trend report vol. 5
TRANSCRIPT
Excerpts
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Letter from the Director
TTL continues to track shifts and growth in the Talent Acquisition
tech space. Advancements in APIs and interconnectivity among
verticals paves the way for a more cohesive user experience
than ever before.
Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace
How developing a “platform-first” approach can fix the fragmented
Talent Acquisition Technology paradigm. From open APIs to
integrated ecosystems, hope is on the horizon for Talent Acquisition.
Learn how to select the right vendor.
Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick
Recruitment is a dynamic and complex process that will always
include the job description, posting jobs, interviewing, and screening.
What has changed is the execution. Learn how tech has changed
and what tools we’re using today.
Investor Spotlight: AngelList
A rise in incubators and accelerators and an IPO desert are among
the trends impacting the Talent Acquisition funding landscape.
Are late-stage investors getting ready for a big year-end slowdown?
Find out in this investor trends update.
The Future Of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan
With a definitive shift in workforce demographics, new tools and
technology, and accessibility changes for small, medium and large
companies alike, the future of Talent Acquisition may look more like
the past than we think. Read the predictions.
Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition
An in-depth look at emerging trends from Disruptive Innovation in
Talent Acquisition, a TTL event. Talent Acquisition experts discuss
what the new wave of platforms and the issues facing today’s
workforce mean for recruitment in this recap by Brian Delle Donne.
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Letter from the Director
It’s an exciting time to be in Talent Acquisition
Technology. In the last six months, we’ve seen
phenomenal growth here at Talent Tech Labs.
We’ve visited conferences all over the country and
held our own talent innovation day here in New York
City. Our model of putting startup companies in front
of actual Talent Acquisition professionals has been
proven. But what does that mean?
In this Trends Report, you’ll see some common
threads. One is hope. Hope that finally, Talent
Acquisition will get its due; from technology partners,
and from its colleagues within Human Resources
suite. Another key thread is the critical need for
innovation that’s coming from the people that make
up our Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem.
It’s clear that recruiting is a competitive advantage
when done right.
While leaders and frontline practitioners in Talent
Acquisition continue to be held accountable for more
than the traditional job description (marketing,
branding, retention, tech oversight), we’re also seeing
a leap in the willingness to embrace these roles and
shed some of the old responsibilities that have
become ineffective in today’s talent markets.
At the forefront of this shift, you’ll find the people
highlighted in this report. Whether they’re piloting
an unknown new vendor from our incubator to
astounding results, enabling users in purchasing
open API technology, or vigilantly watching the talent
tech markets to give accurate and timely advice
to investors—recruiters, hiring managers, and talent
leaders are championing the issues that are
important to Talent Acquisition professionals.
I hope you enjoy Volume 5 of our Trends Report.
We are always open to suggestions, so if there’s
anything you would like to see our team cover, please
let us know. You may notice that we have left out
the updated Ecosystem from the report. We will be
turning the Ecosystem into its own release and you
can expect to receive the next version in mid-June.
Jonathan Kestenbaum
Executive Director – Talent Tech Labs
J. Kestenbaum
Welcome to the latest edition of Talent Tech Trends
About the Author: Jonathan Kestenbaum is the executive
director of Talent Tech Labs. Talent Tech Labs was originally
founded to foster the growth and development of emerging
ideas and companies in the Talent Acquisition Technology
space. An entrepreneur at heart, he spends his days building
and advising the technology companies of tomorrow.
