The idea of a TA Tech stack has gone mainstream very quickly. It makes perfect sense as employers look to have fit for purpose technology to support all elements of their talent acquisition strategy. While integration is a lot easier than it was a few years ago, there are still significant challenges that TA leaders need to understand and prepare for. So what are the key issues?
My guest this week is the perfect person to talk us through the current market situation and provide some practical advice. Peter Gold has been working in the ATS market since day one and has a vast amount of knowledge and experience to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The current state of the ATS market
▪ The key integration issues
▪ Asking for evidence of integrations
▪ Marketplaces
▪ Marketing spin versus implementation reality
▪ Challenges in volume
▪ AI, humans and automation
▪ Advice for TA Leaders
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:12]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 357 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The concept of a TA tech stack has gone mainstream very quickly. It makes perfect sense as employers look to have fit for purpose technology to support all elements of their talent acquisition strategy. While integration is a lot easier than it was a few years ago, there are still some significant challenges that TA leaders need to understand and prepare for.
Matt Alder [00:01:45]:
So what are the key issues?
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
My guest this week is the perfect person to talk us through the current market situation and provide some practical advice. Peter Gold has been working in the ATS market since day one and has a vast amount of knowledge and experience to share.
Matt Alder [00:02:03]:
Hi Peter and welcome back to the podcast.
Peter Gold [00:02:06]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me again.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about what you’re now doing?
Peter Gold [00:02:16]:
Yes, of course. My name is Peter Gold and I’m soon to known as Mr. Ats, which is a little bit tongue in cheek, but it’s really about my next kind of chapter in my journey, I guess, really my career and everything and been fixing ATSS for many years. I’ve been doing it for the last four years really with Cornerstone clients, helping them get the best out of ats. So I just thought, yeah, let’s just go with the Mr. ATS kind of tag name.
Matt Alder [00:02:40]:
There may be people listening who, who aren’t familiar with you and your tremendous body of work. So could you give us a kind of a bit of your.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
Bit of your backstory?
Peter Gold [00:02:48]:
Yeah, I mean I, I was a recruiter for many years, then got involved in the Internet and I just thought Internet recruitment. Can we make some money out of this and built what in effect became one of the very early ATSS. I then sold that in 2002, 2003, then started consulting as a kind of e recruitment expert and then over the years continued to do that. I was blogging and integrating systems, implementing systems, buying systems and just acting as an analyst, blogger, consultant really. And then as you know, I joined Cornerstone four years ago to help them with their ATS journey and get the help and kind of define their strategy going forward. And I’ve kind of got to the end of that period, really four years. It was long enough for me, having worked for myself for so long and just thought, yeah, now’s the time to do something different.
Matt Alder [00:03:37]:
As someone who’s been in the ATS world pretty much since, since day one. There, there are lots of things that I want to ask you but, but before I do, because it might sort of help shape the conversation, tell us a little bit about your new focus and actually going to be doing.
Peter Gold [00:03:52]:
Yeah, the main focus area for me is about integration. So the ATS started off as pretty much the system you use to do all of your online recruiting, but the world’s evolved massively since then. You’ll remember the days of mobile that’ll never happen in recruitment. And of course we know where, we know where that will go. So it’s constantly changed. But one of the biggest challenges I’m seeing and still seeing was getting a third party system such as video recruitment or assessments or even job board tracking into the ATS has always been complex and it’s still complex and it’s not getting any easier. So my focus is really saying, how does a client get those integrations to work? How does what we call ISVs or independent software vendors work with the ATS vendors? And how do the ATS vendors also make the most of those relationships as well? So it’s everything around integration, integrations and the products that kind of get involved in those integrations.
Matt Alder [00:04:49]:
I mean, that is an absolutely fascinating topic. It’s a huge topic and it’s something that I’ve not seen many people, many people talk about. So I kind of want to dive into it in a bit of detail in a second. But, but before, before we do, it’s probably sort of worth setting the scene a bit with your thoughts on the ATS market. As you say, things have moved on massively since those early days and the last year has obviously had a massive effect on treat and recruiting technology. Where’s the ATS market now? As you, as you see it, what are the sort of, the critical things that are going on?
