4 Steps to Getting Executive Buy-In for the Recruiting Platform You Need

Insight4theEnterprise Series Part 1: 4 Steps to Getting Executive Buy-In for the Recruiting Platform You Need

ONTENTS Introduction 3 Framing the Discussion: We re Not Talking about an ATS 4 Step-by-Step Guide 6 Step 1: Team Up with a Line-of-Business Sponsor 7 Step 2: Know the Potential ROI 8 Step 3: Get IT Involved Early 10 Step 4: Report Your Proof 11 Conclusion 12 2

Recruiters need more than the so-called recruiting components of large-scale talent management or Human Resources Information System (HRIS) suites. They also need more than a basic Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that simply posts job requisitions to a website and tracks resume submissions. They need real recruiting functionality. Getting executive buy-in on this obvious fact, however, can still be a challenge. People not mired in the day-to-day tasks of the recruiter tend to think that an enterprise suite s so-called inherent integration or sweeping scope will magically eliminate every recruiting headache with a single installation. But that s not true. Recruiting is its own animal. Broad talent management or HRIS suites provide limited real recruiting functionality. Why? Because recruiting is now less of an HR function than it is a sales and marketing function. It s about closing deals with candidates, not just posting jobs and scheduling interviews. Want proof? Recruiting now has the greatest business impact of any HR function with at least 3.5 times the profit growth and 2.0 times the profit margin, totaling 5.5 times the performance of a lower capability HR function. 1 This should be compelling to most enterprises, right? We certainly think so. That s why, in the first book of our Insight4theEnterprise series, we ll help you zero in on the numbers and value potential of implementing a real recruiting platform. Armed with this data, you can spell out the advantages to executive decision-makers and then get the technology you need to succeed. In the following pages, we ll outline four steps that will help ensure a smooth selection and purchase process when evaluating recruiting technology: 1 Team up with a line-of-business sponsor 3 Get IT involved early 2 Know the potential ROI 4 Report your proof Let s get started. 12

Despite the high unemployment rates in many countries, more than 65% of global leaders cite talent and leadership shortages as their #1 2 business challenge. Yes, ATS s are not the sexy application they used to be but now they re the platform for all the other recruiting tools you need and they become the data platform for analysis as well. Josh Bersin 3 Framing the Discussion: We re Not Talking about an ATS First, you need to clear up misconceptions. You can t convince management to help you if they don t understand the situation clearly. That means, at the very least, finding a way to convey that today s recruiting technology requirements extend far beyond the capabilities of the traditional ATS. Consider this: Everything s changing technology, jobs, and jobseekers alike. As baby boomers continue to retire and jobs become more STEM-focused, the qualified candidate pool diminishes rapidly. The result is a dramatic increase in the competition for quality talent. To convince the right talent to choose your company over the competition, you must now build and communicate a marketable employment brand. That means you need to source and capture prospects and then nurture them continuously, the way marketers nurture leads to close deals. The ATS was not originally designed for this purpose. Traditional systems are largely administrative and lack critical sourcing and referral technology, along with other tools that help fully integrate the source-to-hire process. Unfortunately, most HRIS suites only offer a glorified ATS. Recruiting is typically an after-thought for these employee-centric systems. Their recruiting components provide limited functionality and little innovation. That s not going to cut it anymore. Recruiters need a candidate-centric tool. 4

Thanks to tools like Facebook and Glassdoor, your entire brand represents your employment brand so you should make sure your employment brand and corporate marketing teams are well connected. Josh Bersin 4 Read more about the rise of the more comprehensive and innovative recruiting platform in our ebook, Phoenix from the Ashes. When you don t have the right tools for the job, you cause measurable damage. You waste valuable resources, you work inefficiently, and over the long term you risk creating skills gaps or turnovers that hurt the bottom line. Only a comprehensive recruiting platform, built for recruiters to tackle today s recruiting challenges, will deliver the desired results. And as you work to make a case for executive buy-in, this is the fact you will need to prove. Put it in Pictures The sales & marketing funnel where you capture leads, nurture leads, and close deals is a standard within most enterprises. Executives would never dream of skimping on the tools required to keep this funnel running. They want marketing teams properly equipped to build databases and launch communication campaigns. It s how they convert prospects to customers. It s how they make money. Well, recruiting uses the same type of funnel. Take a look at this infographic you ll want to use this when making your business case. 5