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Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace
If companies are not careful, Talent Acquisition can become the
most fragmented process within an organization. There are many
steps to a holistic recruiting approach and many different vendors
to work with across these steps. To make a senior hire within a
technology company, for example, a recruiting team might need to:
— Post the job to multiple job boards and aggregators
— Do distributed video interviews
— Offer meaningful skills/behavioral assessments
— Leverage reference check vendors to skip the phone call bias
— Perform background checks
— Prepare an offer
That is five separate vendors to work with in what we all see as
a relatively straightforward hiring process. It gets worse. The vast
majority of customers are on legacy ATSs (in which sourcing and
CRM were afterthoughts), so we need to integrate these steps
into our already complex process. A Talent Acquisition professional
may also need to do some or all of these things:
— Ensure the job is distributed to internal employees
for referrals
— Tap into select agencies who might have good candidates
— Ensure the career page is up & mobile optimized
— Email all of the relevant targets in my talent pool
using my CRM
— Leverage LinkedIn Recruiter to source folks
That’s 10 steps with 10 potentially different vendors or tools.
This may sound exorbitant or insane (or both), but it’s the reality
of today’s recruiters. Last week, I spoke with a Fortune 20 company
who has 19 different systems “on top of” their ATS, with only
four of them integrated. The talent leaders at this company were
incredibly frustrated because their reality looks like this:
— Recruiters spend less time recruiting and more time
doing “swivel-chair integration”
— They are wasting money and resources to support
vendor integrations if they bother at all
— They can’t get the “full-picture” data they need because
it’s stored in many different systems
— Worse, they are running their best candidates through
a menial, disconnected experience
How to Identify Platform- First Vendors:
− Every endpoint of a vendor’s product feature is exposed to a restful API
− The vendor’s APIs have a robust API management and throttling process
− The vendor’s APIs are easily viewable and testable on a vendor’s development sites
− The vendors offer metadata reporting APIs for 3rd party reporting tools
− The vendors offer pre-built sophisticated bi-directional connectors with HRIS systems
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How did we get here?
There are many reasons recruiters find themselves in this professional
predicament, but one primary cause stands out. The relatively shoddy,
closed state of the underlying technology (powering all of the vendors
that comprise the TA stack) is at the core of this issue. Few ATS
vendors have open APIs, nor have they taken the time to realize the
mess they have created. The resulting customer frustration has led
to a resurgence in customers blindly buying the recruiting modules
of their large HRIS vendor. This is because they assume all of these
modules are integrated automatically.
However, this doesn’t end well as many of these vendors also lack
open APIs—sometimes even for their own Talent Management
modules, meaning that Talent Acquisition leaders are jumping from
the ATS frying pan into the HRIS fire. Regardless of which purchasing
decision they make, they find themselves with a system that isn’t
integrated with their other platforms, leading to disjointed processes,
inefficient recruitment teams and poor candidate experience.
...to win in Talent Acquisition, one must
adopt a platform-first approach...
There is exciting news—not on the horizon, but here today. It’s no
mistake there is a wealth of technological innovation in the Talent
Acquisition space. Nothing is more important for a customer’s
success and survival in this “world is flat” reality than getting better
Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued
people than your competition. You can’t do that if your recruiters are
ill-equipped, your sourcing team is doing duplicative work, and your
candidates are giving up on applications. So today, we are seeing
companies taking a broader, more impactful view. They realize to win
in Talent Acquisition, one must adopt a platform-first approach.
It is easy to identify such vendors and their products.
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This is a huge step, but it is merely the beginning. While this
pace of innovation is exciting to the Talent Acquisition buyer, it is
truthfully what other application categories have been offering for
over five years. Some vendors are going further—recognizing how
little time and resources the Talent Acquisition buyer has to do
the work themselves with these new open APIs. They are creating
marketplaces where they work with the myriad of potential vendors
a Talent Acquisition buyer might need, and have thus created
a much larger “whole product” with an integrated ecosystem.
