Hiring Tech Trends that will Change Everything in 2014

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future technology and science fiction concept - man with digital glasses 2014 will be a pivotal year for the recruitment industry, and Recruiter.com has asked some of the field’s leading experts to tell you why.

Read on to discover the innovative technologies and trends today’s recruiting professionals say will change the game of recruitment this year and beyond:

The Future of Staffing SoftwareArt Papas, CEO & Founder of Bullhorn

2014 is the year that the consumerization of staffing software goes mainstream. Apple has shown people that computers and software can be a pleasure to use, so there’s just no reason that staffing software should be so difficult to comprehend. Today most staffing software is horrible – cumbersome screens, slow queries, ugly graphics, and two-day training courses are what customers have come to expect from their software vendor.

And staffing software is generally stuck five to 10 years in the past from a user interface perspective. The most progressive companies in the software industry are embracing the notion that software should be a pleasure to use – like Facebook or LinkedIn. No one needs a training course for Amazon. It’s time for staffing software providers to embrace the usability and scale that defines the best modern enterprise software – a clean and streamlined interface, in-app guides that educate recruiters on how to use the software and produce quickly, and a responsive design. Staffing software makers will have a choice: Evolve in 2014, or be replaced in 2015.

Recruitment & MarketingTim O’Shea, Solutions Consultant at Lumesse

Treat recruiting like it’s marketing and not like it’s supply chain management. The fundamentals of marketing and talent acquisition are getting harder to tell apart. Both disciplines focus on target markets, branding and nurturing. Velocity and conversion rates are critical measures of success in both areas. With the increase in demand, recruiting is once again breaking away from HR. In the long run that’s a good thing.

What marketing has that recruiting often doesn’t is a hunger for innovation and competitive advantage. Recruiting must change to keep pace. Getting to your prospective customer first, and with more impact, is critical.

HR roles shifting toward talent successTim O’Shea, Solutions Consultant at Lumesse

If you love something – set it free. HR practices are starting to be oriented towards the individual and away from the organization, balancing between the two to ensure mutual advantage. The role of HR will shift toward creating the conditions in which talent succeeds, and not, as so often happens, mitigating the impact of bad decision-making and poor management.

HR professionals will start to understand that talent is truly a commodity that can walk and the organization needs to compete daily for it – with new and existing employees. If bad management, bad practices or poor working conditions stand in the way of that, HR must be empowered to challenge beyond its own function.

Increased hiring success ratesBen Baldwin, Co-founder of ClearFit

With industry averages for hiring success continuing to languish at 50 percent, technology will come to rescue hiring managers from their own admitted poor hiring effectiveness. Technology that maps applicants to job success, like ClearFit, will significantly improve the success rate in finding and hiring employees that succeed. With over 10,000 businesses having hired using ClearFit, we’ve proven to be 5X more successful than traditional hiring.

Looking beyond that, customers are demanding simplicity in design and the ability to replicate their top performers. Hiring is moving quickly and the software needs to support hiring managers that need it to be fast, efficient and simple. As businesses continually seek to up the skill and performance of their teams they are also demanding new methods for finding and hiring more people just like the ones that are performing at the highest level. We call it the “All A Team”.

Speed: the new measure for successTim O’Shea, solutions consultant at Lumesse

Speed is underrated in HR and is often falsely contrasted with quality. This is false. Speed and quality are often related. We believe the new key metric across many talent management tasks is Time-to-Effectiveness. This is the time between start date and optimal performance or the time between a new skill being required and the successful demonstration of that skill. Time-to-Effectiveness in talent management needs to be measured in days and not months.

Ben Baldwin, Co-founder of ClearFit (on same topic)

Technology will significantly increase the ease and speed to hire. Manual and disconnected processes like creating job descriptions and pushing out and promoting postings will become simple tasks that hiring managers can achieve from one place and with two-clicks. At ClearFit, we’re using technology to allow hiring managers in SMBs to build job descriptions in just a few clicks and push them out to job boards in one click. The impact is that hiring managers that used to spend hours and days to get this done are now receiving applicants the same day they sit down to start the process and everything takes less than 10 minutes.

This story is a part of Recruiter.com’s 2014 Recruiting Technology Trends series.

By Shala Marks