most sense for you?” Eric asked in a Hueman article.
Before finalizing your selection, it’s critical to give vendors the opportunity to showcase their tools to your organization. An article from Recruiting Daily said initiating work sessions can help during your RFP process to choose the best tech stack tools.
“These kinds of sessions let you engage in authentic dialog with potential vendors and create the kind of shared understanding of expectations that you would never get from a written response,” the article reported.
While choosing the optimal tech stack for your organization can be a huge task, you don’t have to undergo the experience alone.
How are Your Peers Optimizing Their Tech Stacks?
Big companies either cobble together specialized vendors and hope the tools will talk with one another, or go with one holistic solution that rarely offers all the functionalities and insights talent leaders need. How can you be sure the tools you’re using are going to help your team succeed?
Talent Marketing Board members — all senior talent leaders at billion dollar companies — meet weekly in our community to benchmark their most pressing issues, including how they’re optimizing their tech stack for talent marketing.
Our members shared the tools they’re using and which tools they’re looking into, how they’ve solved integration issues, and what they’ve learned from RFPs and implementations that would help others.
If you lead employer branding and talent marketing at a large enterprise, learn how your peers are evaluating their tech stack for future success.