Successful vendor marketplaces have these common components:
Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace
− Partner solutions integrated to a consistent set of APIs that are always maintained
− A consistent consumption experience within vendor’s UI, including easy invoking of partner services from a hiring process as well as view the partner results from within the vendor’s solution
− Ability to combine and view the partner and vendors data to provide a whole picture
− Flexible choice of business models, ranging from distribution for simpler “customer-click” purchases (often to SMBs) to referrals for “more complex” sales to larger customers
Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued
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The benefits for companies looking to evolve their Talent
Acquisition strategy and impact are obvious: no more swivel chair
integration, no more burdensome integration, reduced IT costs,
and more efficient processes. What is less obvious, but more
powerful, is that customers can ensure a consistent candidate
experience, while great candidates don’t get lost across multiple
non-integration points. This is terrific news for Talent Acquisition
technology vendors, especially those who specialize in one core
area of the Talent Acquisition spectrum. If these ecosystems bear
fruit and take off (which they will—platforms always win in the
end), this will allow them to double down on their core strength
while having multiple effective routes to market knowing that their
solution is easily consumable with others.
Boston Consulting Group reports that
organizations that win in recruiting deliver
2.5X the revenue growth over those who don’t.
It just may be in a few years that TA
and HR is where the coolest and geekiest
kids in IT work.
Finally, real technology is coming to HR tech (no more flat-file
integrations) in the area that has the most impact in HR: Talent
Acquisition. Boston Consulting Group reports that organizations
that win in recruiting deliver 2.5X the revenue growth over those
who don’t. It just may be in a few years that Talent Acquisition
and HR are where the coolest (and geekiest) kids in IT work.
Would that be so bad? I think not.
About the Author: Brett Queener is President and COO of SmartRecruiters,
an industry-leading Talent Acquisition Platform with 700+ customers including
AOL, Atlassian, Skechers, MicroStrategy, and Ubisoft. Prior to SmartRecruiters,
Brett was a senior executive at Salesforce.com for 11 years, including as the Head
of Products where he launched many market-winners including the industry-
changing Salesforce AppExchange.
Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued
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Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick
Consider two colleagues at the same level in your company. The
first is incredibly bright and switched-on. The second, however,
is a slacker. The contrasting qualities are paramount. Yet, no ATS
in the world could distinguish between them; it only sees two
people with the same job, title, company and time period. Your
ATS does not have the capability to track the intangibles; learnings,
accomplishments, and impact, to name a few.
Your ATS does not have the capability to track
the intangibles; learnings, accomplishments,
and impact, to name a few.
Simply put, ATS technology is stuck in the 1990s. Applicant
Tracking Systems are nothing more than cumbersome systems
of record and black holes for job seekers that unfortunately do
not capture who the candidate is and what he or she represents.
Due to the pace of consumer change, combined
with rapid technological advancements,
traditional job posting has been effectively
rendered obsolete. Companies and
candidates both mutually depend on smart-
business intelligence and effective candidate
management tools. Technology facilitates
connectivity and enables a mutually impactful
partnership between recruiters and prospective
talent. However, the collective challenge that
Talent Acquisition specialists face is figuring
out how to best-leverage these advancements
to create a dynamic and engaging digital
recruitment process.
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Because of this, it’s critically important that we are maximizing
technology in order to attract and retain dynamic talent. To
succeed in this endeavor, we need to move past technology
that simply screens and dismisses unsuitable candidates. Rather,
we must focus on treating candidates as consumers, and sell to
them throughout the process in order to compel them to join our
respective firms. While social recruiting isn’t entirely new, there
are various tactics that have proven effective and continue to gain
popularity. Tactics include video interviewing, mobile recruiting,
and social media engagement as part of the application, rather
than a screening mechanism.
...we need to move past technology that
simply screens and dismisses unsuitable
candidates.
A good question to ask is, “When job seekers go online to look
for employment, where are they going?”
CareerBuilder reports nearly 75% of current workers are open
to new opportunities, but only 18% actively look at job postings.
Furthermore, nearly 44% of candidates only respond to a job
opportunity when someone contacts them. These figures show
that interactive communication is essential; the methods by
which we engage with prospective candidates will be the key
differentiator between winning and losing the talent war.
As I alluded to before, candidates are more than just job seekers;
they are savvy consumers, engaging with our brands on multiple
levels. We can market to talent as thoughtfully and acutely as we
market to customers. So why don’t we?
