7 minute read
Innovation in recruitment
Dana Bash Shelach is the CEO of iTalent, a company that uses unique methods to find and hire the right talent for startups and the high tech industry
Advertisement
The world is advancing at a dizzying pace, and many industries have undergone radical change thanks to disruptive innovation that has led companies and products to view reality differently and challenge the status quo. Technology companies engaged in innovation always push the boundaries of creativity, but this depends entirely on the quality of their human assets. As innovators in recruitment, this is where we come in.
We are iTalent, nice to meet you.
Our diverse set of clients, who we prefer to call partners, represent the full scope of the technology industry, from startups at the beginning of their very first expansion to global organizations that require precision in finding candidates with just the right, unique talents. Besides being technology companies and our partners, the one factor they all share is growth and expansion. Understanding that old recruitment processes simply aren’t good enough anymore, we’ve innovated new methods to meet the needs of companies in these stages of growth.
Why recruitment needs innovation
Finding the big stars in an industry and successfully recruiting them is always a difficult process regardless of market conditions, and the necessary investment increases dramatically for organizations experiencing ongoing growth. In 2017, research conducted by Glassdoor’s chief economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain in 25 different countries found that the length of recruitment processes for programming engineers had gone up. On average, it now takes 41 days to recruit program development engineers, making it the sixth-longest recruitment process by position. According to Brian Schreier of venture capital fund Sequoia, a startup needs more than 19 hours per-week for an entire year in order to recruit and employ 12 engineers, adding up to almost 1,000 hours!
These figures make it clear: recruitment is strategic, and short-term tactical solutions should be avoided. As we set out to increase our partners’ ROIs, it was important for use to to take into consideration two points:
1. LinkedIn
Most recruiters have a love-hate relationship with this must-have tool. LinkedIn is a partial solution, as it comes with many limits and restrictions like high subscription rates. Spurred on to overcome these difficulties, we practiced, specialized and invested in getting to know it and getting creative with it. While LinkedIn remains an imperfect tool, the way we’ve learned to use it has given us a huge advantage as recruiters.
2. The success-based model
We innovated the entire recruiting business model by charging regular monthly sums rather than selling prepared packages for a set price, focused only on the outcome. We faced our fair share of opposition to this new model, but it has proved to be superior in every way. Remember how we talked about having partners rather than clients? This model supports a healthy partnership, allows us to focus on long-term strategy and guarantees recruitment while avoiding damage to the brand. Our last decade working with this model speaks for itself.
After saying that, lets glimpse into 4 points which we decided to focus on of how we created innovation for our partners:
Transparency with our partners
The entire recruitment process often seems vague, and some organizations struggle to figure out where they and their candidates stand at certain stages. This confusion can lead them to simplify recruitment into a blackand-white process. Either someone was hired, or no one was - success or failure.
True, the ultimate goal of recruitment is, well... recruitment, but much value can be gained from the process itself and learning from the details of every step. The information acquired during recruitment leads to new conclusions about future recruitment and even the nature of the company itself.
That’s why we built the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), so our partners can see the status and details regarding each candidate for each open position we are working on. This includes their contact details, social media links and the ability to rate each one. This system has saved us time in organizing the data we gather on candidates, getting to know our partners and building a good relationship with them.
Technology
The success we’ve had with developing tools like ATS is a large part of the reason we are continuously investing in technology - new ways to accomplish old goals better. Another reason is that without our technological innovations in recruitment, there might not be anyone else to do it. Recruitment is often seen as a “soft” area of operations and doesn’t get the attention it deserves from within the organization. But with the proper investment in technology and innovations in how to use it, recruitment proves itself to be anything but soft. We’ve used technology to innovate in recruitment by developing the ATS system, which is based on the wellknown CRM system; part of innovation is using existing tools in new ways. We’ve also built AI tools that help us reach candidates and information we wouldn’t have found otherwise. And then, some technological solutions arise out of practical need. For example, one of our cyber partners was happy with the transparency of our processes but wanted to filter through candidates comfortably for different parameters at the push of a button. We listened, and built them the option to rate each candidate and filter accordingly.
People
People #1 - Everyone knows it, but few put it into practice, so it’s worth repeating: your people are your most valuable resource!
All the tools we’ve discussed wouldn’t be worth anything if we didn’t recruit intelligent, curious people.
This may not sound very innovative, but the development of a proven and dedicated recruitment method allows us to serve our partners and candidates in an innovative, pleasant and respectful way. We are even proud to say that this year we received an award of excellence from the National Association for Human Resources in Israel.
In addition, all these tools allow us to gather and share critical information between our people and save you and us valuable time.
People #2 - An essential part of the tools in our arsenal were born out of openness and curiosity, including the ongoing collection of information and receiving feedback from our partners. Is there anything more exact than that?
Putting the customer first isn’t a slogan for us as much as a way of working. Our preparedness to continue learning makes the organization thirst, curious and entrepreneurial in character. We take all feedback and requests seriously and collect everything into a unique system that ensures service and a product that are continuously developing. Many companies feel they know what the customers want and need. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes not... Our partners help us be better than the competition. True partners.
Candidate experience
The term “employer branding” is familiar to most people, but the complexity behind this concept is exceptional, and this topic has seen much development in recent years. A key part of employer branding is candidate experience, a tricky element that often leads organizations to missing out on great candidates. The candidate experience begins from the very first time contact is made with a potential candidate and is eventually composed of all their interactions with the organization, from the wording of advertisements to how they are treated personally at every stage of the recruitment process. Focusing on this important factor, giving candidates a positive impression of an organization and building within them a great desire to work there has led many of our partners to significant success in finding and hiring the right talent. Going back to the importance of people, candidate experience makes them the focal point, led particularly by how an organization chooses to communicate with them. It’s important to use the right language and give candidates a secure feeling of respect. Consistent messaging and behavior across platforms and time is also crucial to inspire potential candidates to put their trust in an organization. Our work with one partner included sending a detailed email with information about the company, the various advertisements the company had appeared in, a little about the team and a detailed explanation of how to conduct a recruitment process in the future. All this leaves the exact impression the company wanted. Candidates felt like they were being seen and that we really wanted to get to know them and create a friendly and transparent process for them. Giving them this feeling is also a great way to create ambassadors for your company.
We are currently working on and considering implementing a number of systems that will help us gather more input from candidates about the recruitment process. We hope this will help us strengthen our branding efforts for our partners further and give us that much more of an advantage in recruiting in-demand talent.
