systematicHR

Overall, this year was one of the best years in a while for the vendor and show floor.  In my opinion, there were some significant areas where technology has finally started catching up with vision, and it was happening on a pretty broad level.  The smaller startup vendors from the last year have pushed the bigger players, creating a lot of positive movement.  More on that in another post.

Let’s start off with recruiting because…. well everything starts off with recruiting.

User Experiences:  
The idea that you can take any of the older recruiting experiences like Taleo, Brassring, PeopleSoft, etc and wrap a UX around it is fantastic.  Half of the candidate problem is process and interview experience, but it all start with being able to submit an application in the first place.  We all know when we’re in the never ending PeopleSoft application submission process because most of us have never actually gotten to the end of it.  Manager experiences are equally bad, and half of our organizations can’t get managers to use recruiting functionality because it’s so bad.  We have HRBP’s supporting them instead.

• Jibe has been around for a few years that I know of, and they have an incredibly elegant candidate, manager and recruiter experience.    Jibe avoids all of that by cleaning up the experience, making it mobile and easy, and doing for a huge selection of ATS systems.  I do have some concerns with their laser focus on the user experience since at some point the vendors might catch up and make the UX overlay unnecessary, but for now and the next few years, there is a huge amount of opportunity for them.
• Findly is an organization that I just don’t understand their core ATS differentiator, but they also have the ability to wrap a UX around Taleo, Brassring and SuccessFactors recruiting.  At this point they are only doing a wrap around for the candidate experience, but it’s pretty decent.
• Many of the newer cloud ATS (including the ones mentioned below) have great UX – being architected in the last 5 years puts them far ahed of the old generation, and really makes it unnecessary to wrap a different UX around it.

Old vs. New ATS
One of the things I’m desperately trying to figure out is when the new vendors will be ready to fully take over the mantle from the older recruiting vendors.  We still have the old school, behemoth vendors with such robust and rich feature/functionality that deployment and maintenance of the applications just are not agile.  Then we have the new school of recruiting applications that are very agile, but don’t have nearly the depth in functionality.  Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium that allows 95% of our organizations to get what we need and manage staffing practices with the speed at which the employment market changes.

Just to name a few, we have Jobvite with good ATS adoption, but it’s obviously not Taleo in functionality, we have Smashfly who started in the referrals business and is trying to broaden functionality quickly, Hirevue started in interviewing and is also trying to grow into other areas.  All of the systems have gaps, and at some point the gaps are small enough that system viability is unquestionable over the old ATS.  Right now, this feels a bit like 2007 when the talent systems started buying each other ,but there were always clear strengths based on where the vendor’s original functionality was.  it took 5 years before end to end talent was truly viable.

Recruiting CRM:
I’m still seeing a pretty big gap in really capable recruiting CRM systems.  Integration to the truly powerful content marketing engines and really deep CRM that comes close to matching traditional CRM is just not there yet.  That said, there are recruiting CRM systems that do a great job, but there are not that many of them.

I’m pretty excited about recruiting systems this year.  I do think we’re in a transition phase where the old stuff looks a lot older this year, and the new stuff starts looking pretty good.  Next year should hopefully see more maturity and hopefully the start of the changing of the guards.