Marketers learn in a flash that marketing to the wrong people
negatively affects bottom line figures. The same is true for status-
quo recruiting tactics. Yet, thanks to all the technology options
available to us today, we can evolve past “black hole” recruiting
and treat each job-seeker like the valued collaborator he or she is.
Through smart and insightful technology, we can humanize the
recruiting process with candidate relationship management (CRM)
tools that are geared towards engaging job-seekers rather than
intimidating them. Initiating contact is a critical first step, so long
as it has the human touch.
Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued
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...we can humanize the recruiting process with
candidate relationship management (CRM)
tools that are geared towards engaging
job-seekers rather than intimidating them.
Social media has revolutionized the way we connect, interact
and engage. Because of this, the technology we leverage must
seamlessly connect across a candidate’s online presence. Social
media is no longer used to screen a candidate, it is now used
to validate a candidate. The most successful social media
recruitment initiatives are those that imitate real-life scenarios.
People want to see the “face behind the brand” and are conducting
online audits of potential employers prior to and during the
recruitment process. It is important to integrate your digital
footprint to ensure that you are presenting your desired corporate
brand to potential candidates.
Mobile recruiting has far surpassed all expectations. Today more
than 72% of candidates apply via a mobile device. More than 61%
of people said they have a better view of the brand based on their
mobile experience. These figures reveal the importance of having
a mobile-friendly application process.
Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued
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...future generations will make decisions in
sound bites, and they won’t wait around for
companies to make up their minds
As video continues to take over social as the preferred stimulus,
appealing to candidates in this way will significantly increase.
While the use is not new, video interviewing and screening needs
to be fresh as the prevalence and application gain momentum.
Videos must sell the culture and brand. It’s beneficial and unique
to give candidates the opportunity to leave timed interview
applications. Internally, employee generated content will be
adapted to help recruiters engage with candidates.
Over time, other social and mobile tools like WhatsApp, Line and
SnapChat will replace lengthy traditional conversations. The role
of the employer will be to sell the opportunity in 90 seconds or less,
while the role of the candidate will be to convince the employer
they are the right fit in the same amount of time. The fact is, future
generations will make decisions in sound bites, and they won’t wait
around for companies to make up their minds.
Recruitment is a dynamic and complex process that will always
include the job description, posting jobs, interviewing, and
screening. What has changed is the execution. As we leap towards
the third decade of the 21st century, with Millennials transforming
into industry leaders, and Generation Z taking their place as the
largest portion of the workforce, we have no choice but to tackle
these challenges head-on.
Ultimately, the winners in the talent wars will be the companies
that can effectively and efficiently use pre-existing technology
while keeping a watchful eye on what tomorrow will bring.
About the author: Simon Fenwick is the Executive Vice President and Managing
Director of Global Talent Acquisition at IPG Mediabrands. His experience spans
client and agency environments. He has extensive experience in designing,
implementing and managing operational delivery of global talent teams and
acquisition strategy.
− Use social and mobile tools to replace lengthy conversations
− Videos must be honest and sell the culture
− Create a mobile-friendly application and career site
− Market to talent like consumers
− Personalize your first candidate message
− Customize your approach with CRM
Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued
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The Rise in Accelerators and Incubators
Accelerators and incubators are surging, and in many cases
corporate sponsorship is the fuel driving it forward. Over 2,000
incubators and accelerators can now be counted across America.
These programs can boost economic capabilities and development
across regions and can consolidate the support network early
stage companies require to succeed, particularly in emerging and
“flyover” cities.
Viability-Centric Investor Criteria
In 2016, investor criteria will shift focus to viability metrics
over growth metrics. Some of these measures include margin
analysis, acquisition rate, retention rate, break-even and customer
diversification. During a period of reduced liquidity, companies
that can sustain themselves without investor intervention will
trade at a premium to their VC-tethered peers.
