Articles 
When Avature introduced CRM to recruiting fifteen years ago, we had an uphill battle bringing established marketing practices into in-house talent acquisition (TA) teams. Many companies weren’t quite ready to consider that recruiting was really about engagement and redefining the up-front candidate experience. Then, it was just an idea; now, it’s a “must-have.” However, a strategic vision for talent acquisition is something different.
Avature CEO Dimitri Boylan considers “HR is in the midst of a second digital transformation, where customers are looking to move beyond the initial CRM engagement process to a place where all their stakeholders – candidates, recruiters and hiring managers – are involved and highly engaged in the entire recruiting process, from initial shoulder tap with a candidate to their very first day and beyond.” This is central to a strategic approach to talent acquisition and implies a redefinition of the role of the traditional ATS from a system of record to a platform for engagement.
Defining a Vision for Talent Acquisition
HR has spent 15 years trying to define employee self-service, which is fine but not strategic. Strategic means directly impacting the organization’s competitive position. While core services (such as payroll and time-keeping) are necessary, talent-focused functions (recruiting and talent management) are strategic ones. CEOs of large companies know they are a hair’s breadth from digital disruption, and 90 percent of the way to avoid that is by recruiting and retaining the right people.
Strategic talent acquisition needs to revolve around engagement and service delivery.”
Dimitri Boylan, CEO, Avature
This focus will encourage companies to give those involved in sourcing, attracting and hiring talent the right technology to collaborate and engage with one another throughout the entire recruitment process. A service delivery focus has many tangible benefits – it doesn’t just redefine the analytical approach to the service; it sends the right message to the organization, establishes the terms of engagement and automatically aligns the recruiting team’s objectives with the strategies of the business it serves.
On the technology side, focusing on service delivery sets a new standard for recruiting platforms. Remember, nobody gets credit for fighting with their ATS. When your team recognizes hiring managers as customers, systems that manage service delivery are obvious choices.
This level of engagement and collaboration is essential when seeking improved talent outcomes. Recruiting agility, finding the right talent faster, building strong talent pipelines, and sustaining a competitive advantage are ultimately the results of efficient and effective relationships between key stakeholders. You can only stimulate engagement and align your organization with its talent acquisition mission statement by focusing on service delivery.
Delivering a Great Candidate Experience
The impact of service delivery on the candidate experience is tremendous and can significantly alter outcomes. There has been a lot of talk about the candidate experience being about candidate responses to job adverts or the speed with which they can apply online, but that’s not the only important part.
A crucial part for organizations is what happens further down the line, when the candidate starts to go through the interview, screening, and the offer process – because actually, you want the best talent to accept your offer!”
Dimitri Boylan, CEO, Avature
We hear lots of negatives associated with candidate experience, such as “black hole”, “no feedback”, “long response times”, “poor interviews”, etc. These all arise because the service that takes place is not managed or enabled. From a candidate’s perspective, if their experience through screening and interviewing is average (perhaps the hiring manager wasn’t engaged, asked the wrong questions, didn’t provide feedback, or turned up late), the candidate can feel let down and possibly lied to. Until the point of the interview, they’ve formed a good relationship with the recruiter and had an easy application experience, and suddenly, it feels very different.
So now it doesn’t matter that the organization likes the candidate more and more; the candidate is actually in the process of liking them less and less. Then, you arrive at the big day – the offer – and the candidate says, “No, thank you.” This is when the organization starts to wonder where it went wrong. Without service management, you have no idea where or how often the process failed, and you have no way of fixing it.
Delivering a great experience requires productive, collaborative and harmonious relationships between internal stakeholders, which involves service delivery management.
Forecasts and Predictions
Focusing on engagement and service delivery will improve your forecast and prediction ability. By managing the service delivery between all stakeholders, you can build a big picture and understand how they engage with each other; you, on the other hand, can compare business area results and see where things go wrong.
For example, HR can demonstrate their work with managers x, y and z and show the associated outcomes. They can compare results and processes, share best practices and adjust internal practices to suit different managers’ needs to achieve better performance across the board.
When organizations reach this point, they remove themselves from the one-size-fits-all approach. Ultimately, you get to what all service delivery aims for: customer satisfaction. This is the only metric in service management—how satisfied your internal customer is.
Besides, the standard reports that many focus on – like time to fill and cost per hire – are not reports that help you do business better. They are reports designed to satisfy other departments. Cost per hire is a CFO report. Time to fill doesn’t say anything about recruiting. They are macroeconomic indicators and only tell you how easy or difficult hiring is.
“I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the industry are struggling to create meaningful reports, and the reason for that is that you must first understand the prime HR objectives,” Boylan explains. When you recognize that service management and delivery are the main focus, you start looking at the reports that help you manage that service.
Extending the Focus of Candidate Experience
Our customers are focusing more on the new hire onboarding than previously. They have spent considerable time, effort and money on getting the right candidate to the door, and potentially losing somebody at this stage of the game is disastrous. It’s financially costly, significantly affects your brand and can send shock waves through the organization.
Strategic talent acquisition doesn’t stop with the offer process; it should and does cross right over and into onboarding and talent management.”
Dimitri Boylan, CEO, Avature
Many view onboarding as a tedious core HR process – usually a paperwork-heavy, compliance-driven process. Furthermore, it sits at the interface between TA and TM and thus can easily be mistaken as a core process rather than a strategic one. However, it’s definitely strategic, as onboarding takes place at a sensitive period of a candidate’s life; it’s an exciting yet nerve-wracking time. And those first experiences with an organization as an employee can impact how long a new hire stays, their perceptions, how quickly they become integrated and feel comfortable, etc. So, it’s essential to approach onboarding from a strategic standpoint.
With a well-structured process, an organization can squash doubts, preserve that initial excitement and enthusiasm, positively shape the candidate’s organizational perceptions and ultimately get them up to speed and engaged quickly.
