Tech Worship

There should be no need to tell your boss that there is a war for talent going on, as the notion of a global talent war has received exhaustive coverage in the press. In fact, talent shortages are one of the main things which keep CEOs up at night as the PWC annual global CEO survey shows that 66% of CEOs are concerned that, “talent shortages will strangle their company’s growth”.

But, importantly what they also found was that CEOS are in the mood to spend on HR, with the PwC survey showing that, “83% of CEOs were ready to make ‘some’ or ‘major’ changes to their people strategy to address talent shortages”.  Its good then that HR has so much to offer in the form of a range of new talent attraction technologies that have exploded onto the market in recent years. The 5 most powerful technologies that are making waves on the talent attraction circuit, by bringing down cost and time to hire while increasing quality of hire, are:

  • Employee Referrals Software such as Zao, Gooodjob, Jobvite and BullHorn Reach
  • Video Interview Software (Live and Recorded), such as HireVue, Taketheinterview.com
  • Cloud Based Applicant Tracking Systems like Zoho.
  • Gamification of hiring technologies such as: Kaggle and Crowdspring
  • Talent Communities platforms: Like Meshhire and Luceo

This means its the perfect juncture point for HR to approach their bosses or decision makers for investment in new hire tech. But, there is a ‘right’ way to go about it which I have highlighted below:

Start small and adopt a staged approach

 A recent Bersin study has shown that 66% of firms intend on buying talent management software, but less than 10% will buy it as one big project, and most will buy and implement one module at a time in  a step by step fashion. This is the approach we recommend when trying to get buy-in for your talent management software. Don’t bombard your boss with requests for a massive all singing all dancing system. Take a modular approach and propose one piece of hiring tech with a clear functional purpose that addresses an identified problem in the business. Focus on clarity of purpose.

Know your hiring metrics

 You are in the big boys club now. If you are asking for investment you need to be able to show a return. This of course means that failure will be painfully evident if your initiative does not deliver the returns. Be brave; it is a trait respected by many CEOS in today’s business world. So, clarify your time to hire, cost per hire and quality of hire and benchmark these against industry standards. And make sure that your new technology can be shown to improve one or more of your hiring metrics to a quantifiable degree.

If the technology will pay for itself, then show it

 The benefits that some technologies bring mean that they may actually pay for themselves within a short period of time as well as introducing savings from a certain date. When making your proposal, if possible, always show a break even date, (when it starts paying for itself), and a ‘savings’ date, e,g, when it starts reducing the existing HR bill. This is one of the most compelling arguments you can make, particularly if the Finance Director is in the room.

If the technology can reduce empty desk time, then show it

 Reducing time to hire will reduce empty desk time which should increase output and minimize lost productivity. In your business case, show how much potential lost output can be retrieved by reducing empty desk time from the introduction of your new hire technology. This will be an especially compelling case for CEOs and production orientated managers.

Show if the technology can improve the quality of hire

 Research from Futurestep shows that employers are increasingly placing their emphasis on quality of hire as a key hiring metric. Line managers will be especially sensitive to quality of hire and if you can show how your new tech can help to deliver higher performing candidates, you will build some powerful allies to help lobby your case with the CEO.

Benchmark your current approach to talent management against key competition

 One of the best ways to convince CEO’s of deficiencies in their technology strategy is to benchmark their practices against competitors. If competitors are using superior practices and getting superior results your CEO may be compelled to act and approve your budget.

Securing investment for new hiring technology can be challenging but if you can follow these principals you will be able to make a power and convincing case for investment.

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By Noel Cocca

CEO/Founder RecruitingDaily and avid skier, coach and avid father of two trying to keep up with my altruistic wife. Producing at the sweet spot talent acquisition to create great content for the living breathing human beings in recruiting and hiring. I try to ease the biggest to smallest problems from start-ups to enterprise. Founder of RecruitingDaily and our merry band of rabble-rousers.