IPO Desert
Venture capital fundraising has continued to rise despite America’s
ongoing IPO drought, but something needs to give. With the rout
in tech stocks in January and continued global equity volatility, Q1
2016 was the slowest period for IPOs since 2009. Investors have
shifted their perception of public offerings as a viable liquidity
strategy. Expectations for timing of exit and value are undergoing
re-calibration along with renewed focus on corporate acquirers.
Venture Capital Trends: Q2 2016
The United States equity surge reached its
seventh year in 2016, spurring one of the most
durable venture capital periods since World
War II. 2015 ended with more than $100 billion
flowing through startups across every stage
of investment, yet volatility in stock prices and
concern over valuation have many investors
spooked about an overheated market. Here are
a few venture capital trends to look for in the
rest of 2016.
Investor Spotlight: AngelList
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Investor Spotlight: AngelList Continued
A Decrease in Startup Valuations
An outcropping of the factors listed above has manifested in a reset
in valuations. Some high-flying companies who raised big rounds
in 2014 and 2015 must now justify their valuation to investors on
par with historical norms, else they will likely face flat or down-
round valuations upon their next fundraise. A few fund managers
have openly joked about keeping a unicorn target list of companies
they do not expect to remain above $1B. However, a reduction
in late stage valuation has a positive trickle-down effect on early
stage investors to be more conservative with terms in Seed and
Series A rounds. Median valuations are down anywhere from 30%-
50% from Seed through Growth.
Increasing Difficulty with Raising Mega-Rounds from
Late-Stage Investors
Investor sentiment and flexibility at the late stage is especially
under pressure. In Q1, mega deals were at lows not seen since
Q3 2014. This is likely a result of diminished multiples, fewer exit
opportunities and bloated valuations from the last three years.
Series B and later investors pay particular attention to burn rate,
as their tolerance for write-offs are nil. As one growth investor
recently told me, companies earning $20M a year but burning
$30M now must either find a way to break even or they will
go out of business.
Seed-Stage Funding Becomes Increasingly Professionalized
Early-stage VCs and platforms such as AngelList are becoming
fixtures in funding rounds leading up to Series A. In this
environment, professional full-time investors are competing with
part-time angels in identifying companies and getting into “hot
rounds.” To that end the industry is becoming more insider, and
competition for allocation more fierce. Beneficiaries of this shift are
lead VC funds and intermediaries such as AngelList, which provides
Angels and Micro VC’s access to VC deal flow.
About the author: Adam Carver is a former Principal at Mesa Ventures and
now leads partnerships for AngelList in New York. He formerly worked at the
accelerator Techstars and at Morgan Stanley in the credit trading group.
AngelList is the premier platform for investors to discover and invest in
venture-caliber early stage startups. It has facilitated $250M in funding into
over 1,000 companies.
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Future of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan
Pinning down the future of Talent Acquisition is a tricky beast.
One year, we’re all screaming about gamification and mobile
recruiting and the next year, some will insist psychometrics,
big data, and virtual reality are the next big thing. The future
of recruitment has been written about by countless analysts,
futurists, vendors and yes, those rare birds, practitioners.
Here’s my take:
Like any predictions, we’re going to get some of them wrong.
Here are the trends that aren’t so “techy” but will probably carry
the day when it comes to getting it right about the future of
Talent Acquisition.
Spray and pray is so over, on both the candidate and the recruiter
side. You can see it in the gasping death throes of some of the
larger, more general job boards. It can be seen in every recruiting
nightmare blog post. It’s a main stage keynote at every event. If you
can take the time to source a candidate properly, you can then take
the time to approach them as you might any other human being. Is
it faster? No. Is it more effective? Absolutely.
Recruiters are responsible for cultural fit and retention. That’s
why you hear so much about assessments, personality tests and
matching these days. While very few enterprise companies have
perfected it, many are following the rank smell of high turnover
straight back to the Talent Acquisition executives. So recruiters
are learning how to be better judges of skill and alignment.
