Dear 2015 #ERE attendees: Free Your Mind!

From what? The 4 biggest lies still in recruiting today.

When in flight to this years ERE recruiting conference I found myself reflecting to 4 years ago, when I was very likely a conference attendee similar to you. I was a talent acquisition leader with a large global organization and we had just begun the first phase of a global Taleo deployment. I came to ERE to shop for widgets and bolt-on solutions to try and make Taleo more modern and effective.

This conference changed my career significantly as I stumbled upon Find.ly (now findly.com) and brought this idea back to our team. We, ended up buying and implementing a talent community on top of Taleo. And eventually, I went to work for Findly as a path from the customer side to the provider side (frequently called the dark side), where I stayed until late last year.

In subsequent years, I’ve met many of you in a similar situation as I was in 2011:

You have an ATS from the 90’s (Taleo, BrassRing, iCIMS, PeopleAnything)
You have one or more additional solutions semi-integrated to that system
You are still attending the conference seeking solutions to problems you can’t seem to solve

If you are like I was, you walk up to each booth and within the first 3 minutes someone who is there to sell you explains their value proposition and you exchange brief introductions. Then you ask the question that you always do, “Do you integrate with Taleo ATS?”

Many times, after hearing the common no, you tune out the rest of the conversation and keep moving along. All in hopes to find that innovative solution to your problems that for years you haven’t been able to make meaningful improvement on.

FREE YOUR MIND! There are some old false truths that no longer need to hold you back from freely exploring true innovation to take recruiting to the next level. They are:

My ATS integrates with my HRIS system. In fact, almost every ATS booth you walk into can build this integration. If you feel stuck with your ATS and forced to build around it because of that integration, free your mind from one of the biggest myths in the industry today.
My ATS is OFCCP compliant. Yes, compliance is important. But let’s break down what compliance is. Compliance is reporting of a set of fields for a specific time range. Again, if you feel stuck on your ATS because of compliance, free your mind. Many providers in the industry work directly with OFCCP to make sure we have compliant solutions before we ever show up to talk to you about our products.
Implementation of My ATS took forever and cost a fortune. You might think you can’t afford the time or money to change. Many providers have focused on this very obstacle, and dramatic improvements have been made to implementation timelines for modern technology companies. Much of the improvement is actually software related, a gain that you get from leaving the 90’s and going modern. Remember, your hiring managers never login to Taleo anyway, so the change isn’t as significant for many of you as it would be if the business actually used the ATS. Integrations are getting easier, not harder.
But My ATS is a global system. So are many others! The key here is the definition of “global”. If you have recruiters in Russia that only read and write in Russian, then your choices will in fact be limited. What I find with many companies is they write global recruiter language requirements in their RFP, but when they deploy they find that the international recruiters largely login in English anyway.

There was a day and time when these requirements were highly differentiating in the ATS market. In those days, ATS was seen as the center of recruiting and that day has long passed us by. Free your mind this year and consider focusing on user experience. Not just the experience of the recruiter but the experience of the hiring manager and the job seeker. If people in your organization don’t use the solutions you buy, then even the above 4 criteria don’t really matter, right? You no longer have anyone standing in your way to change your ATS. Not IT, HRIS, Marketing, or Compliance. All of the roadblocks have been removed by the evolution of the market as a whole.

Do you think there isn’t anything better out there? Up until about 2012, this was true. Whether you were on BrassRing, Taleo, or the rest – why switch? Theywere fundamentally all the same. Mobile was only beginning to take off, and the modern solutions were still maturing. But that was 3 years ago. Today the rule of thumb that the heads of Talent Acquisition tell me they follow is to not change one 90’s ATS for another.

Change, integrations, compliance, and global requirements used to be in your way of buying what your users really want: simplicity and personalization in the modern world.

None of those things stand in your way in 2015.