Lately I’ve been watching a number of presentations by recruiting and sourcing professionals on their recruitment marketing strategy and how they are able to drive success at their organizations.   Most if not all have a technology component that helps them drive innovation in their process.

With many of these organizations, they’ve been able to determine a successful recruiting strategy through a few key steps.  Here is my simplified synopsis:

• Evaluation: They took stock of what they currently had in place and determined the strengths and weaknesses of their current strategy (and technology.)
• Prioritization: Started to brainstorm, research and envision what they wanted their recruiting strategy to look like.  Basically asked themselves, “In a perfect world with an unlimited budget, what would we do.”  This helped them prioritize the changes needed to improve their strategy.
• Budget: They took a look at their current budget while estimating the budget that they would need to invoke the improvements above.  They then made a business case for why an increase in budget was warranted if needed.
• Technology: At this point, they went to find the technology that could help them achieve these goals and process improvements.

The point in going over this is that typically you should try and determine what you want in your strategy before you go out and find the technology you are going to implement.  While I don’t want to diminish the importance of technology (as it has can have a great impact on your strategy), it should take a back seat to identifying your strategy goals.

Once you have these goals in place and you have an idea of what you want to do, it is time to search for the technology to drive your strategy.  Determine need first and then technology based on that need.  For instance, if you are looking to centralize your existing sourcing contacts so you can leverage them better internally, you should probably look at Recruitment CRM technologies.  If better tracking and metrics is what you want, a Recruitment Marketing Platform or similar technology may be of interest.

This is not to say that your recruitment strategy is set in stone, however.  As you talk to technology companies and other recruiting organizations many times you will come across ideas and strategies that you didn’t think about previously that you’ll want to include in your overall recruitment sourcing strategy.  A good strategy will be continually fluid incorporating the best ideas and processes along the way.

While I gave you some specific examples of how strategy goals lead to specific technologies, I want to go a little more basic.  So here are some basic reasons why you might want to implement technology in your recruitment process:

Centralize processes:  From sourcing candidates into a single database to managing all your job distribution campaigns in one place, technology can help you dramatically in centralizing your current processes.  This can be really valuable for your recruiting team as they manage all these campaigns and can help standardize your processes making it easier to train new team members and lessen the impact of employees that leave your organization.

Better metrics & reporting: Technology can make it easier for you to track more of your process and provide the data in a way that is optimal for you to make quality real-time decisions in your recruiting strategy.

Depending on the technology you have in place today, the metrics and reporting you have can vary widely.  Determine the data and more importantly the insights you want to have in your recruiting process as this will make your search for the right technology that can provide these recruitment metrics that much easier.

Time Savings / Efficiency:  In recruiting, there’s a number of functions that are needed but require a significant time commitment to execute such as job distribution or job SEO.  Technology can make these functions easier and sometimes automatic, enabling your recruiters can spend their precious time on more important recruiting initiatives as well ensuring accuracy with all these functions.

Those of some of the bigger reasons for using technology in your strategy.  Notice the focus on functionality over sizzle (which is great in a 30 minute demo but worth much less when you are really using the product).  A number of technology vendors speak about how they can revolutionize your recruitment strategy / process and while they may help you execute your strategy, it’s really important you determine it independent of technology initially.  It’s not until you determine your strategy goals that it is time to look for the right technology that fits your recruiting organization.

I would love to hear your thoughts.  Engage with me on Twitter @smashfly