Talent acquisition is a marketing role, not a sales one. As we
recover from our economic slump, job seekers, both passive and
active, are going to balk at aggressive tactics that interrupt their
workday. Today’s prospects want to know what you know, they
want to see what you’re like and they want to be approached with
the same level of personal touch they receive from all the other
people trying to market something to them. Just as marketing has
moved from outbound to inbound, so too must recruitment.
“I think the very role of a recruiter is evolving. It’s not enough to
be a great sourcer. It’s not enough to be a great closer. We need
to bring more to our clients...Tomorrow’s recruiters will be:
— Creative marketers
— Brand champions, at ease working up and down
and inside/outside their organizations,
— technically fluent and know how to wrangle metrics…
They will understand what social media is, what it isn’t, and how
to effectively incorporate it into various programs (recruiting,
branding, talent communities, etc). They MUST be self-motivated
and curious in order to keep pace with the rapidly evolving talent
landscape. The recruiting world is changing fast, if recruiters
aren’t driven to keep up they will struggle.”
--Lars Schmidt, Founder, Amplify Talent
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Future of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan Continued
Recruiters will stop accepting bigger haystacks. In the past, job
boards, matching services and even applicant tracking systems
would boast about the number of profiles they could give Talent
Acquisition pros access to. Today, an exhausted profession
demands a more discerning set of technologies that makes
the location of the “needle” much clearer. Today’s recruitment
technology (once the big guys’ SLAs have run out) should offer
up a few great matches, not 200 potentials. As search algorithms
become increasingly sophisticated, and tools’ APIs begin to talk to
one another, recruiters will build systems that work inside
their organizations, and according to their process.
Recruiters will start to build personas. Sensing a theme here?
Marketers build personas to “get inside the mind” of their prospect.
Recruiters can and should do the same. Candidate personas are
only popular among 44% of CEOs but 69% say it will be more
important within five years or more. Persona-based recruiting will
happen in the future. Of course, this only makes personalizing your
approach that much easier.
Candidate experience wins out big. While it doesn’t feel like a
prediction when bloggers, presenters, analysts and those smart
folks at the candEs have been saying it for years, it’s still worth
noting that as companies compete for top talent and that top talent
continues to become more savvy, more mobile, and less patient,
we’re going to have a problem. Interestingly, SMBs are ideally suited
to “clean up” as the enterprise companies flounder with exhaustive
application processes, 45-60 hiring cycles and career sites that
look terrible on even the best smartphones.
The future of Talent Acquisition, as it turns out, belongs to those
willing to try new tactics, pivot gracefully and treat job candidates
with the respect they’ve long been asking for.
About the author: Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer, writer and business
builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. Founder and CEO of Red Branch
Media, an agency offering marketing strategy and outsourcing and thought
leadership to HR and Recruiting Technology and Services organizations
internationally, Hogan is a consistent advocate of next generation marketing
techniques. She has built successful online communities, deployed brand
strategies and been a thought leader in the global recruitment and talent space.
She was part of the founding team of RecruitingBlogs and Fistful of Talent and
continues to write about Talent Acquisition and leadership on Forbes, Inc, Fast
Company, HRExaminer Business Insider, Entrepreneur, LinkedIn’s Talent Blog and
her own blog, “Marenated”, a collection of articles that dates back ten years. Red
Branch Media works with startups and Fortune 500 companies around the world.
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Filling a room with top talent executives is sure to bring up some
interesting topics. In fact, when Talent Tech Labs presented its
initial Disruptive Innovation in Talent Acquisition in NYC’s Flatiron
district last week, we found out exactly what sort of topics and
trends come up.
The event was kicked off with a bit of context on how Talent Tech
Labs was founded to nurture innovation by bringing new concepts
and solutions to the market for sourcing, engaging, and hiring
talent. Our incubator is focused entirely on Talent Acquisition
technology and fosters a community through collaboration and
engagement. It exposes founders to mentors, beta testers, events,
and actual talent executives to give critical feedback on new
applications and platforms and how they might work in the real world.
