In the last five years there has been an explosion in the number of talent acquisition technology products hitting the market. The choice is bewildering and many talent acquisition professionals are struggling not only to make sense of the vast array of options but also to understand what it is they need in the first place!
This week it is my pleasure to welcome HR Pro, Recruiter and industry commentator Tim Sackett back to the show. Tim is a unique hybrid of practitioner and thought leader and has some great insights into the world of Talent Acquisition Technology
In the interview we discuss:
• The Talent Acquisition Technology Stack, what is it and why might an employer need one?
• Are there really 25 categories of Talent Acquisition Technology?
• The ATS as the system of record
• Marketing myths
• Google jobs, salary data and the impact on applicant flow
Tim also tells what he is looking forward to at the HR Technology Conference which is taking place in Las Vegas in October
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Avature ats, an applicant tracking system that redefines user experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. Just listen to one of the many ways in which L’Oreal USA has improved their hiring process with Avature, as told by Edward Dias, Director of Recruitment, Intelligence and Innovation.
Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart automation and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that, and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 103 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In the last five years, there’s been an explosion in the number of talent acquisition technology products hitting the marketplace. But how do talent acquisition professionals make sense of this vast array of options? And how do they even know what kind of solution they need in the first place? My guest this week is Tim Sackett and it’s great to have Tim back on the show. Tim is a unique hybrid of practitioner and thought leader and he has some brilliant insights into the talent acquis technology marketplace. In the interview, he also shares some of his recent experiences of the impact of Google jobs.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
Hi Tim, and welcome back to the podcast.
Tim Sackett [00:02:16]:
Thanks for having me, man, I appreciate it. We haven’t been on since you guys, you released your new book, so congratulations for that.
Matt Alder [00:02:23]:
Thank you, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:02:25]:
It was a labor of love writing it and it’s brilliant that it’s. It’s brilliant that it’s now out. So for people who might have missed the last time you’re on the show, or people that don’t know you, could you just quickly introduce yourself?
Tim Sackett [00:02:39]:
Yeah. So, Tim Sackett, I live in the States and actually in Michigan and I run an IT engineering staffing firm out of Michigan, but it’s kind of a national kind of firm. And then I also got involved with this kind of HR talent acquisition blog writing and talent acquisition technology and like all these kind of things on my own blog about nine years ago and it’s exploded. So now I have like two full time jobs of actually trying to run a business and then trying to do this whole kind of thought leadership, you know, weird kind of scenario that we get involved in with podcast and blog posts and speaking and writing books and all that great stuff.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
Absolutely. And you know, podcasts obviously being the best form of communication. So the sort of topic that we’re going to discuss in this episode is talent acquisition technology. And lots of people sort of talk about now creating a stack of technologies to better enable talent acquisition and to innovate and kind of revolutionize the way that companies market to the talent that they need. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Sackett [00:03:55]:
You know, I think there’s a couple, couple of ways, right. I think some individuals will take a look at it and say, and I think it’s all, some of it has to do with marketing and how we market HR technology. But you’re going to have a lot of organizations, especially on the enterprise side, that says, hey, we want just one big giant HR system that does everything we need in hr and it’s all under one kind of umbrella and it all talks together and all the data is shared and oh my gosh, wouldn’t that be great? And theoretically, I think all of us would want that same thing. It seems like that would be wonderful. And then you have this other side of HR technology which is what if we can make the coolest little sliver of whatever we need? I need to source candidates. Let’s just make something that’s all it does is source candidates or I need to interview candidates or I need to do whatever might be do payroll. Then you have that best of breed. You have enterprise level technology and you have best of breed. What happened is this tech stack concept came to say, hey, if it wasn’t just this giant kind of umbrella, one piece of software that we’re just the entire organization is going to use, which is kind of theoretical in nature, but I think there’s some big enterprise companies trying to do that. This tech stack kind of analogy is kind of like dominoes. What if I had a great piece of sourcing tech and a great ATS and a great pre assessment test and I just took all these really small pieces and because of kind of open APIs and the ability to go out in SAS models, I could just stack all these things together and make my own great piece of technology. Maybe because those individually are all great pieces of technology, my stack would be better than this big giant vanilla all in one encompassing software. I think that’s where it lies. I’m going to be at the HR tech conference this Year in Vegas in October, I’m going to be leading a panel on that. What if, if we could build the perfect tech stack for ta, what would that look like?
