As the Chief Evangelist, Talent Tech Marketplace & "Recruiter in Residence" at HR.com I traveled on behalf of the HR.com community to Las Vegas, Nevada last week for the annual UNLEASH America conference at the Ceasers Forum.

Here are my top 3 talent acquisition technology takeaways from the UNLEASH conference last week in Las Vegas:

1) My hypothesis that the "future of HR tech is lite" increasingly is proving correct from real life market observations & conversations with TA tech buyers & vendors. I will let the more academic & data analyst type folks let the talent acquisition community know "what the data shows." All I personally know, hear, &  observe in real life recruiting conversations is that employers & talent acquisition leaders do not want to be stuck with demanding core TA tech system needs or with bulky software requiring a fixed long term contract & number of user seats. Nor do employers wish to be stuck with time consuming & expensive implementation & integration. Buyers of TA tech software, want lite, flexible, & easy to adopt and integrate solutions into their TA tech portfolio. I enjoyed speaking with Josh Bersin Chris Russell & Brian Delle Donne briefly about this.


Evan at “The Coolest Party In Las Vegas” hosted by Gr8 People & JobPixel. Pictured from left to right are Evan,  Katie Waller &  Jocelyn King  from VirgilHR, and Summer Delaney CEO of CollabWORK

2) CCRMs are in a great position to fill in the gaps in the TA tech marketplace. It is a "Herman's Law" of HR tech & Recruiting that "the interview reflects the job." Similarly, the TA tech portfolio needs to reflect the employer's hiring process & experience. 

While some analysts & vendors out there are talking about "recruiter enablement", I continue to see more interest & focus in what I call "hiring & interviewing enablement." CCRMs are a heterodox & disparate class of tools that nonetheless all share the common value proposition of mirroring the entire hiring & recruiting processes. The recruiting reality is that recruiting & HR professionals are not the only people involved in recruiting & hiring. 

Many people, such as hiring managers, business leaders, & regular employee team members are involved in recruiting. Employers' tech portfolios need to reflect this reality. CCRMs are enabling the entire interviewing & hiring process by bringing together everyone involved in hiring projects together on the same software platform & arming them with the information, language, & other guidance they need for successful & compliant interviewing. I enjoyed speaking with
Anil Dharni from Sense, Prakhar Agrawal from Senseloaf AI, Mark Simpson from Pillar & others about this.
      
Evan Herman from HR.com (left) with Chris Russell (right) from Rectech Media & Joel Cheeseman (middle) co-host of the Chad & Cheese Podcast with Chad Sowash.

3) What I call "Data SALAD" is coming to an end in TA tech. Data SALAD = Silo'd & Lingering & Dead Data. Increasingly, TA tech vendors are offering tools & features that take into account the recruiting reality that internal talent recruiting, retention, & mobility cannot, & should not, occur in isolation from external recruiting efforts. Recruiting is recruiting. Talent is talent. A lot of the problems in talent acquisition & talent retention & mobility occur because they are viewed & performed as distinct fields, when in fact they are different components of the same talent equation. I enjoyed speaking with Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf from retrain.ai , Caitlin MacGregor from Plum , Alison Lands from SkyHive, & David Morelli, PhD OwlHub about this.

Evan enjoyed speaking with  with Retrain.ai CEO Isabelle Bichler-Elias


Magic Johnson keynote address at the end of UNLEASH