Welcome To The Era Of Recruiter Experience

Understanding how to retain and attract recruiters is your next big challenge

I love talking to recruiters about why they like their careers—in fact, it’s one of my favorite questions to ask them. Surprisingly, it’s not a question they often get, but the answer is consistent: they love making the connection, changing peoples’ lives, and being opportunity brokers. 

After all, the new job they bring to a candidate could have a multi-generational impact, unlocking access to better education and better healthcare for families working for their chance at a better life. As a department name, “Talent Acquisition”, or TA, misses the point entirely. “Opportunity Midwifery” might in fact be a better term. 
 

So, with so many passionate recruiters who love what they do, why are so many walking off the job right now, when the labor market is saturated with job-seekers looking for something new? 

Simply put: recruiters are overworked. In the first half of 2020, employers responded to the uncertainty of the pandemic with a massive hiring freeze and a surge of furloughs and layoffs. TA teams were no exception, leaving many short-staffed as the Great Resignation kicked into gear and the number of positions they needed to fill rose. 

With a redoubled focus on sourcing diverse talent and a corporate crusade to stem attrition through internal mobility, recruiters are now being asked to fill more positions while also taking on new challenging sets of responsibilities.   
The good news for recruiters is that human resources (HR) and talent acquisition (TA) leaders are responding to the new challenge with deep investments in technology; however, “getting it right” will require the teams making investment decisions to take a step back and seek to understand the problem. At the center of these decisions, there are almost always three types of stakeholders involved: leadership, practitioners, and IT. In the coming years, the major challenge facing TA won’t be the availability of technology, but more likely the misalignment between these three groups on what the problem even is. 

According to the latest report by Aptitude Research, TA leaders are much more satisfied with the technology than the actual users, suggesting a disconnect in adoption, use, and perception. Given that the same report found that one in two recruiters would be willing to take a new job if the technology were better. This ought to be an important signal that something is wrong.  
Contrary to popular belief among TA/HR leaders and IT, recruiters are not challenged by the number of solutions at their fingertips—their big challenge is that these solutions aren’t talking to each other, leaving them to duplicate work.

One of IT’s most important functions within your company is to reduce cost and avoid crippling software bloat, so it’s not surprising that they typically suggest recruiters have too many solutions. However, this diagnosis can lead to a heavy bias towards all-in-one solutions that are cheaper to support but feature-poor. When solutions check the box but fail to provide the promised productivity, distrust and frustration drive recruiters to abandon the technology—and often, the company—and look for greener grass. 
So what do recruiters need? In order to drive diversity hiring, activate internal mobility, and deliver on a historic backlog of requirements, they are looking for better automation that simplifies their workflows and lets them get back to what they love doing most—talking to people. After all, the one thing humans are better at than any technology is building relationships with other humans.  According to the Aptitude report, there’s good news—artificial intelligence (AI)/automation is one of the few places that Recruiters and IT professionals both see opportunity. Ten years ago, AI-based solutions may have represented a scary unknown to many recruiters, but that is no longer the case. 

AI for matching or prioritizing candidates against requirements is the single most important technology application Recruiters are currently seeking. And while recruitment marketing efforts are important, it is critical not to confuse employer brand strength for recruiter productivity. 
At the heart of every good HR tech strategy is a hard-working practitioner that loves talking to people about a better life. If you don’t solve recruiter bottlenecks and deliver deeply integrated solutions, you will find yourself losing recruiters to companies that understand how to do this. 

Making your recruiters happy doesn’t have to be complicated. The best place to start is right at the center of their universe with a matching solution and work your way out. Focus on solutions that meet the highest standards of ethics and compliance in every jurisdiction in which you operate and that integrate with the systems you already have. 

Your recruiters will thank you for paying more attention to seamless integration than for bringing them more cold leads that they don’t have time to talk to anyway. When they trust their tech stack to prioritize applicants and source qualified and interested candidates, they will have the bandwidth to focus on changing lives and accelerating your company.

To learn more about how leaders, recruiters, and IT partners are diagnosing the challenges facing TA today, I strongly recommend you go read the detailed Aptitude report. In that report, you’ll find a deep dive into critical findings regarding the essential role recruiters play in talent acquisition and how companies can best support them. With input from over 300 organizations, the report offers insight into which technological solutions may bring the most value to recruiters, the resources they want, and who is really influencing TA technology decisions today.

Download your copy here. 

Dr. Tyler Weeks is Head of Partnerships & Strategy at HiredScore. Tyler is a Physicist who stumbled his way into Talent Acquisition and became obsessed with people and work and how they relate. He’s a technologist, writer, and speaker, who is thinking about the future of human resources technology and how that technology will enable the most important innovations humans seek, like stemming global climate change and responding to the next great pandemic. Visit www.hiredscore.com Connect Dr. Tyler Weeks