Enhancing the Hiring Manager Experience: The Next Frontier for Recruitment Technology Platforms

Guest Expert Blog by Aniruddha Kulkarni, Practice Director, Everest Group

As organizations across the globe embark on digital transformation journeys, talent acquisition (TA) has witnessed a technological revolution over the last few years. Established technology vendors and new-age startups are digitalizing the entire talent acquisition process with a plethora of tools, platforms, and technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Despite the rapid growth of technology players and offerings, enterprise adoption remains somewhat of a challenge. Hiring managers play a vital role in the adoption of TA tools and platforms as the primary users. However, hiring managers’ experience often fails to match the promise of the new tools and technologies.

Enhancing the hiring manager user experience can help your organization seize the opportunities integrated recruitment technology platforms can offer and improve the bottom line by reducing hiring time and improving the quality of candidates. Here’s how:    

Three major problems hiring managers encounter

 Some of the common problems hiring managers face include the following:

• Disparate tools: Hiring managers need to determine the most suitable type of talent for the work. This could be a full-time employee, a temporary worker from a staffing agency, or a freelance/independent contractor for a given work assignment. A major pain point for hiring managers is the need to use different systems: an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for full-time employees; a Vendor Management System (VMS) for temporary workers; a Freelancer Management System (FMS) for freelance and independent contractors; and procurement systems for services procurement and Statement of Work (SOW). Having so many different third-party add-on tools and platforms makes it necessary for hiring managers to log in and navigate multiple systems over the lifecycle of a single requisition.

• Complicated workflows: Hiring managers need to work with systems that often have legacy user interfaces with overtly complicated workflows. As a result, the hiring managers spend disproportionate amounts of time in non-value-adding activities like requisition creation, compliance checks, and tracking the progress of already created requisitions.

• Data-blindness: The talent acquisition process has become increasingly data-driven. Hiring managers need access to relevant market data and insights to make timely and accurate hiring decisions. The legacy and disconnected talent acquisition systems often fail to provide the relevant data, requiring the hiring managers to reach out to the recruitment team or external service providers such as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) providers. The inevitable back and forth communication results in process delays and severely compromises the hiring manager experience.

Technology features to look for

An integrated recruitment technology platform can be a practical first step in overcoming the obstacles hiring managers face. Ideally, this platform should have features that provide benefits such as:

• Simplified guided workflows: The platform should be able to guide hiring managers through simplified workflows after understanding their requirements. Ease of use and superior user experience should be the basic design principles of the platform.
• Total talent acquisition (TTA) solution: The platform should have the ability to integrate with existing talent acquisition systems like ATS, VMS, FMS, and procurement to act as a unified TTA solution for all talent types. The platform should demonstrate the requisition progress throughout the lifecycle including identifying shortlisted candidates. Further, the platform can have self-service workflows to enable hiring managers to get queries resolved from internal or outsourced TA teams.
• Integration with other tools and technologies: The platform should act as a single gateway/portal to all of the existing tools and technologies like the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), candidate sourcing and screening tools, and video interview tools to alleviate the need for the manager to log in across different platforms. It should have flexible Application Programming Interface (API)-like integrations as well as lighter integration options through RPA.
• Built-in analytics: Providing hiring managers access to program and market data through dashboards within the platform itself would allow hiring managers to make accurate and timely decisions.

The New frontier

Industry practitioners often complain about the lack of focus on stakeholder experience as one of the major shortcomings of talent acquisition technologies. Improving the hiring manager experience is an imperative for true digital transformation of the talent acquisition process. An integrated recruitment platform will go a long way in conquering this new frontier in talent acquisition.