Peter Gold [00:05:26]:
Well, I guess there’s two types of ats. There’s those you want and those you get. And there will be, there’s plenty of smaller ATS vendors who are very agile and you know, they, they try and make the integration piece easy or in some cases they try and build as much functionality in their own product as they can do. And they can sometimes come across as the very kind of sexy Tesla type systems in the marketplace. But then there are systems you get rather than choose. And they’re the big enterprise ATS that the global organizations use, that we part of an HCM suite. And those products are kind of focused more around compliance and data security and stability and in theory have a big API option. They have lots of APIs or one big open API and you can theoretically integrate more easily with those to get the functionality you want. So I’m kind of seeing the market go two ways. Like I say, those you get and those you want, smaller market tend to get the more agile systems, the larger market get the bigger system and probably have the bigger challenges with integrations, to be honest.
Matt Alder [00:06:35]:
Why are there so many problems with integrations? Because from a, from an outside perspective, the way everyone talks about tech stacks and seamless integrations and the way the industry talks about itself, it doesn’t necessarily get into the detail of how all this works and how it kind of works practically on the ground. Why are there sort of issues and problems with integrations? What’s really going on?
Peter Gold [00:06:58]:
I think that the main start point is no disrespect to the buyer or seller, but they’re not really technical enough to understand the intricacies of what an integration looks like. So the salespeople, the software vendors are told, yeah, we’ve got APIs we can integrate with anything. Oh, so they believe that because they’re not technical people, the buyers. Again, they’re not technical people. They’re heads of talent acquisition, Talent acquisition directors. And they look at what the vendors tell them and the vendors go, yep, we can integrate, we’ve got integrations, therefore it’ll just work. So that’s the start point. So you start off with a almost on the wrong footing because the devil is always in the detail. The other thing I see is that very often people try and boil the ocean in one go and they don’t think about starting small and they don’t think about testing things and very often what they’re trying to achieve with buying a third party product, let’s say Video interviewing, for example, why are they trying to buy that? What is the business need? Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they trying to improve something? And actually what they should be doing first is saying, within the ats, is our ATS process, Is our recruitment process aligned with that goal of buying a third party product? So if, for example, it’s saying we want to make, we want to be faster by using this new product, we’ll be able to be faster and we’ll also be able to process the best candidates quicker, well, that’s great. But first and foremost, is your ATS set up in the best possible way to align with that goal? And so very often what I see is that people have a goal for buying something, but then that doesn’t align with what the existing ATS setup is, and you end up just with a mess of processes that don’t work together very well because they’ve been set up in different mindsets, and that’s just a recipe for disaster. And then top, top that off with, there isn’t a person like Mr. Ats who’s actually overseeing the project and asking all these hard questions saying, well, hang on a minute, let’s just take a step back and look at the whole thing holistically and then work out what’s the way forward. And that’s why, because we end up with just people with slightly different thoughts and experiences running in parallel towards the same direction or the same end goal, but never actually getting close enough to understand why things aren’t working. And I see it all the time, Matt. You know, I’ve seen projects that the longest project I’ve seen that still isn’t live yet is about 19 months now. It’s been going for 19 months. It’s an ATS integration, and it’s still not live.
Matt Alder [00:09:32]:
And that doesn’t surprise me, to be honest. You know, I think that this is really something that isn’t talked about, isn’t talked about enough. My next question is obviously a lot of the, for want of a better word, sort of standalone software solutions will market themselves as being pre integrated with a number of ATs. Now, having kind of worked on the technical side a little bit myself, I know that the definition of what that pre integration means is kind of can be quite loose.
Peter Gold [00:10:00]:
Yeah.