Matt Alder [00:06:00]:
Do you think it’s actually possible? The reason I asked that is a lot of sort of talk I hear about, you know, stacking all these technologies together essentially comes from the, the, the vendors, them, the vendors themselves. And a lot of the companies that I work with don’t seem to use more than sort of two or three, you know, two or three things at the same time. They don’t necessarily integrate properly. Do you think that it’s a possibility? Are there companies out there actually who are actually doing this? You know, it’s something that sounds fantastic in principle, but does it happen or can it happen in reality?
Tim Sackett [00:06:37]:
So one of the people on my panel is going to be Jessica Lee and she runs kind of talent acquisition strategy for Marriott. So this huge kind of international company with hundreds of thousands of employees. So as you can imagine, their TA technology is pretty advanced. She claims right now that they have 18 different TA technologies in their stack. And I would say when I looked at it myself and said, okay, if I could look at just categories of TA technology, I came up with about 25. And so I’m like, so theoretically I think there is the ability to stack tech in a TA and make it work really well, even at the enterprise level. I actually think it’s easier as you get into the SMB and midsize and large because you’re already there, kind of already using mostly some best in breed stuff. What I think what we find out though is that we constantly want that one major piece. So there’s always. So like in hr you have HRAs, you have like one big kind of HRAS system. Could be Oracle, could be SAP, could be whatever. And then in TA you have the ats, right? So they’re both systems of records. You have a system of record for hr, you have a system of record for candidates and applicant tracking. And what you want is those kind of core organization, core pieces of software to do as much as possible. So instead of having a separate CRM, why couldn’t I just have CRM built into my ats? Doesn’t that make sense? Well, it does, but when you start to build in CRM into an already kind of really sophisticated ats, it just, it starts to, you know, everything starts to break down. It’s really hard to get it all to work together. Whereas CRM, I think if you open up the APIs and you’re sharing data back and forth. You can actually kind of get this stuff to work together pretty well even though now you have people somewhat working in multiple systems. But you know, we all work in multiple systems on a daily basis already.
Matt Alder [00:08:33]:
That’s very true. That also throws up a couple of questions for me. The first one which I have to ask, and this isn’t, this isn’t a memory test, 25 categories. I won’t ask you to name them all because there probably isn’t enough time. But could you sort of group those together or give us an insight into what some of them might be?
Tim Sackett [00:08:55]:
Well, no. So you have like recruitment marketing tech, you have sourcing tech, you have interview tech, you have assessment tech, you have just data analytics in general. And that’s kind of a technology category in its own. That brings all of the data from all of these sources together. You have an ATS stack, right? You have sometimes communication. So that could be texting if you don’t have that built into your ats, which most companies don’t. Programmatic advertising is a complete separate kind of add on tech CRM. There’s some predictive kind of analytics sides of that that go in there. Automated reference checking, VMS or contingent workforce technology, college sourcing or kind of management software. So onboarding I think adds on to that as well. Depending sometimes video interviewing. So you start to look at all job distribution, job board in my mind like they’re all kind of swimming around but so I think when you take a look at all those different kinds of really kind of verticals of different pieces of technology, I can go out and buy a technology that only does those kinds of things. There’s a job description vertical where it helps you write better job descriptions and different stuff like that. Again that’s part of the TA tech stack. Most applicant tracking systems will do pieces of that. So you don’t necessarily have to go in every vertical. But a lot of times you know how they do that is actually I would say pretty weak overall comparable to what you can get on the outside. Candidate referral or you know, kind of systems and employee referral. Automation, you know, is another piece I think that most ATSs just disregard besides jobvite who kind of kind of created it to begin with. But so you can see like there’s just all these categories and we would love to have in one system but it just doesn’t work out that way.
