WYSINWYG: What you see is not what you get!

Imagine the plight of an organisation whose entire effort of choosing and deploying a recruitment solution through a vendor, goes futile because it turns out that a lot of their needs aren’t even met. Multiple vendors use similar language to describe their recruitment solutions that might not be similar at all, which makes the challenge of finding the right solution for your unique needs even more difficult. And the stakes in terms of time, money, and effort spent reviewing RFP responses, scheduling demos, selecting a vendor, implementing their solution, and training your people are high. Read this to understand what you should expect while evaluating the right recruitment partner for your organisation.

Last week, when we spoke to a senior HR leader on the recruitment solutions available in the market today and what were his expectations from the product. What this HR leader shared could be a learning for many in the industry!!

After due research and multiple demo meetings, his company decided on roping in a vendor for optimizing its recruitment.

After months of implementation drill, when the software did go live, the HR Head realised there were problems with UI and multiple logins that held most people back from adopting the tool. Moreover, shattering all hopes of getting people to learn and adapt, the solution was only limited to web, with no mobile solutions for anytime anywhere access for different stakeholders.

Well, now that the decision was made and the moolah was already spent, they had to stick around with the decision for a while. But, as time progressed, more realisations came in, such as challenges with data access and analysis. Issues like sourcing from multiple channels, managing duplications and obsolete candidates profiles, this all started cropping up as challenges that the hiring managers were facing. On the other hand, the candidates found it very confusing switching between multiple windows and URLs which was not helping them really track their interview process seamlessly.

There’s more to this story and there are more like this company that may have faced the same. For many solutions on offer, the reality is far from user expectations but that realisation mostly comes later – when the solution has already been deployed.

Despite recruitment solutions being available in abundance, companies struggle to find their best fit. User reviews on a public forum for discussions and reviews on business software reveals various cases of expectations and need mismatch for recruitment solutions on offer.

As the famous Rolling Stones song goes – ‘You can’t always get what you want, But if you try sometime you find, You get what you need’ – there are times when one just needs to look a little further, make some extra efforts to understand and analyse what is required and what will fit the bill, to be able to get exactly what is needed.

Here is a debunking of what recruiters, hiring managers or candidates really need or expect from a holistic recruitment solution and what is it that they actually get from the fragmented ones available in the market.

Recruiter expectations Vs reality
• While recruiters are expected to source from multiple digital channels like social media integration, multiple job boards but they usually end up with services that provide limited availability of sourcing channels.

• Another benefit recruiters seek through recruitment solutions is to be able to reach out to passive candidates but not many RPO solution provider out there really offer that. With lack of cognitive computing and the right kind of mechanism for managing candidates, recruiters are left with no option but to put in manual efforts to ensure reaching out to the passive set of talent.

• Going through hundreds of profiles for a single position is what takes up the most time for a recruiter. It is one of the most tedious parts of the job and one that is or can be literally, completely automated. Although a passé, there are RPO solutions out there that still rely on manual sourcing and screening processes rather than having completely digitised it.

• Additionally, recruiters seek advanced features such as digital salary fitment, offer generation, job-related analytics and intuitive & insightful dashboards, while what they get are basic ATS (Applicant Tracking System) kind of tools that rely on complex MIS reports and data dumps.

Sorting these challenges all at once, PeopleStrong’s alt recruit can auto match the candidates against the profile requisition. The algorithm from the backend gets the best of candidates from multiple sources (200+ social platforms, job boards, resume databases) and shows in percentage, how much the candidate is suitable for a position. Watch this video to know more.

Hiring manager/HR expectations Vs reality
• What HR professionals or hiring managers seek is ease of usage while raising a requisition, aligning tasks and approvals, providing interview feedbacks and so on, whereas many solutions on offer still have long form, non-user-friendly interfaces resulting in low adoption of the systems. In times when everything is on mobile, a solution that is still limited to only a web interface is also a total turn-off.

• Also, real-time view of progress on candidates and intuitive dashboards is what an actual holistic solution should offer whereas, hiring managers end up having to depend on an external team for live updates. The following-up required therein, destroys the whole purpose of having tech enabled solutions deployed. In the end, what one requires is not data but analysis based meaningful information.

Candidate expectations Vs reality

• When applying for a job through an organisation’s hiring portal or even otherwise, in the hiring process all a candidate expects is continuous engagement and connect, along with ease of navigating through the process and ease of documentation. On the other hand, what they really get as an experience is mostly a rut of multiple follow-ups and reminders to get the status of their application, and the not-so-instant email based communication route.

Businesses in the market for HR and Recruitment face hundreds of vendors, and the claims they make can sound similar. Making sense of this industry and all the solutions available can be challenging.

The above aspects are a few crucial ones that businesses should keep in mind.

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