4 Steps to Getting Executive Buy-In for the Recruiting Platform You Need Step-by-Step Guide

TEP 1 Team Up with a Line-of-Business Sponsor Once you ve decided to look for a comprehensive recruiting platform because it s the only way you can do your job successfully you need to find an ally who will listen to your thoughts and align with you as you select a vendor and make your case. Determine who has the most at stake outside of your recruiting team. Is there a technical leader in desperate need of key talent for the engineering team? Is there a manager looking to quickly hire more salespeople before a product launch? Who can you see directly and rapidly benefiting from the technology you re looking to implement? Select several potential sponsors, and schedule some time to outline your plan. And be sure to get your sponsor involved early in the process, so you can maximize his or her ability to help drive consensus. 7

STEP 2 Know the Potential ROI Be prepared to show the measurable upside to using a comprehensive recruiting platform as well as the measurable downside to not using one. These are the facts that will make your case, and most of them center on the ways in which the right technology can help you save time, boost productivity, eliminate fees, and hire longerlasting, more qualified talent. Be certain you select a vendor that delivers on this potential. In short, you re trying to find the recruiting platform that will empower you to find the best hires, in the shortest amount of time, for the least amount of money. Fact OUTCOME The U.S. average cost-per-hire was $3,479 in 2011. 5 The average cost-per-hire of a referral was $2,306 in 2012. 6 Technology that increases the number of referrals you receive could help you cut expenses by at least $1,170 per hire. Referrals are hired 55% faster than those hired through job boards or career sites. 7 Technology that can help facilitate employee referrals will shorten your time-to-hire and reduce the hiring team s workload. Referrals account for approximately 25% of all external hires, making them the number one source for recruiters. And candidates who have secured referrals from an employee are about 3-4 times more likely to be hired. 8 Only about 3% of new hires come from third-party agencies. 9 On average, staffing agencies can charge between $7,000 and $21,000 in fees for each hire. Bolstering your employee referral program could dramatically increase your hiring efficiency. The right sourcing and referral technology could vastly reduce or even eliminate the need for thousands of dollars in agency fees. 8

Fact Employees hired by referral stay with a company longer than those hired through other sources. 10 OUTCOME The longer your employees remain with the company, the lower your turnover expenses. In other words, quality talent that remains with the company over time delivers a year-over-year return on the initial investment. If recruiters can save just 30 minutes per day on typical hiringrelated tasks over 240 working days out of the year, they can each reclaim 120 hours per year. Likewise, if 15 hiring managers cut just 30 minutes per month off their recruiting tasks over the course of a year, they can save six hours apiece. A comprehensive recruiting platform that helps streamline the source-to-hire process can save real, quantifiable amounts of time and money that can be reinvested in other business-critical projects. Recruiters can spend as much as 45 minutes per candidate, per job, scheduling interviews. A more advanced recruiting platform that includes video interviewing technology can help recruiters reclaim about 8 hours per open job. Without leveraging the advantages of social media, companies can expect to spend 2-3 times as much on sourcing. 11 Technology that natively involves social media in the sourcing and recruiting process can reduce hiring costs. Tip: We ve summarized most of these facts in a separate ROI sheet you can use when you present your case. You can access it here. 9

TEP 3 Get IT Involved Early While bringing IT in before a project has even commenced can feel like overkill or an invitation for unwanted complexity it s a wise decision whenever you re considering investing in a software-as-a-service (SaaS). The good news is that most modern recruiting platforms are available in the cloud, and that spells all kinds of benefits. Cloud apps are more affordable, require less maintenance, and are far more accessible to both hiring teams and candidates. Product updates are streamlined as well, which makes staying current less of a concern. Nevertheless, your IT team will likely have questions about security, downtime, data back-up, and so on. These are valid issues, and you ll want a recruiting platform that addresses them clearly. Put your IT team at ease by discussing these topics, along with other critical infrastructure requirements, so you know what solution will best cover your bases. And remember: Waiting too long can cost you. If you broadside IT with a project that s in the final decision step, they may feel excluded or pressured to provide rubberstamp approval. This has been proven too often to backfire, resulting in project delays or even worse complete project failure. 10