Matt Alder [00:10:57]:
I think that might have been 25 actually. I’m going to go back and listen and count but it’s probably pretty close But I think, but that kind of, I suppose, underlines, I think, one of the other issues with this topic. So again, with the companies that I work with, there’s so much confusion about where to start. If someone is running talent acquisition for, you know, any size of enterprise really, and they kind of look out to the market, everything that they could have to make their lives easier and make them hit their objectives, then it’s just a kind of bewildering array of stuff. I mean, what would your advice be to, you know, to the actual buyers of this technology? Where, where should they start, how should they get their information and what is it that they need to buy?
Tim Sackett [00:11:45]:
I think that’s one of the things that I’ll get out of the panel, right, because I’m having a cross section. I’m having enterprise, I’m having midsize and I’m having large companies come on the panel. And I think what we’re going to find when we say, hey, what’s a perfect tech stack for ta? It’s going to be different for every single organization because it’s based on a lot of things, right? It’s based on kind of where you’re at. Are you in a startup mentality? Are you, you know, kind of, you know, your industry, your location, like just the needs of what you have. So now you start, say, okay, well there probably though is some commonalities. So if I’m an SMB tech stack or if I’m a mid to large or if I’m an enterprise, what are some of those pieces? I like to take a look at it and say, you know, I’m going to go to the business and say, okay, well what’s the biggest pain point we have? And if the biggest pain point we have is we’re not hiring quality people, we can hire people, we just can’t hire good quality. Well, I’m going to add in some assessment tech or I’m going to add this. I think we all have to have the core piece, right? You have to have a core HRIS system for your system of record for your employees. You have to have a core ats. Now I think there’s even some discussion that says, hey, in the next five years, do we see the ATS kind of go away and it becomes, and some of this is just, you know, Matt, we see this constantly, this rebranding of technology into a, into a new brand. So I see this recruitment, recruitment platform or recruitment automation of some sort of kind of new title. But it could, because the ATS has Such a negative connotation when we say, oh, you have to have an ats. I don’t think you have to have an ats. I think you have to have some kind of system that helps you manage the influx of talent and candidates that you’re going to get and also manage your ability to nurture those candidates. So that’s a little bit of a CRM, recruitment, marketing and ATS together. So if I’m going to look at just like, hey, I can only get two or three things, I better have some kind of recruitment marketing in sourcing, I better have some kind of ATS to make it all work. And then from there some of the other stuff is just, I would say extra, right? I don’t really need add on assessment tech or interview tech or certain kinds of AI that will do job matching or job chat or applicant chatting or whatever. Those are all great automation pieces that will save me time and actually add capacity to my team. But I don’t necessarily need them. Some of the stuff I mean I need if I’m going to go out and hire at any kind of level.
Matt Alder [00:14:14]:
I think you raise an interesting point about ATS is there and the sort of brand of ATS is now we’ve probably had ATS this for the best part of 20, 20 years now. The first sort of piece of recruitment technology that appeared. What always interests me, and I’ll be interested to get your perspective on this is lots of companies, you know, don’t necessarily like their ats. They don’t feel that it, they maybe don’t use it in the right way or they don’t feel drives what they need from it. Yet there’s a kind of a real reluctance to change and sometimes a reluctance to embrace some of these newer technologies because of this kind of, you know, reliance and being tied to this ATS that they don’t like and doesn’t work properly.
Matt Alder [00:15:00]:
Why is that?
Tim Sackett [00:15:03]:
I mean it’s somewhat blamed back to the vendors again on marketing. So it became very popular for the last couple of decades to say if you had. Because we didn’t have a SaaS model, right? So we had kind of in house, this was this technology sitting on your servers. And so if you wanted to change that kind of technology, it was very painful to bring in a brand new tech and have to have all this information put over to another piece. And it took sometimes years to make that transformation from one ATS to the next. And then when, when you got all said and done, it still felt very similar to the one you just had. And so it’s to the advantage of the current technology in place to make you feel really scared that it’s going to be super painful to change. It’s going to take a lot of work. You don’t have that capacity, it’s going to cost a lot of money, and at the end it’s probably not going to be that much different. So just keep working with us and we’ll deliver what you’re looking for and what you need. That’s a marketing concept. That’s not reality. Because the reality is with SaaS software, ATS platforms, you can literally change one from month to month without really too much of a hiccup. And it wouldn’t be that difficult to do. And yet we have this psychology now built into us over a couple of decades where we’ve been hit over the head so much that our instant reaction is like, oh my gosh, if you have to change software, it’s going to be so hard. Don’t do it. You could lose your job over it. And you’re like, oh my gosh, where did that come from? It’s like, it’s like that kid that kept getting hit, as you know, by his dad as a kid, and every time the dad raises a hand, he just jerks all of a sudden because he thinks he’s going to get hit. We have the same thing. When we talk about, oh, you’re going to change ats, we go, oh, oh gosh, don’t do that. Oh, don’t do that.
