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The Human Capital Experience Economy: What Does It Look Like?

three people overlooking a city from a skydeck

Would you pay more for a good experience? Would you be more likely to come back again? You probably already do. We live in a world where experience trumps everything – including cost and quality. According to a study by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, 80% of US consumers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience. It is the experience that gives companies a competitive edge even when their products fall short. It creates loyalty and a powerful commitment to a certain company or brand.

Companies recognize the impact of experience on their growth and profitability and are making changes to how they communicate with, engage, and support their customers. In fact, according to Aptitude Research Partners’ 2016 Hire, Engage, and Retain research, 60% of companies have an executive level customer experience role in place. But, creating an engaging experience does not and should not end with the customer. It must extend into our workforce. Surprisingly, only 37% of companies have an executive level role focused on the internal culture and experience of the workforce. Just as companies are prioritizing customers, they must also focus on the experience for the individual candidate, employee, manager, contingent worker, and leader in order to ensure continued economic success.

The elements of this important balance are at the core of Aptitude’s new Human Capital Experience Economy model- take a look here:

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Blog Talent Acquisition Strategies

Raytheon: Improving the Candidate Experience through Better Communication

A street sign with directions pointing different ways labeled what, where, who, when , why and how

As customers, we want to feel important. We expect a customer experience that is personal, simple and human. Fortunately, most companies are committed to meeting these needs. If I think about the sites I visit regularly (Adidas, Fiverr, Amazon or even sites for my kid’s activities), they all share two things in common. First, they offer real-time chat options and second, they ask for feedback about the experience. Chat and messaging help us feel supported in a friendly and familiar way. Feedback is important because we want to know that our opinions matter. Again, customers want to feel important.

The same is true for our workforce. Candidates and employees also want an experience that is personal, simple and human. Why should messaging and feedback be limited to just the consumer world? The good news is that more solutions are becoming candidate-centric and employee-centric – committed to providing the same experience we see in the customer world to our workforce. In my opinion, the key to making candidates happy is making solutions simple. One candidate-centric provider that has really impressed me this year is Brazen. They are able to put the individual first by providing exactly what candidates want…communication and feedback. Brazen offers a simple solution for attracting and engaging passive talent through real-time messaging.

Raytheon has been using Brazen for the past four years to improve the candidate experience. With so many positions available and too many applicants, providing a 1:1 engagement was a challenge for the defense contractor. With Brazen, Raytheon is now able to provide a more personal experience through individual chat-based events. Candidates are attracted to Raytheon and then have the option to schedule a chat with a recruiter or hiring manager to learn more about the organization and the recruitment process. The process of looking for a job is transformed from scary and unknown to friendly and familiar.

Below are a few ways that Raytheon is using the solution:

  1. Enterprise Tool: To support its four business units, Raytheon has been leveraging Brazen for over 4 years to schedule chats with candidates that typically last for 20 minutes.
  2. Targeted Events: Raytheon uses Brazen to schedule very specific, targeted events for military hires or women (just two examples). These events go into greater detail about the culture and work environment at Raytheon. These events are also much longer – sometimes lasting between sixty to ninety minutes. The military events attract 60-140 candidates and are held 8-10 times a year.
  3. Target Specific Jobs and Roles: Raytheon uses Brazen to target specific types of roles, locations and market to a specific demographic.

Through this solution, Raytheon has been able to identify candidates quickly, engage with them in a meaningful way and gather more information to make better decisions about candidates. They have also been able to save money that would be spent flying candidates to meet with recruiters and hiring managers. Overall, it has proved to be a win-win for both candidates and recruiters.

In a world where experience is defining our workforce, we need more solutions that make communication easy and simple.

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Just In: New Data on Talent Acquisition Technology

silhouettes of people discussing and sharing ideas with ideas floating above their heads

Our first Aptitude survey is off to a great start with close to 300 responses. The goal of this research is to explore how companies are leveraging technology to improve the way they hire, engage and retain talent. We are looking at the challenges and strategies through every stage of the customer’s journey from readiness to selection, implementation and adoption. The good news is that with so many new products and services, it is an exciting time to be an HR technology buyer. The bad news is that most companies still struggle when making decisions on what technology will best meet their unique needs.

We are committed to helping companies navigate through the customer journey and understand how to identify their own priorities. Below is a sneak peek at some of the data that aligns with the customer journey.

  • Readiness: Readiness involves understanding your organization’s true business needs, requirements and limitations, as well as the underlying talent strategy. Companies must think about what technology they currently have in place and what changes will help them achieve their business objectives. Currently, only 3% of companies are using the full functionality of their ATS and one third of companies are still using their ERP.
  • Selection: Selecting the right provider involves more than product capabilities. It is the process for identifying the best partner. Companies have to look at differentiators and how they help to meet their own business needs. Eighty percent of companies rely on word of mouth to help make decisions. Key criteria for selecting an ATS includes:
    • Product Capabilities- 65%
    • Price – 63%
    • Demonstrated ROI- 60%
    • Approach to integration- 56%
    • Demonstrated expertise in a related industry- 56%
    • Financial Viability – 54%
    • Relationship management Resources- 52%
  • Implementation: Implementation is often when the relationship with a vendor goes wrong. The process of getting the solution operational in your unique business context. Thirty-four (34%) of companies implement their system in 90 days or less.
  • Adoption: Organizational change management is critical to success, and planning for how to support user adoption is a key to unlocking technology ROI. Adoption is the true sign of how successful the customer journey has been. Only 20%of companies have a change management strategy in place and only 43% of companies view their providers as a partner.

Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing highlights from this research and recommendations for companies looking to better understand the technology landscape and their own customer journey.

