Those of you who know me well may be a bit surprised to know just how organized I am when keeping notes. Because I can be rather scatterbrained, often bouncing from one idea to the next, I’ve come to rely rather heavily on my ability to capture the essence of a given conversation for quick reference at a later date. Every once in a while, I’ll come across a note that jumps off the page, grabs me by the collar, and shouts, “This is important!” One such instance occurred today.
The weeks following HR Technology Conference are pretty hectic. I was thumbing through the notes I took during briefings, working my way through the near-endless list of follow-ups and to-dos, when I came across a simple question: “Why is integration important?”
There were a few answers, quickly jotted down – data integration, single sign-on, process integration – but none of them quite captured what I was looking for. As I was reading this press release from SmartRecruiters announcing the expansion of their integration with LinkedIn, the question came back to the front of my mind.
I had the pleasure of discussing the integration with SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck last week as he gave me a sneak peek. As he was walking me through the new features and functionality that come with SmartRecruiters’ expanded (and very slick) LinkedIn integration, I had to ask his perspective on the value of this integration. It’s no secret that the ROI of LinkedIn Recruiter has come under scrutiny lately, as candidate response rates are dropping and the cost of use is rising. How would integrating with an applicant tracking system – even one as popular as SmartRecruiters – address these issues?
If you’ve ever spoken with Jerome, you know he’s very passionate about changing the way we recruit. As he sees it, many of the fundamental problems limiting organizations’ ability to hire better talent are due to the widespread use of slapdash systems. “In order to be effective, a talent acquisition platform must allow talent acquisition leaders to manage all sourcing activity and all candidates in one place,” he explained. By expanding their LinkedIn integration, SmartRecruiters has made it possible for users to track candidates that were sourced via LinkedIn Recruiter all the way to hire.
While Ternynck believes this will be a very useful tool for organizations to measure the ROI of their direct sourcing efforts in LinkedIn, I think there’s more to it than that.
In my blog last week, I discussed the rapid expansion of use cases for analytics in talent acquisition systems. Talent analytics may very well be the catalyst that finally does away with reactionary recruiting models – that is, if we can actually capture the right data. And therein lies the answer to my question.
You see, the majority of recruiting teams today are using multiple tools to find, attract, and engage talent. Not only does this limit an organization’s ability to streamline their hiring process, but these tools also rarely talk to one another – leaving user data siloed and largely unusable. Lacking an integrated system, it’s nearly impossible to capture the data necessary to gauge end-to-end performance in talent acquisition. The best you can hope for is a collection of reports that tell a different story for each disparate system your recruiting team is using.
On the flip side, our research shows that those organizations using multiple integrated solutions, in conjunction with an ATS, are 240% more likely to rate their talent acquisition process as more than moderately effective than those using various standalone tools. I’ll be digging into this a bit further as I begin drafting my High-Performance Talent Acquisition Framework Report next month. For now, I’ve got some more post-HR Tech follow-ups to take care of.
Until next time!
–Kyle Lagunas, Talent Acquisition Analyst,