Matt Alder [00:16:47]:
So moving on to developments in the market, I suppose the biggest recruitment technology story of the year has been sort of Google’s entry into the market. With Google Jobs and, and Google Hire, what’s your view on that? What do you think the implications are? Where does this take us? What should people be thinking about it?
Tim Sackett [00:17:09]:
Yeah, I mean, I literally get probably five email questions or LinkedIn type kind of responses a day asking me different little things. And it’s amazing the breadth of questions I’m getting about Google for Jobs because I think it’s really. Here’s what we have to understand is Google for Jobs was developed so that candidates would have a better experience searching for jobs. It was built by Google for candidates. It was not built for companies. And the companies are struggling to understand that because everything that’s always been built in TA technology was built for them. It was built for something where I could pay you some money and you’re going to help me do this better or you’re going to help me get higher up on rankings or you’re going to do whatever a la kind of, AKA indeed. And so all of a sudden, Google comes along and says, yeah, you know what? We don’t care about you as an employer. We don’t really care anything. What you have to say, what we care about is, is this better for candidates? If it’s better for candidates, then we’re going to deliver it and you guys can complain about it. You cannot understand it. We don’t care. That’s not what this is about. Now, when you put that into context, you understand more of why Google for Jobs is the way they are and employers are really struggling to understand because there’s a couple of things, right? There’s two big things that happened in terms of Google for Jobs pulling out a new schema of structured data. So for those listening that don’t really kind of understand that, basically every job posting that Google is looking at says, hey, a job posting should have these five criteria, right? They should have a title and they should have this, and they should have that. And as long as you kind of meet that criteria, then we’re going to pull that job into Google for Jobs and then we’re going to make it searchable and, you know, based on some basic SEO rules, it’ll show up higher in results versus another one. Well, some of the, A couple of those schemas that change were we want to see a specific address. So like a street address. Not, hey, it’s Detroit, Michigan. This is where the location of the job is. They want to know that it’s at 1 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. So the more specific you can get with the location, the higher up in the search results it’s going to show. The other piece of it that came in is salary data. Candidates want to know what the salary is on a job. Well, I was just on a webinar and there was, and we had a survey and there was 2,500 responses that asked companies quite blankly, where do you put salary in the job? Do you put it in the title? Do you put it in the job description, or do you not put it at all? 65%, which I think is pretty normal across the US at least in terms of behavior, did not put salary at all in a job, nor do they want to. And Google is going to say, well, if you don’t want to, if you don’t want to play along with us, then your jobs are going to fall deep down in terms of search results. And your competitors who decide to put the salary into the job description into a structured data field that’s going to show up much higher because candidates are telling us that’s what they want. And also traffic alone, job search traffic will tell you if you have salary in the job, even if it’s under market, gets a much higher traffic than those jobs that don’t have any salary data. And so when you start to take a look at the Google for Jobs piece, it’s going to have a major impact. And I think the other piece of that is so much of our traffic right now comes from indeed. Well, Google for Jobs is not going to index indeed Jobs. So instantly all that indeed traffic is going to fall below the fold in terms of search results. So if you have a ton of money and resources going into indeed, you now have to take a look at that and say, okay, well wait a minute, what’s my applicant traffic look like? And I’ll tell you, Matt, most companies don’t even know what that is. They have no idea where their applicant traffic’s coming from. So that’s the first hurdle. Let’s go out and figure out how do we actually measure applicant traffic? And then do we know kind of what we’re spending on applicant traffic versus hire so we can realign those two things to be much more effective with our spend. Google for Jobs just literally flipped up the entire world for that. Because before we always knew like, all right, probably number one traffic source indeed. Maybe there’s some other pieces in there with career builder and LinkedIn or even our own career site, but in there those were going to be the top four. And then when you got to source of Hire, it kind of did that. My own traffic alone changed by 50% when Google for Jobs came live from the indeed organic traffic. And ironically, Career Builder was a Google for Jobs original partner. Two years ago, in developing this, my traffic went up correspondingly with them. So Google for Jobs built their entire schema to match as close as possible to Google for Jobs. And thus if I post a job on Career Builder, it’s going to show up really high on the results.