TEP 4 If you aren t already analyzing your recruiting process in detail, you should be. Companies that measure recruiting well are dramatically outperforming their peers. Josh Bersin 13 Progressive firms continually measure newhire quality and use that information to fine-tune the 14 recruiting process. Report Your Proof Finally, be sure the vendor you choose has the reporting capabilities you need to measure success. This is a key requirement for most executives, as data-driven decisions increasingly influence the company s strategic direction. Analysts and industry writers also believe that the use of data to make smarter hiring decisions is an important, growing trend that will likely shape the future of recruiting itself from how you hire to how you spend your budget. 12 You will need a recruiting platform, therefore, that can capture data and create reports that make sense for your company and your industry. For example: You ll want to track applications and hires along with their productivity by source, so you know where your money and effort is best (and worst) spent. You ll want analytics that help you determine the success of your employee referral program. How many employees participate? Who are your top referrers? How long do your referral hires remain with the company? You ll want to know the success of any nurture campaigns you conduct among prospective candidates, so you can decipher which messages have the greatest impact. In short, one of the greatest benefits of a comprehensive recruiting platform is the data it enables you to harness from the end-to-end recruiting process. But data does nothing unless you can analyze and apply it to increase your success. 11

ONCLUSION There is tremendous innovation taking place in the recruiting market. Remember that among all the HR, talent, and leadership programs you work on, the #1 most important is hiring the right people in the first place. Focus on recruiting: you ll be a better business for it. As recruiting continues its evolution into a more marketing-focused function, recruiters are increasingly craving enhanced technology that speaks directly to their needs. But getting executive leadership to understand this fact and invest in recruiting beyond the generic HR suite is still an uphill battle. If you band with the right alliances, however, and uncover a vendor solution that can deliver the ROI you need while satisfying your IT and reporting requirements, you will make a strong business case that executives will have difficulty denying. The next book in our Insight4theEnterprise series touches more on the metrics that matter most, both to recruiters and to the leadership that supports their endeavors. http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/07/04/the-9-hottest-trends-incorporate-recruiting/3/ Josh Bersin 15 12

1 http://www.ere.net/2012/09/04/news-flash-recruiting-has-the-highest-business-impact-of-any-hr-function/ 2 Bersin & Associates, TalentTrends Fall 2012 3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/07/04/the-9-hottest-trends-in-corporate-recruiting/2/ 4 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/01/11/hr-leadership-technology-and-talent-management-predictions-for-2013/2/ 5 http://marketing.bersin.com/rs/bersin/images/111111_es_tafb-execsumm_kol.pdf 6 http://www.ere.net/2012/05/07/10-compelling-numbers-that-reveal-the-power-of-employee-referrals/ 7 http://recruiting.jobvite.com/resources/recruiting-data-employment-statistics-by-jobvite-index/ 8 http://www.careerxroads.com/news/sourcesofhire2013.pdf 9 http://www.careerxroads.com/news/sourcesofhire2013.pdf 10 http://recruiting.jobvite.com/resources/recruiting-data-employment-statistics-by-jobvite-index/ 11 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/01/11/hr-leadership-technology-and-talent-management-predictions-for-2013/2/ 12 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/02/17/bigdata-in-human-resources-talent-analytics-comes-of-age/, http://www.ere.net/2013/04/11/analytics-transformed-recruiting/ 13 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/07/04/the-9-hottest-trends-in-corporate-recruiting/3/ 14 http://marketing.bersin.com/rs/bersin/images/111111_es_tafb-execsumm_kol.pdf 15 12 http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/07/04/the-9-hottest-trends-in-corporate-recruiting/3/