By Aaron Elder, CEO & Co-Founder, Crelate
There’s been a lot of talk over the past year about the Great Resignation, the Great Renegotiation, and the Great Reshuffle. However it’s described, businesses are feeling it with more than 10 million open job positions to be filled in the United States. Internal hiring managers and staffing and recruiting agencies have significant challenges as they race to respond to an unprecedented dynamic.
Staffing and recruiting agencies are feeling insatiable demand from the market and pressure to fill as many vacancies as swiftly as possible. Meanwhile, they must also address potential candidates’ new demands, such as a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and work-life balance. These rising candidate expectations are spilling over to the recruitment and hiring processes themselves.
Beyond redefining where they’re willing to work, candidates also expect a new level of transparency and consistency from the recruiter throughout the hiring and onboarding process. They want a level of personal consideration that recruiters utilizing outdated technology platforms will struggle to provide at scale. Today, immense competitive pressure means that if staffing and recruiting professionals wait too long to reply to or even proactively update a candidate, the candidate may have moved on to the next opportunity.
Technology delivers exceptional recruitment outcomes
Staffing and recruiting professionals still need to match people with great-fit roles but may struggle to create healthy pipelines of candidates due to the extreme levels of demand in the market. Technology can ease the workload of staffing and recruiting professionals by eliminating extraneous manual or awkward information transfers, leaning into human-centered automation, and effectively integrating tools for engagement at scale. When technology streamlines recruiting processes, professionals are free to focus on building relationships with talent and finding those great fits.
Responding to the surge in demand while dealing with staffing technology that is patched together or requires weaving in and out of outdated or disjointed workflows doesn’t offer the scale needed to keep up. In today’s extreme environment, technology that expedites, supports, and drives the process, is essential to enabling professionals to have the bandwidth to build and manage successful candidate relationships.
Leading ATSs and recruiting CRMs are increasingly creating more efficient and responsive experiences by automating everything from internal processes to outbound candidate engagement, both as native functionality and through deeply integrated point solutions. When that kind of technology is also highly flexible and intuitive, it can act as an Iron Man suit for recruiters in high-touch, high-volume sourcing and recruiting. This technology support can range from delivering key check-in messages around initial engagement to communicating status in a recruitment or deployment process. The staffing industry has an opportunity to drive new levels of digital transformation to answer this once-in-a-lifetime market cycle.
Minimize “no show” during onboarding
Once recruiters secure the right talent, onboarding is another mountain to climb—a discombobulated or dated process can result in far higher no-show rates. Starts and stops in onboarding, and a vague sense of status, can drag out the process for everyone. Onboarding isn’t becoming less complex or tedious: from I9s and background checks to drug screenings to personal information entry. A staffing firm’s only viable weapon is to streamline with tech at the center. Recruiters can use flexible onboarding automation and compliance management software to make this process less painful, from candidates excited to make the next move to recruiters desperate for more bandwidth.
More than ever before, the ability to be responsive and humanize the recruitment and onboarding process is necessary for creating and maintaining long-term relationships that will see both agencies and brands through this market cycle with the talent onboard needed to win. An initial opportunity might not be a fit, but that next one might be ideal. The question for the staffing professional seeking to build a talent pipeline becomes: did my tech position me for a long-term connection to the candidate or bury my ability to establish a relationship?
Aaron is the CEO and co-founder of Crelate, to which he brings more than 25 years of experience in product development and technology consulting. Prior to co-founding Crelate, he was a lead architect of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one of the largest CRM platforms in the world. Aaron has spent most of his career hiring and growing developers in both the enterprise and start-up world, with much of that time in niche technology fields.