 

 

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Blog Talent Acquisition Strategies

I Can’t Even: HR Trends We Are Over

silhouettes of employees with different colored chat bubbles above their heads

At the start of each year, HR Trends are hard to ignore. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a message. Everyone has an idea of what happened in the past year and what should happen in the New Year. And yes… I am guilty. Trends are important because they help companies understand their priorities and benchmark their progress against industry standards. They give us a guide for what matters and what will drive success. But, the reality is that sometimes trends can go wrong. Especially when trends go unchanged year after year (mobile and social, I’m talking about you). Even when they are important, we are sick of hearing about them. But what if the problem is not about the trend itself and instead about the way we are talking about that trend. The way we talk about its value and its relevance and its impact on our organization.

Below are a few trends we believe need a new conversation and a few we want to stop talking about altogether.

  • Quality of Hire: Quality of hire is not a new trend. In fact, it is a very old trend that has been misused and misinterpreted for years. Yes, everyone wants to hire great people. But the challenge is that there is no standard for defining what quality of hire is how it can be measured. Some companies define it simply as someone that completed an application. Others ignore other important recruitment metrics like time to fill, conversion rates and source of hire. The good news is that several of the ATS providers (Lumesse and Cornerstone OnDemand to name a few) are helping organizations create this standard by defining what quality of hire is and pulling in performance and succession data to help measure it.
  • Integration: Integration is important. Very important. It’s important because HR professionals do not want to open 10 different solutions to do a simple task and it is important because the HCM landscape has become so complex it is hard to make sense of how these providers and strategies work together. There is not a simple solution to integration and so many providers try to pretend that there is. Open API’s are great but how can we help companies understand the full ecosystem. How an technology providers offer a better experience. Some providers like ADP, SmartRecruiters, and iCIMS are tackling integration through a Marketplace- providing both a network of partners and the guidance on what might be right for your company. Additionally, Andy Rice and my friends at Black-Box Consulting have the best approach I have seen to consulting on integrated talent management and helping companies overcome integration challenges.
  • Innovation: We differentiate providers by their functionality. And each year, new functionality and innovation becomes a trend. Sophistication and product enhancements are something we pay attention to and while the product capabilities are important, so many of these solutions have become too complex. HR and talent acquisition buyers want solutions that will save them time and provide a good experience for their candidates and employees. Our upcoming index report looks at differentiators beyond capabilities (the ATS report will publish early next month). Yet, too many areas of HCM technology focus on depth in functionality over simplicity. Fortunately, there are new solutions that make our jobs really easy and even fun such as GreatHires for interviewing, BrandAmper for employer branding, SkillSurvey for online reference calls, Engage2Excel for recognition and The Marcus Buckingham Company for team performance.
  • Engagement: Writing about how engagement is no longer a trend is becoming a trend. When we are talking about engagement, we seem to be stuck on the same challenges and strategies year after year. Mollie said it best in her blog last month. Let’s talk about something that will change the way we treat our employees, our managers, candidates, leaders and stakeholders. We need to talk about the experience (more to come on this next week). Let’s talk about better communication. I love the work GuideSpark is doing with providing better communication between employers and employees.

So, join us for a new conversation as we tackle some of these issues in our latest survey and don’t miss next week’s post on trends I wish we would start talking about again.

 

 

Categories
Blog Talent Acquisition Strategies

Recruitment Marketing: It’s Time to Start Paying Attention

employee holding a tablet with eight different candidates with the center one larger than the rest

If you thought recruitment marketing was just a passing trend, you might want to think again. Companies are restructuring their talent acquisition functions and investing in technology to improve the way they attract, nurture and engage talent. A recruitment marketing platform handles everything on the front end of recruitment or to put it bluntly, everything your ATS does not do. It involves all the activities that connect a brand to the right person at the right time and with the right communication and messaging. It has become a recognized category in talent acquisition technology- one that is responsible for improving the candidate experience, quality of hires, and overall recruitment efficiency.

If you don’t believe me, you might want to take a look at SmashFly, a leading recruitment marketing platform that raised $22 million in Series B funding today led by Bessemer Venture Partners (an investor in Cornerstone OnDemand and LinkedIn). This company is the real deal. Not only have they gained recognition as a leading talent acquisition provider but they have also had tremendous success by tripling the number of net new customers (mid-market and enterprise) in 2015.

Recruitment marketing matters and below are a few reasons why:

  • The 2016 Candidate: Today’s candidates are smarter about what they want and what to look for in a future employer. And they need to be engaged early. Candidates are diving deeper into career sites, social media and sites like Glassdoor to get a clear picture of an organization before making a connection. In fact, according to the 2015 CandE Research Report, 76% of candidates surveyed conduct their own research and due diligence in their job search.
  • The Talent Acquisition Trifecta: At a basic level, the recruitment technology market is powered by three major systems: A Recruitment Marketing Platform, An Applicant Tracking System and an Onboarding System. Companies need solutions to help attract and engage talent, move candidates through the recruitment process and onboard new hires. Recruitment marketing is a critical part of this journey.
  • The Modern Recruiter: Marketing departments spend energy and resources trying to understand their buyer. They identify, nurture and engage buyers in a way that builds a long-term relationship. Why wouldn’t recruiting do the same for candidates? Furthermore, most organizations invest in technology to understand and engage the behaviors, motivators, challenges and preferences of buyers. Why wouldn’t recruiters want this same technology to support how they interact with candidates? A recruitment marketing platform takes talent acquisition to the next level by allowing companies to better understand and target talent while strengthening their brand.

Congratulations to SmashFly on this exciting announcement! As we launch our latest survey, we would love to hear what you think about talent acquisition and the recruitment marketing space.

 

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