Matt Alder [00:10:01]:
What’s your sort of experience? Because obviously when you go out to the market as a buyer, you are told that a lot of these systems will seamlessly integrate into the ATS that you’ve got.
Peter Gold [00:10:12]:
Well, first and foremost, I do catch a few vendors out that claim to be integrated with every ats. And you look at some of the logos on their website and you go, not quite true, is it? And you talk to them and they kind of fluff their way through a conversation with me and basically go, yeah, well, we’ve had a conversation with somebody. We just didn’t actually quite get to the next level. So the first thing is, is if anybody makes a claim and you’re a buyer, you want to see evidence of that. And you need to say, ask the ATS vendor, are you integrated with X? If they say yes, it’s like, well, show me, show me a client that’s actually using your system with, you know, with, with this partner or this isv. The other thing is that some ATS vendors have what we call marketplaces. So again, they will say, here’s a list of vendors we’ve already pre integrated with. Now, they are generally true. However, they might be old integration. So it could be that ATS1 is integrated with video interviewing technology1, but it was done 12, 18 months ago. And it might be the ATS has since updated their API, therefore that the old integration may not necessarily be applicable. And people will say, well, surely APIs are fluid and they keep moving and integrations are fluid and they keep moving and they kind of are, but they still have to be updated. They don’t update themselves. We haven’t got automatically updating integration software yet. So again, the devil’s in the detail. So it comes back to. And it could be fine. It could be that what you, you want from that video integration with your ATS is actually fine for now and that will do what you need it to do, but you need to understand what are you missing and does that matter and can you still get it by going directly into the product? So again, it’s a lot of marketing fluff going on out there, making claims that aren’t necessarily that true. A little bit, you know, loose on the honesty here, let’s say. And that’s why. And again, devil’s in the detail, you’ve.
Matt Alder [00:12:20]:
Sort of mentioned a few things which are great advice to people buying recruiting software at the moment. What else should people have in mind and be looking for or looking out for?
Peter Gold [00:12:33]:
Well, the first thing I’d be looking at is how is your current ATS setup? Is that optimized? Because very often it’s not. And actually part of the problem you’re trying to solve, let’s say, could be partly solved just by some better configuration of your existing ats. But also don’t expect your ATS vendor to do everything for free. You know, they’ve got limited resource. And if you’re needing advice and help and support in making changes, making improvements, that budget you might be using for your chatbot or your video technology or your new assessment tool, maybe some of that budget would be better utilized for making the most of your existing ats. So that’s the first thing is make sure you actually got your ATS exactly how you need it and use some budget for actually for doing that. But also talk to other organizations. You know, if you’re looking at a third party product, say to them, okay, this is our ats. I want to talk to some of your existing clients who ideally integrate with the same ATS I’ve got right now, or at least integrated with an other ats so I can find out from them firsthand what was the integration process like. Show me how it works today. Show me, tell me anything else I should know. Because at the end of the day, the industry talks to each other. So let’s just do that. Make sure you talk to people who’ve been there before and experience the journey firsthand. But also make sure you’ve got people who know what they’re talking about. Because very often. Let me just give you an example. Indeed. Okay, I’ll very often talk to people who are saying, we’re struggling to get source tracking for Indeed. We want to know how many candidates are coming from Indeed. And indeed will say one thing, the ATS vendor will say another thing. And the client said, well, you can all say what you want, but it just isn’t working. Or and then the other piece is, oh, we want to put some pixel tracking code on the thank you page. And there’s lots of different views on how we do that. And do we use Google Analytics, do we use Google Tag Manager? And there’s all this stuff that goes on and you end up with all this jargon in a conversation and the poor buyer just says, look, I just want to track where my candidates are coming from. I don’t care whose fault it is, I just want it to work. And to be honest, it’s very often a very simple fix. But the problem is nobody knows how to speak the right language and understand what needs to be done. So it’s just about having the right people in the conversation. So they’re the main things. Really simple stuff.
Matt Alder [00:15:10]:
I always like to ask people about their predictions for the future, even though it’s very, very difficult to predict the future at the Best of the times. At best of times, but particularly at the moment. But where do you think things are heading with ATSS and recruiting technology? Obviously, in some ways, we’ve seen a huge amount of innovation in the last few years. In lots of ways, things are still exactly the same as they were. Terms of some of the issues, what do you think is coming next? What’s the next 18 months to two years going to look like?
Peter Gold [00:15:39]:
Yeah, I think the one conversation I keep hearing more of is volume. Volume recruiting. Yeah. The ATS wasn’t really designed to handle the volumes that we’re seeing today. And whilst AI is kind of heralded as the answer to everything, and whilst whatever level of AI there is does actually add some value, we’ve still got the human element factor in. And what I mean by that is the machine says yes, the human says no. But managing bulk applications is still very hard. But I think that’s going to change in an interesting way, because the pandemic, it’s thrown us all into a state of flux. Organizations, they’re not sure if they hire, who they hire, how many they hire and what employment status they even hire them on. So that makes life hard for recruiters. Now, last year, there’s a mad rush to buy certain types of tech, but I think, to be honest, we’re going to carry on with that hybrid model for the rest of 2021, at least, because it’s a big unknown. Because whilst we kind of hope or think we’ve beat the pandemic in the uk, what we’ve got really coming to bite us in the backside is Brexit. And that’s yet to play out the borders from both a goods perspective, but also a people perspective, because the hospitality industry, they rely heavily on people from outside the uk, and we don’t know what’s going to happen there. And the thing is, getting people now from outside the UK is not going to be made any easier. And so I think for me, the biggest thing we’re going to need to focus on as an industry is how do we get enough workers into the UK to provide the skills needed to the hospitality industry? Because all the pubs are worried about running out of beer, the restaurants can’t get staff, you know, some of the big coffee chains, they would hire maybe 7,8000 people a year from outside the UK, who’d be people working on travel visas and that kind of thing, just work part time in the uk. And actually the process of getting those workers now from Spain, from France, from anywhere else, you know, you’ve got to think about how do we hire, attract and hire them. Do we make the, do we have to make the onboarding process entirely remote because we actually need to issue them with visas or sponsor them before they even get to the uk. So to me I think it’s not about how will talent acquisition evolve. I think the first thing is how the hell will we get those high volumes of people. And secondly, I think we’ve got to look at what does the organization do because they want not, they’re not going to wait for talent acquisition to find people that don’t exist. So the investment will go in automating more and more of the process, whether that’s making stuff or serving customers more and more self service to reduce the reliance on people. And my question to talent acquisition is how do we predict and adapt to that market where actually hiring reduces purely and simply because we haven’t got the volume to hire, we haven’t got the skills in the, in the country because of Brexit. What do we do then? And I think that’s where you’ve got to look at the organization. Say how does the organization plan to adapt to potentially not enough people, full stop. So that’s my thinking.
Matt Alder [00:18:58]:
That’s really interesting. But particularly as I’ve got a couple of, couple of interviews coming coming up with with people in the US talking about the problems that they’re having with volume hiring in hospitality as well. You know, problems maybe with slightly different causes, but it’s the same problem. There’s not enough. Getting enough people in quickly enough to restart hospitality businesses is a massive issue. And I think you’re right. I think it is going to shape a lot of the recruiting technology that we have over the next months and years. So final question, where can people connect with you? How can people get a hold of you?
Peter Gold [00:19:31]:
Yeah, easiest way, go to my new website which is www.mrats.co.uk so just m R A T S and on. I’ve made it pretty simple. There’s a page that just gives you a link to my LinkedIn profile and email address. Simple as that really.
Matt Alder [00:19:46]:
Peter, thank you very much for joining me.
Peter Gold [00:19:47]:
My pleasure. Thank you very much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:19:49]:
My thanks to Peter Gold. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
