Reinvent Recruiting

Jerome Ternynck presented iRecruit Expo’s keynote, “RE:Invent Recruiting.” Over 700 talent management business leaders and executives gathered in Amsterdam, listening to the SmartRecruiters CEO explain the pulse of the recruitment industry.

“Recruiting is a competitive sales process. Hiring teams must be deeply involved to close the best candidates,” said Jerome Ternynck.

It’s hard to think of a better way to kick off my tenure at SmartRecruiters. In my 8 years in recruiting tech space, there has been a lot of hype about reinventing recruiting, but so much of it has been incremental innovation built on top of an outdated core.

“Is recruiting really about tracking?” Jerome Ternynck asked the crowd. “The ATS as we know it has to go. Tracking is a feature, not a purpose. The purpose of recruiting is to hire great people.”

“Preach it, brother,” said Chris Hoyt, talent engagement and marketing leader at PepsiCo.

The reality is: recruiting is not supply chain management; recruiting is really about relationship management.  For too long, hiring managers, departmental staffing heads, and corporate heads of Talent Acquisition have been undermined by an ATS industrial complex that has lost sight of what recruiting really is; a people-centric function where good people are a magnet for other good people, where people provide the best referrals and leads, and where people (not matching algorithms) do the best vetting and screening, collaboratively.

So is there an opportunity for a player to shake up the space? For a smart team to storm the market with a clean, flexible, open platform that is unwed to the bulky, slow, expensive HCM Suite strategy? A team that is also smart enough to envision and build the social hiring machinery of the future?

I am proud to be a part of this team.

Jim Milton is the Senior Director, Enterprise Strategy. He spent four years leading enterprise product strategy at SelectMinds, which Oracle acquired in 2013. After the acquisition, Milton owned product strategy for Oracle’s Taleo Social Sourcing Cloud Service line. Prior to SelectMinds and Oracle, Milton held positions at LinkedIn, TheLadders.com and Apex Systems in product, sales and marketing functions. Check out the iRecruit Keynote slides below: