In a hiring environment marked by low unemployment rates and widening skills gaps, recruiting teams across the board are coping with heightened visibility, pressure, and candidate volume resulting from intensified competition for top talent.
Luckily, technology has kept pace with the demand for better talent acquisition tools, and there is no shortage of software available to help employers attract, screen, and hire. In fact, research shows that on average, organizations use up to two dozen different applications for recruitment alone.
From job board posting to sourcing to background screening and onboarding, a lot goes into what should be a straightforward process—especially from the candidate’s perspective. This is why we’re seeing more and more best-in-class companies choosing best-of-breed recruiting software with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) frameworks to help simplify the complex candidate to employee conversion process.
In a PaaS framework, a centralized recruitment platform serves as a hub for all these hiring tools and cleanly transfers data collected during the process to and from other point recruiting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and human capital management (HCM) applications.
By building an HR technology stack that facilitates seamless integrations between systems, employers can drive better results for their talent acquisition teams and their businesses overall, while prioritizing the candidate experience along the way. Here are two of the ways best-of-breed recruitment software, and strong HCM integrations particularly, can directly benefit your organization.
Business-Wide Return on Investment
A lack of integrations across disparate systems is consistently cited as a top challenge for HR professionals. Systems that don’t work well together lead to hours of data entry, re-entry and administration, ultimately leaving your organization more vulnerable to critical data inaccuracies or loss. Further, having to create and manage a myriad of individual talent acquisition point solution integrations with your HCM can create a web of frustration, with varying implementation processes that end up being much more time-consuming and costly than expected.
After all, the overall time to fill open positions last year was 43 days, according to iCIMS’ platform, which is drawn from a database of more than 61 million applications and 3 million jobs posted per year by more than 3,500 customers. The automation provided by a recruitment platform to HCM integration saves the business from costly errors and painful implementations and allows recruiters to focus on more productive tasks, like personal one-on-one interactions with qualified candidates. With open roles left vacant for more than six weeks on average, even more time can be wasted without the right tools and integrations in place.
By integrating two strong platforms, a best-of-breed recruitment platform and a proven HCM, organizations gain better access to sound analytics, greater expertise in specific HR functions and higher adoption, resulting in smarter business decisions. Because of this, companies are four times more satisfied with a best-of-breed provider than with a traditional ERP provider for talent acquisition, according to Aptitude Research Partners.
Ongoing System Scalability
A best-of-breed recruitment platform–HCM integration is essentially the result of employers wanting to use the best products available across their HR technology stack. A unified workflow from system to system keeps an organization ready and able to address changes as they arise. And best of all, it enables companies of all sizes to extend the value of their various HR solutions across their entire organization via a secure, single sign-on process.
As businesses scale and modify internal processes to react to shifting hiring trends, talent acquisition point solutions will likely need to be replaced with some frequency. Utilizing a recruitment platform as a unified hub for all talent acquisition technologies allows employers to protect the HCM from cumbersome and costly system changes. Instead of managing dozens of individual recruiting point solution integrations to an (already quite arduous) HCM system, just one recruitment platform integration agilely brings it all together and adapts to new technologies as needed.
In part two of this article, we’ll discuss other features to look for like software flexibility, improved data governance, and compliance.
 As Chief Marketing Officer at iCIMS, Susan Vitale is ultimately responsible for shaping and sharing the iCIMS story across various audiences, including prospective and existing customers, the media, industry thought leaders, employees and candidates. She is also responsible for iCIMS’ brand strategy across public relations, events, advertising, product marketing and content marketing.Vitale takes pride in converging the worlds of recruitment and marketing, and incorporating this passion into the company’s own recruitment marketing strategy. Given iCIMS’ role in talent acquisition, she has a deep understanding of how to effectively manage recruitment advertising investments, social recruiting strategies, candidate relationship management (CRM) and recruitment events. As a member of several online mentoring communities, Vitale provides career advice and insight on finding the right career fit for young professionals. She also serves on the board of advisors at Switch and is a member of the board at NY/NJ Baykeeper Association. |