Brad Cook from Informatica, Simon Fenwick of IPG Mediabrands
and brand marketing and social engagement guru Craig Fisher all
delivered provocative presentations based on their experiences
implementing cutting-edge solutions. While each executive was
innovating in their own way and had unique recruiting and sourcing
issues to contend with; there was a common thread that ran
through their presentations.
Brad Cook posited that you won’t know if something will work for
your processes until you select and implement something non-
traditional—encouraging talent leaders to get out of their comfort
zone. However, he did recommend having a safety net in the form
of a beta or pilot program, before attempting to go at scale.
Craig Fisher also echoed the sentiment that you can’t be bashful
about trying new ways to advance the state of the art. In large
companies, it can be difficult to get buy-in for new technology, but
if you prove it works in one department, you can make a case for
cost or time savings and essentially earn that stakeholder approval.
Fenwick pointed out his talent function has learned from the way
IPG’s digital agency engages clients; treat job candidates just like
agencies treat their customers: client relationship management.
His firm belief is to better enable internal personnel as corporations’
best brand ambassadors.
Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition
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More than ever, talent leaders who effectively implement innovative
solutions are being recognized for those efforts. Seen as emerging
thought leaders, they have earned the opportunity to affect change
in their organizations, especially in companies where talent is
deemed a strategic imperative.
The second half of the event featured six companies curated by
Talent Tech Labs to each highlight various aspects of the hottest
sectors of the Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem. Three later
stage startup firms presented first, followed by earlier stage
companies that Talent Tech Labs has in incubation now and who
promise to be rising stars.
Of the later stage presenters, Talentron presented its tool to make
hiring managers more proficient at effective interviewing. Clinch
demonstrated its cutting-edge CRM solution that allows companies
to better gauge candidate and passive seeker engagement. Finally,
Mercer Match presented its gamified psychometric testing tool,
which uses gameplay to draw out characteristics that map to the
hiring company’s target profile. These demonstrations were
critiqued by a panel of industry thought leaders who lead talent
functions at Razorfish, FanDuel, and American Express.
To round out the day, Recroup demonstrated its automated
ad-retargeting technology that helps track candidates to posted
jobs by finding them where they live in social sites, and Step
presented its technology to engage targeted talent pools with
crowdsourced compensation data.
An audience of nearly 100 participants were fully engaged and had
many questions for the speakers, panelists and startups. We asked:
“What did you get out of these sessions?”
— Excellent insights and information on what
leaders in the field are doing.
— I’m fascinated with what is occurring in the startup space!
— Small, nimble companies appear best suited to pinpoint
challenges that need resolutions.
However, some leaders pointed out that the tradeoff between new
and nimble had to balance against playing in a legacy HR Tech
stack, and wondered if some of the younger companies would be
able to scale to industrial or enterprise burdens.
Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition Continued
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Talent Tech Labs will be running more of these “demo days”
targeting specific audiences. While this event targeted high-level
corporate Talent Acquisition executives and practitioners in the
NYC metro, future events will be offered in other cities, and will
feature content and tools geared toward the invited attendees.
Our next event will target staffing companies through a virtual
demo day jointly presented with an industry association focused
on IT, engineering, and specialty technical skilled professionals.
To make the most of these upcoming events, Talent Tech Labs
is asking the following:
— What are the biggest, most intractable challenges
you face today?
— What would you most like to see change about
how Talent Acquisition works today?
— Are there case studies that you can share with us about
lessons learned as you stepped outside the normal tool
kit to enable some new approach to Talent Acquisition?
Please respond to me with any observations that you would like to
share that will assure our programs going forward meet your needs.
We look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events.
About the Author: Brian Delle Donne is President of Talent Tech Labs. Talent
Tech Labs was originally founded to foster the growth and development
of emerging ideas and companies in the talent acquisition technology space.
In addition to accelerating the startups we enroll, the company has become
a “go to” source of data and analysis on all the developments in the talent
acquisition technology space.
Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition Continued
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