Articles 
The world around us is changing radically and technological innovation is at the center of that change. The world of recruitment is no different.
Whether you’re looking to tailor the candidate experience to engage Gen Z or keep up with competitors’ cutting-edge Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, the answer to the recruitment challenges of today lies in placing innovation at the heart of your talent acquisition strategy.
The Three Elements Required for Innovation
Generally-speaking, three elements must be aligned to innovate:
- Vision
- Strategy
- Technology
The vision requires both the foresight of what the future may look like and the understanding that you have the power to shape it. It is about the future you want to bring into being and what you may have to guard against to do so.
The strategy is the road you take to reach your vision. It involves open-eyed recognition of where you are, the challenges you face and the opportunities that are or will become available to you. In short, it is your plan.
To execute your strategy and bring your HR vision to life, you need to choose the right technology. All too often, an organization will choose technology that forces them to change their strategy based on the constraints of the tool.
Innovation is about performing activities when and where you need to; i.e., the tech must support your vision and strategy, and not lead it. Your chosen technology must enable agility, end-to-end service delivery and engagement.
With over 380,000 employees worldwide, Siemens knows better than anyone just how important technology that supports these three pillars can be for executing an innovative HR strategy on a global scale. Its VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas, Mike Brown, shared how Avature CRM has allowed Siemens to innovate in the face of constant change.
Innovation in Recruitment: Agility
In the past, HR systems were extremely rigid. If you look at a legacy ATS, for example, it’s usually a pre-built recruiting process based on what the vendor thought recruiting was at the time. However, recruiting has changed significantly in the last 15 years and continues to evolve rapidly.
Today, a one-size-fits-all software solution is no solution at all. HR technology is about adapting to what works for you. Being agile means that necessary customizations can be made when the need arises, allowing you to implement your strategy as it evolves.
To accomplish its HR strategy and vision, Siemens decided against integrating disparate systems worldwide or building its own tool and instead sought out an agile SaaS platform that aligned with the principles of its global HR system.
We needed the functionality of a CRM tool, not a static place to collect applications which we may never look at again. And we needed to pipeline people in a way that allowed us to get back in touch with them and organize them in a way you could perhaps not do with an ATS. We wanted to capture all this information so we could be smarter about the market.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
With this in mind, Siemens chose Avature for its ability to fit into and improve existing recruiting processes. One such example of this agility in action was a recent recruiting event in Saudi Arabia that Siemens attended.
The on-site recruiter quickly set everything up with the right permissions and entered the event with iPads in hand. By the end of the event, 1,000 leads were swiftly registered for future contact.
The configurability of the Avature platform allowed Siemens to respond in an agile manner and get the most out of the event, even at short notice.
End-to-End Service Delivery
It is essential to remember that the success of your recruitment strategy lies in how effectively it is executed by real people. Your HR technology needs to consider all those involved and provide an optimized user experience for every stakeholder.
One way to easily measure this is to draw a map of the process, identify your key stakeholders and ensure that your strategy will support all of them.
In this way, a business can better understand how to optimize the process and provide the best experience for each person, department and region.
The scale and complexity of a company like Siemens represents constant challenges. With so many stakeholders involved in the recruiting process, from IT to data privacy to recruiters and hiring managers, it was necessary to provide them with a tool that brings them all together and onto the same page.
A key example of this was when Siemens decided to redefine its Global Employee Referral Program. Using Avature, it combined 19 employee referral programs and two ATSs into one single platform, making it easy for each stakeholder to collaborate and own their part of the process.
Innovation in Recruitment: Engagement
When selecting recruiting technology, the most important factor to consider is no longer the feature set but the degree of user engagement it provides. The right technology fosters engagement with passive talent and collaboration across the talent acquisition process.
Authentic engagement is much more than just sending a thank you message after meeting someone at an event. It’s leveraging the information that you collect about your candidates in a way that allows you to segement your audience and send targeted communications over the short, mid and long term.
However, to do any of these things, a collaborative hiring environment needs to be enforced internally, and the recruiter must be engaged in the new process.
We try to put the recruiter at the center of everything we do. Recruiters are notorious for wanting to be left alone… but we have to bring them along and show them that the market is changing. We have to go and find candidates and engage them. Posting jobs and skimming through resumes no longer works for the jobs that we have. You’ve got to go out into the marketplace and find those people. And once you find them, even though you may not have an open job today, you need to engage with them, and you need to have the tool to do that. Traditional ATS systems are not set up for that — Avature is.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
Innovation is crucial for continued success as an organization, and recruitment is no exception. The right technology—that is, a technology that is agile, engaging, and that ensures end-to-end service delivery—is critical when implementing new, innovative strategies company-wide.
Siemens is just one of many top companies that has partnered with Avature to transform recruiting and scale its processes globally. To learn about others, we invite you to explore our customer success stories.
It’s no longer an ATS-centric world… it’s a more dynamic and interactive job than it used to be… [Avature] is a tool that enables recruiters to actually behave and function differently than they did before, which makes them feel like they’re more technologically advanced as a digital recruiter and they’re keeping pace with the changes in the field.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