Matt Alder [00:22:06]:
That’s, I mean, that’s really interesting stuff. I mean, particularly the results that you’re seeing. And also I think the, you know, the salary stuff and the data in the job, because I think the percentage of companies who don’t put salaries in jobs in the UK is probably even higher than that. It’s just, you know, it just kind of does. It kind of doesn’t happen. So I suppose, in summary, there’s lots to think about for employers, but effectively this is, this is really all about improving the job search for, from a candidate perspective. And, you know, surely that must be a good thing.
Tim Sackett [00:22:38]:
It should be, right? We would hope so, I think. But I think companies struggle so hard to understand the impact Google has on their own applicant flow. I just think they go, oh, well, it’s just Google. And you know, I mean, a decade ago we really focused on SEO and how to make our job descriptions show up higher from our career site. But then indeed came in and indeed basically bought all the SEO, right? They owned SEO. That’s really the main advantage. Indeed did. I mean, they were just experts in saying, hey, if somebody’s going to search for a job engineer in Chicago, So the first 50 things that are going to show up are jobs on our site because we’re going to go out and buy keywords and we’re going to own SEO and we’re going to understand it. And so companies just kind of gave up on saying, well, we’ll show up high enough or it doesn’t matter because indeed scraping our jobs. So they’re going to show up on indeed. We don’t care. As long as we get the traffic, we could care less. Well, a lot of that traffic now is going away. So companies who are ignoring Google for jobs are really ignoring potentially 40, 50% of their traffic for applicants going away as well.
Matt Alder [00:23:45]:
No, that, that, that makes a lot of sense, I think. It’s certainly very, very interesting times. So finally, we’re sort of just about to. The, the kind of, the big conference season of the year is just about to kind of roll around again. And I know that you’re going to be at HR Tech and you’re also going to be at the Recruiting Trends conference later in the year. What are you going to be looking out for? What are you looking, what are you looking forward to? You know, what’s kind of on your radar for those conferences?
Tim Sackett [00:24:14]:
I love going to HR technology conferences to really kind of one look at new startups coming into the space. I think every year I find a handful of companies where it’s truly people who don’t even understand what they have. They understand that there was a problem, right? So they went out and saw, hey, this one company we talked to and usually that’s really what happened is like, they’re like, hey, my dad has a company and he was really struggling with this. And I’m like, oh, me and my friends said we could fix that. And we developed this piece of software and I’m like, oh my gosh, that is groundbreaking, really cool stuff that I can see a bigger enterprise like software, like an Oracle SAP ultimate workday coming in saying, oh my gosh, we just want to buy you, integrate it into our stuff. And here’s a check for 3 million go away. Every year that happens and it’s cool to see how those ideas still are out there. We keep thinking like everything in TA technology has already been developed. There’s nothing new. And yet every single year there’s actually new things who are, you know, are solving problems that we have. And it’s usually coming from people who are totally outside of the regular kind of HR talent acquisition industry who just see problem solve, problem solve and they don’t think about it in the context where we would. When we know we understand all the industry stuff and kind of understand the process the way it should work, they don’t even have that context and they just go and say, oh my gosh, here’s an issue, I’m going to solve it. Bam. Technology.
Matt Alder [00:25:44]:
Tim, thank you very much for talking to me.
Tim Sackett [00:25:46]:
Thanks for having me, Matt. Certainly appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:25:48]:
My thanks to Tim Sackett. You can see Tim’s panel at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, which takes place in October. I’ll also be attending, so please say hello if you see me. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting future in your app store. You can listen to all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
